Been meaning to comment on an interesting thread about Klout, Trey Pennington and overall influence calculations that have been going on over the last 10 days. Since I'm in London today, and still on my latest European trip, I haven't been able to physically write as much as I'm accustomed to. The Social Media Analytics book (which is in it's final edit by McGraw Hill) also was an major contributor to why I'm posting less - but a curious thing is happening - my posts are often read more when I post less frequently.
There's been a debate on weather one should post twice a day or twice a week - Chris Brogan posts twice a day - I often do too, and that's fine if your goal is traffic acquisition - if Chris Brogan doesn't have anything to say today, he'll make up something so he's gets his two posts a day in - rationalizing it by saying - there's always something valuable to share with his readers. On the other hand, coming up with two posts a day, it's hard to imagine many of the posts are going to be that relevant and take them for granted - so in gaining one kind of traffic, he's actually losing the value of attention. Sure, a painter who paints 4 hours a day will produce many dogs (paintings that are unsuccessful from the artists point of view) along with a few gems - probably more gems than if they didn't paint constantly - but that's only one way of looking at it and for every "Van Gogh" that had to churn out work every day to satisfy their idenity issues with being an artist means painting, or post constantly, there are others, such as Manet, who didn't have such a compulsive need.
Perhaps the truth is somewhere in the middle. Now to the subject at hand, influence.
In Thinking Inside Out about the problem with online reputation it's said
Often, social media tools afford a lack of critical thinking. See something, half read it, tweet and reweet it. It's easier than crafting a thoughtful response. We're all guilty. The problem is that it amplifies the connected group, without much analysis of the quality of the content. Through the lens of our online measurement tools the author looks knowledgeable, the content looks good, and the retweeters look influential. But none of those may be true. Being part of a clique community on Twitter does not make someone knowledgeable.
It's easier to calculate an influence score on a digital signal than an offline (hidden or dark) signal, Klout works with measures it can get a hold of out of the Twitter and Facebook stream, and as Trey Pennington said, Klout is necessary (even though it's not accurate and in many cases, not actually actionable). I will say that some of my readers have said Trey Pennington is promoting Klout because he may have a financial interest in it; I doubt it. I think Klout solves one problem while creating others.
For example, the Klout API makes it easy to feed Klout scores into publications like the Huffington Post and merge it with Twitter data and I've written about that already over the last two weeks. The information is helpful even if it may not be totally accurate - the issue Klout solves is getting a calculation of influence into other streams of data so it can be used as a ranking factor and filter. Now, we can argue the merits of the calculation - but we should not argue that we need some way of calculating influence and relevancy and many of the other influence platforms haven't really tried to feed, to my knowledge, their influence rankings into other digital media streams of information - they have kept their influence rankings self contained in their own systems.
The reason Klout works at all, in my book, is it uses the Social Graph it pulls out of Twitter - inter-operating with Twitter and Facebook is necessary in order to effectively rank by influence/influencer, much the way that most businesses had to somehow cater to Google (until recently) because so much of what happened online connected to Google in one form or another. The more successfully companies integrated with Google, the more successful they could become (unless Google decided to compete directly, like Saturn eating it's own children, then Google became the enemy).
Getting back to the topic at hand, influence, Klout makes it easy it integrate it's scores into other online content publications, that's why it's necessary. Many people feel credit scores are not necessary - I for one don't like them - but they solve a problem of who to lend credit to. Do I think the algorithms for Credit Scores are fair - not in one minute! Do I think Klout Scores are fair or accurate - of course not!
We know that real influence and topic relevancy may have nothing to do whatsoever with Klout is looking at. On the other hand, having a Klout Score integrated with HuffPo does make some interesting interactions and engagements with online content that isn't as likely otherwise.
So ... is Klout as accurate as a mood ring? Yes - but for today, it successfully managed to integrate itself into online media and awareness in ways that other platform haven't yet done. Is MPact better - of course it is, and much superior to Klout as an influence detector - but it's not yet scaling the entire social graph - which Klout attempts to do, at least on Twitter and then again, on Facebook.
So... if you want to take on Klout - model influence on the Social Graph - go after Twitter and Facebook because they are the new Google.