What's Klout About?

Klout.com recently received $8.5m in investment to develop its social influence ranking tool. Using social media accounts such as Twitter, the folks at Klout take your followers, retweets, followback ratios and various other metrics into account when they decide your worth to society online. If 2011 is the year of influence then isn't that a bit depressing? The lovely dreamworld of the internet being a place of equals, replaced by the real world of some tweeters tweeting more equally than others. I suppose by recognising and ranking the influential we are addressing the elephant in the chat room. It is just that ranking formalises the hierarchy, and will result I fear in a widespread adoption of more mercenary and self-serving approaches to sharing online, not to say that we are devoid of them already.

And of course we are now obsessed with Listening In, and keeping an ear out for buzz whilst thinking 'if 'comte4059' is the biggest influencer in the cheese market, how can we tap into him/her?' (Dodged an Andy Gray shaped bullet there). For brands this is useful, as we must strive to find out the value of the conversations surrounding them online. However, I simply don't think that an influence grade point average can do anything but create a smug and superficial oily layer on top of the already murky landscape of social media.

A question about influence that i posted on the much derided Q&A site Quora turned up some interesting responses. I asked for '5 tips to becoming a social influencer on Twitter'. The majority of answers were built around the idea that in order to influence, you have to listen first.

Some things are as true online as they offline.