I just finished reading Return on Influence:The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social Scoring, and Influence Marketing by Mark Schaefer which is a significant book in understanding the concepts of creating a score to value a person’s social influence. If you have any interest in being a complete social media “person” than I highly recommend you read this as it will demonstrate the good and bad of influence scoring.
Klout is currently the big dog in social media scoring and the history of the company as well as examples of how Klout is being used by major corporations such as Disney and Audi is well presented in the book. It is easy to see how companies can find online influencers using Klout and leverage their ability to spread your message via marketing campaigns to those influencers.From a basic social media perspective, the concept makes complete sense and appears to work very well.
However, the book also presents the case against Klout and other scoring systems in terms of privacy, non-online influencers (E.g. Malcolm Gladwell), and people gaming the system to name a few. I see these issues but believe that we are in the early days of social media scoring and these issues will be worked out over time. In fact, after reading the book I am more convinced of the value of Klout and these types of tools and plan to spend more time understanding them and leveraging them.
If you have any thoughts on this topic or ideas about Klout, please feel free to add them. I will update this blog regularly with new ideas I learn about this topic and look forward to learning from you as well.
Spector Ramblings 