There’s been a bit of buzz around Klout recently. Having changed its algorithm a couple of times, users’ Klout scores have fluctuated and caused an uproar. All this fuss has got me a bit perplexed. Despite having a Klout account for quite some time - I can honestly say that Klout has no clout on me.

What is influence?

Marketing communications has always had the problem of measuring reach and influence (part of the reason I love eCommerce/direct-response). Counting media clippings and GRP are all mechanisms created by marketing and PR to measure reach and impressions. Note how I did not mention influence. I mean sure, you can map a few metrics onto an IMC methodology and guess at your influence, but even then, you have to trust you chose the right funnel or customer journey model. At the end of the day, all these are best guesses at influence measured through proxies. Let’s add to the mix that people have been measuring traditional marketing communications channels for quite some time now and it’s clear these less-than-ideal metrics have had time to mature and are really as good as they can get (within reason).

Social media is new

Of course, there will be many that say social media has been around for a long time. It’s all relative of course. But I think it’s safe to say that it has only become a big deal about five or so years ago. Heck, it’s newer than even web Analytics. Ignore what the gurus say, social media is still in a growth phase. People are still finding new and inventive ways to socialize old tactics like coupons, and new channels like smartphones and iPads. And because social is changing so much, the way people use it is changing. Marketers are still trying to figure out how to leverage social - and definitely one size does NOT fit all; Facebook may be the bee’s knees for one company but be a low revenue channel for another. One company’s audience could gather around Orkut while another’s could have its own concentrated around Twitter. The truth of the matter is that no two people use the different social channels in the same way, with the same mix, or the same frequency. So why in the world could all of social activity be measured with one Klout score? Why does Klout get to say which channel is more important, or what conversations are meaningful? (By the way, automatic sentiment analysis is still not mature - dont get me started with sentiment measurements.) GRP is used for advertising, and clippings for PR. Why could all of social and all of its many flavours be represented by one uni-dimensional metric?

Create your own metrics

I’ve heard people say that something is better than nothing. However, in Klout’s case - it was never “something.” In the end, no meaningful action can be taken from knowing that your Klout score went down. If one’s score drops by 1 point versus 5, then what? What if you needed to raise it by 2.7 points to hit your quarterly targets? How exactly would you plan your implementation? What if you had a team of social experts manning your social accounts? Who would have to do what? Klout is cute - but it’s not particularly actionable and it’s particularly useless from an eCommerce perspective. So my advice? Create metrics that make sense to you and relate directly to your goals. You will know how those metrics are calculated and how to act on those. And quite frankly, you won’t change how your own metrics are measured overnight and have to explain to your superiors why your performance has dropped suddenly. So do yourself a favor - ignore Klout. It may be fun and clever - but it’s ultimately too flakey to rely on.