New Klout Scores. No Sir, Many People Do Not Like That.

The whining has been phenomenal today with the changes to how Klout scores your relative influence within social media and networks. While it is an interesting system, and one that I do watch because when I have a Klout score of above 50 people offer me interesting things to do, there are still some things that it does not encompass.

Klout made the statement today that the new scores were up and ready for prime time, although many people knew it was coming days ago through pre-announcements that big changes were coming. Today we got to see those changes, and some people fell a long way in relationship to their previous Klout scores. And the amount of negative feedback for that has been very interesting to read on the Klout Blog.

Like most people I think in the system, I pretty much so stayed the same, around 50 in terms of score. My network reach increased by a stupid amount, but that is also ok by me.

There are still some things missing though, and not sure if Klout is ever going to be able to incorporate this in a way that makes sense. Self hosted word press or other CMS systems still are not part of the system. The reliance on sucking up to and being involved with “popular people” harkens back to high school, not everyone is popular and I refuse to spend my time sucking up to people. I tried that in High School and failed, there is no sense in repeating that insanity. While there are some people who are very popular I do like, they often post infrequently.

The over reliance on Facebook, while that is where the people are, there is only so much time that a person can be engaged with their social network. Things like oh say, work, sleep, eating, quality time with the family all take priority over spending time on Facebook. Then there are other systems that engage with people better than twitter or Facebook.

An over reliance on a few systems will pretty much so turn this into a narrow funnel process, in that while we are busy trying to raise our Klout scores, we end up narrow casting our views. We become members of a small but vocal body, and find it very difficult to find new people to engage with. We are more than our Facebook profile, and there are other social systems that bring greater value in terms of interaction than Facebook or twitter.

So while Klout is interesting, and employers are increasingly using these kinds of metrics to see who you are, we are still missing critical portions of the social personality. We are missing sites like Deviant Art, Orkut, self hosted word press and other CMS systems. In reality we are getting a small slice of someone rather than a complete view of influence and popularity. While that is ok, as with any measure or metering systems, Klout while useful, must be taken with a grain of salt.

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