I am finding, more and more there is a possibly unreconciled confusion between digital influencers and subjective influence as understood by more traditional folks used to thinking of influencers in a more journalistic way; both are entirely different and produced by different world.
A while back I worked with a company in the office construction sector doing SEO; the owner, I observed at the time, had a different company to do web hosting, another for web development and yet another (me) to do SEO for him. I asked why and found it the owner was extremely distrustful of all his eggs in one basket (as he had been burned in the past for doing this) and deliberately opted to create a situation where on hand didn't know what the other was doing (by doing so many synergistic opportunities that would have helped SEO were lost and any work that was done was complicated by having to coordinate 3 sets of individuals that didn't know each other from Adam or care one bit about each other).
I run across situations where digital influence vs. offline influencers are overlapped. The idea, I think is to produce a synthesis - much as two eyes are better than one, and two views of the same data will produce a fuller dimension and data integrity.
But - we're not looking at the same data - it's more like mixing apples and oranges, mixing two types of information does not automatically lead to a synthesis, which I think is the desired outcome.
Meanwhile, it's important to point out Klout deals strictly with digital influencers while mPact tries to reconcile digital influence with other signals that are not always strictly online, that is why I find it more useful.
By the way, to illustrate this point, Seth Godin is considered extremely influential in marketing - his blog is very well read and he has written several books, yet he doesn't tweet at all or accept comments on his blog, last I looked and his Klout score is 46 today. In many ways, much of what makes Seth Godin influential is missed if we depend on Klout to pick it up. Meanwhile, my Klout score is 51 as of today and my first book won't be published till mid August.
A word on my book, Social Media Analytics - we're in final edit mode now and I'm excited.
But I'm even more excited over the possibilities after my book comes out of helping to create an environment when the social media analyst can be understood. Nuff said.