Social Media Influence: Klout Scores are like Moveable Goalposts
Today’s annoying announcement by Social Media influence analysis tool Klout. I suddenly discovered that my score had been significantly downgraded to 52 and the “specialist” category, all down from 65 or 67 and the “broadcaster” status. I then realised that all users had been downgraded too. To top it all, I also realised that all the history of my Klout score had been changed, in George Orwell fashion, like rewriting History. How do you want a serious Exec to believe in such a farce? Making things more accurate is one thing, rewriting historical data is another. I believe that one day – soon – I will stop visiting the Klout portal. “A more accurate score”: this must be a joke!
A More Accurate, Transparent Klout Score « Measuring Online Influence:
The Official Klout Blog
“A More Accurate, Transparent Klout Score
October 26th, 2011 by Ash Rust
Today we’re releasing a new scoring model with insights to help you understand changes in your influence. This project represents the biggest step forward in accuracy, transparency and our technology in Klout’s history. Joe shared the full vision behind these changes in his post last week.
Influence is the ability to drive action and is based on quality, not quantity. When someone engages with your content, we assess that action in the context of the person’s own activity. These principles form the basis of our PeopleRank algorithm which determines your Score based on:
- how many people you influence,
how much you influence them and
how influential they are.
We analyze 2.7 billion pieces of content and connections daily. Reaching this scale, we’ve introduced significant upgrades to our platform, allowing us to handle this explosive growth. Now, we can add more networks and other sources of your influence much, much faster.
Insights help you understand why your Score changed. Each day, you can see which subscore and people in your network caused that change. You can also view insights on your friends’ profiles.”
via A More Accurate, Transparent Klout Score « Measuring Online Influence: The Official Klout Blog.
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Well said!
I can understand Klout improving the metrics it uses to measure influence but it seems to changing them on an almost weekly basis (a slight exaggeration but not massively!). Unless people spend their lives watching Klout to see whether they have changed the formula, it becomes impossible to monitor changes in people’s score.
And for the record, Klout’s statistical revisionism doesn’t help much!