The List!
Let’s imagine you have spent 10,000 hard hours becoming The Best in your field. Or, if not the supreme best, you are certainly “Top 10”.
Eye surgery, ski instructing, trading, investment consulting, commercial litigation, entrepreneur; you are Top 10 in your thing.
Now, let’s imagine a prominent list gets published of your industry’s Top 10 people. The very best guys.
Obviously you’re on The List. Of course you are.
Hang on! Turns out you’re not!?!
****! How did they leave you off? Idiots. It’s a rubbish list.
So, if it’s a rubbish list, why do you care? It’s just a list.
You care, because maybe, just maybe, The World will now think that little bit less of you, solicit your opinions less frequently, hold you in slightly less awe. After all, perception is bitter reality.
Looks like The List matters after all.
And now, The List is online. Klout is a wildly popular 2011, zeitgeist, phenomenon – the virtual version of The List.
Klout looks at your online influence as a key shaper of opinion, a wise person in the crowd and, based on a “detailed analysis” of your social media activity, Klout awards you a Klout Score from 1 to 100.
Score <10 = nobody knows you, nobody cares.
Score 50+ = now we’re talking
Score 75 = now we’re really talking
Score 100 = Justin Bieber
It’s insanely crack-cocaine addictive, because not only are you on The List, you can also compare yourself to everyone else on The List and it’s in your own gift to increase your Klout social influence score and OVERTAKE them.
Share more, Talk more, Add more, Blog more and your Klout score rises. It’s slow, steady progress but – just like getting to be President of the USA – YOU CAN DO IT!
It’s powerful stuff and the Klout Tribe across the world checks their scores daily, even hourly, to see whether they have climbed that little bit higher up the slippery, ice covered mountain called Social Influence.
Each new Klout point is a sweet massage of the soul, a draught of flattering opiate bliss telling you you’re a more important person today than you were yesterday. Oh yes!
So you can only marvel at the spectacular own goal scored by the Klout Tech Team yesterday as they re-calculated everyone’s Klout score – mainly downwards.
The Klout Tribe is not happy. Check out the Official Klout Blog (which went ballistic).
Key Takeaways
Klout made a couple of major mistakes yesterday:
First, they (amazingly) failed to appreciate that when you reduce someone’s Influence Score by even a tiny amount you ruin their afternoon. In a measurable, tangible way, they are worth less. When you reduce it by a whole 20 Klout points, you insult their mother and tell them they are worthless.
Incredibly, having conditioned the krowd – like Pavlov’s dog – to drool at the sound of the New Points bell, they took them away.
Second, they attempted to dress it all up as just a change of currency units. Dollars to, ahem, Euros, if you will.
Unfortunately they also inexplicably provided several graphs highlighting the overnight fall from social grace. Which is a bit like showing a graph of stock prices in US Dollars until Wednesday, and then extending the same graph line to show (much) lower prices in Euros on Thursday.
It doesn’t work in the real world and it sure doesn’t work on Klout.
Summing Up
1. If it ain’t broke, there’s really no need to bring out a new improved model. Particularly when the new model is actually unimproved. The krowd loved Klout the way it was.
2. If your Tribe are all heavy users of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (after all, that’s how Klout calculates your score) then, if you bring out a new and hopelessly unimproved model, you can reasonably expect your Tribe to Klout you around the head across the social media spectrum. Hard.
3. But the real take-away is that if the online community gets this mad over the Klout Katastrophe, then this fascinating new science of measuring true social influence is here to stay.
Klout was just the proof of concept Nokia version.
Expect the iPhone to make its debut sometime soon.
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