social media roundup - should you care about your klout score?
DESCRIPTION
Klout is a social media service designed to measure your organization’s social media influence. Klout has received some negative criticism in the past, but has recently altered the way it evaluates social influence. Should your organization be concerned about its Klout score? This Social Media Roundup will provide the basics about Klout and briefly evaluate its value to social media managers.TRANSCRIPT
Social Media Roundup
Should you care about your
Klout score?
Social Media Roundup
Agenda
Klout is a social media service designed to measure your organization’s social
media influence. Klout has received some negative criticism in the past, but
has recently altered the way it evaluates social influence. Should your
organization be concerned about its Klout score? This Social Media Roundup
will provide the basics about Klout and briefly evaluate its value to social
media managers.
What is Klout?
How does Klout determine clout?
Past criticism
What can Klout do for you?
Should you care about your Klout score?
Social Media Roundup
What is Klout? Klout launched in September 2009.
It is a service designed to evaluate
an individual’s or an organization’s
social influence by assigning a
Klout score.
Klout’s website describes the Klout
score as “a number between one
and 100, [it] is a representation of
your overall social media influence.
The science behind the Score
examines more than 400 variables
on multiple social networks beyond
your number of followers and
friends. It looks at who is engaging
with your content and who they are
sharing it with.”
Social Media Roundup
How does Klout determine clout? Klout determines influence and assigns a Klout score by collecting pieces of
information from seven different networks. For example, for Twitter, Klout focuses
on following count, follower count, retweets, list memberships, how many spam
accounts are following you, how influential the people who retweet you are, and
unique mentions.
Klout also pulls information from Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Klout
(receiving a +K on the actual Klout site) and Wikipedia.
For more information on what specific information Klout pulls from each specific
service, check out this link: http://klout.com/#/corp/klout_score
Social Media Roundup
Past criticism While Klout’s data collection methods
provide interesting anecdotal information,
Klout is no stranger to criticism.
In late 2011, several tech blogs including
Business Insider, discredited Klout because
there was no way to determine exactly how
Klout calculates scores.
CNN Money argued that Klout’s calculation
methods are completely arbitrary and are
not an effective measure of online influence.
In response to the criticism, Klout released
information about new measurement
methods in August 2012. The new methods
consider 400 data points rather than the 100
they originally used. Since the change, Klout
has grown in popularity.
Social Media Roundup
What can Klout do for you? Klout is just another tool to evaluate your organization’s social media efforts.
It provides an alternative perspective, which can always be valuable when you’re
trying to determine what you can do better with your organization’s social media
efforts.
Watching your Klout score fluctuates around events important to your
organization can also show how your influence changes when your organization
works hard to promote a specific communication priority or theme.
Social Media Roundup
Should you care about your Klout score? Whether or not your organization accepts the
legitimacy of Klout is entirely up to your social
media team. You can accept it as important, or
you can choose to write it off.
Regardless of whether or not you accept Klout
as a legitimate resource, it is important to know
what Klout is, how it works and what your
organization’s Klout score is. A story recently
mentioned in an article published in Wired in
August 2012, mentions an individual was
passed up for a job because they not only had a
low Klout score, but they had no idea what Klout
was.
Take Klout for what it is, it is a resource that
provides an interesting service. It’s important to
know about it, but don’t throw away your current
social media strategy just to increase your clout.
Social Media Roundup
Contact information
Have questions? Please feel free to
reach out to us at the Online and
Social Media Division
OFFICE OF THE CHIEF OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS PENTAGON
10/24/2012
Email:
To review and download past editions of the
Social Media Roundup, visit our Slideshare site
at: http://www.slideshare.net/usarmysocialmedia.
All Social Media Roundups are authorized to be
distributed to a broader audience.