Klout’s new algorithm came, saw and shook the world for many Social Media
professionals. Over the past few weeks, the blogosphere has been saturated with
anti-Klout articles. People scoured the interweb (I love that word) for every possible
story, sourcing any and all material that discredits Klout by highlighting even the
smallest chink in their armor.

Klout is the same company it was six months ago. Yes, there have been a few
changes, but as a whole it is the EXACT same company offering the EXACT same
service. Why the string of recent backlash? From privacy, to linking of accounts,
to incorrect topics of influence (all things people have complained about), these
problems existed since they rolled out the beta version. While I will concede that
people were talking about these issues long ago, the flood of negative sentiment
only came after the new algorithm went live. Coincidence? I think not.

What I am about to say will upset many people who read this. Plainly stated, I don’t
care. Your score dropped because you were gaming the system. You concentrated
on “following” just to get a “re-follow.” You obsessed with the numbers, and not the
influence you have over your network. You know the people with 65k followers
that follow 65k back? Do you wonder how they possibly could ever interact with
that many people? They can’t, and Klout (rightfully so) made changes to the scoring
systems to reflect just that.

I believe that many of the people whose Klout scores dropped were using one of the
many automated follow tools, or a very popular manual one like Refollow. Tools
like Refollow are valuable, and I do not want to take away from its usefulness, but
with power comes responsibility. There were waves of you, falling over each other,
stacking follows on top of follows and multiplying the numbers. You were following
and being followed not based on the merit of your tweets, but because the person
following you would be able to track whether or not you followed them back.

This was not a community built on engagement, leadership or influence, but a
community built of returning a follow with a follow. It was a community built on
spam accounts, people looking to build a brand, and those obsessed with justifying
their position as a “Social Media professional” with large numbers of followers. It
was a house of cards, blown away by Klout’s algorithm.

Across the board, in every industry, people are constantly searching for an easy way
to the top. There isn’t one. For those of you with a Klout score that rubbed shoulders
with Barrack Obama’s (until a few weeks ago), you are finding this out the hard
way. If you have a followship of 300k but only influence 15k, you have built your
Social Media empire in reverse. You have erected a beautiful wall with no support or foundation.

Klout measures the influence of your message. When your message is not influential
to your OWN network of followers, why on Earth should it matter how many people
follow you, re-tweet you, or @-mention you?

For those of you who take your falling score personally (most of you won’t admit
that you do), I would suggest that you stop growing an unengaged followship and
interact with the people that follow you. I would also suggest that you un-follow the
dead weight, even if it means a decrease in those who follow you. In the end, you do
not want a follower based on whether or not you follow them. Trust me.