What is Klout and does it matter?

PRs love a good list, right? Something that’s causing a little bit of a stir at the moment – especially given that social media measurement is so front-of-mind – is ‘klout’. Klout is fast becoming the accepted format by which an individual’s online influence is measured. Klout uses a number of metrics (which you can read here) that gives an individual a score from 1-100 which then can be used to create lists for particular industries on tools such as Peer Index.

I was privileged to have been invited to Dell’s B2B round table yesterday and klout came into the discussion. For Thomas Power from Ecademy, klout score is “like a currency” with many companies not being taken seriously if they have a klout score less than 50.

That’s worrying – mine (as @CMRLee) is ‘just’ 46 – it jumped three points yesterday alone, probably on the back of retweets I was receiving around the Dell B2B session. Strangely, however, my new beer reviews blog The Guest Ale has only been active on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter for two weeks and already has a klout score of 36 – with just 54 followers, one video on YouTube so far and a handful of Facebook updates.

For leading social media thinker and author Brian Solis [pictured], who I had the privilege to meet yesterday, “klout is less about influence and more about social capital: how will you navigate social interaction which boosts your score?”

So, the jury’s apparently out on klout, but until something better comes along to measure our online influence it is clear that we all need to work hard to increase our klout score because many people in business are taking it as a barometer for our online influence.