Don’t Be That Guy: Klout Score Guy

I’m just going to go ahead and get this out of the way – yeah, I joined Klout.  Yeah, I still have an account.

But no, I don’t give a rat’s ass what my “klout score” is.  In fact, up until the other day when I read a few articles about Klout that annoyed the hell out of me (and triggered this entry), I hadn’t logged in…oh, probably in over a month or two.   Long enough that it had lost the association to my Facebook account and I had to re-authorize it and a few others.  Why hadn’t I logged in for so long?  Because I quickly realized how ridiculous it was.  Why do I need some random third-party to keep score for me?

In fact, now that I’ve read those articles in the past few days, I care even less about it…but there are those who apparently live and die by it, and now companies are starting to pay attention to it, and I want to throatpunch all of them.

Especially Klout Score Guy…

If you’re not familiar with it, Klout is a site that gives you a score based on some proprietary algorithms which run over your social media accounts that you give it access to – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, and others – and then ranks your interactions with others, how your tweets are read and if they’re retweeted, who “likes” your comments and posts on Facebook, blah blah blah…

It’s my new social media aneurysm.

The first came when it happened to pass that Ashton Kutchner challenged CNN to a twitter follower contest…and won.  That’s right…more people follow and interact with the guy who played Kelso and was in that stellar cinematic masterpiece “Dude, Where’s My Car?” than with a major, international news media outlet.  Now, don’t get me wrong – Kelso cracked me up, “Dude, Where’s My Car?” still makes me laugh even though I’ve seen it at least a dozen times, and I even like him on the post-Charlie Sheen meltdown edition of Two and a Half Men.

But…seriously?

I don't want to live on this planet any more.

Now this one.  You know who has a “perfect klout score” of 100?

Justin Bieber.

Really?

Let that sink in for a moment.

Justin…Bieber.

Is the most influential person on the planet?

More so than, say, the President of the United States?

Really?

So I’m already starting to develop a twitch under my right eye while I’m reading, and it just keeps getting worse.

In case you care (and I hope you don't), here's mine.

Because now…now…I read the ridiculous notion that a Klout score can keep you from getting a job?  Now, let’s just ignore the fact that I’m already all “fire and brimstone” about companies that decide they want to go snooping around people’s personal Facebook accounts, but now you’re going to add in that something as inane (and, again, controlled by some arbitrary third-party who’s in this for the money) as a klout score might factor into a hiring decision?

Now, if you’re looking to hire a social media expert for your company (reminder: there’s no such thing as a social media expert) then you might want to get a feel for how “influential” someone is for themselves online since they’d be doing that as a job for you…but even that’s ridiculous because what if they’re simply not a fan of klout and don’t use it?

But for anyone else?  Any other kind of job?

Save me the effort of throatpunching you, and just calmly stand up, walk to the back of your office chair, place your neck on the back of the chair, and have someone drop a computer monitor between your shoulder blades.  And if you’re the kind of person who cares about klout scores, I assure you…you will be able to find someone to help you here.  Trust me.

Another little nugget that I gleaned from my recent reading was another Facebook app I have to go block – Reppify.  In this story over here, it talks about BranchOut – a Facebook app that I have long since blocked – and the new up and comer Reppify that wants to assimilate all of your data and package it up neatly for a company to look through.  Awesome.

What’s that?  Why did I block BranchOut, since I use LinkedIn all of the time and they’re the same thing?  They’re not the same thing, people.  Remember all those warnings and lectures we’ve given you about locking down your profile, hiding photos, etc.?  Well, the minute you allow BranchOut into your Facebook world…all of that goes out the window.  You want to find me in the business world, you find me on LinkedIn.  You want to chat in my personal space of Facebook?  If we’re not friends in real life, good luck with that.

It’s my data…not yours.

But to get back to the topic at hand and reach a conclusion to all of this, I started noticing over the past 72 hours or so that people actually care about their klout score.

“I must have ticked off klout…score dropped 10 points today!”   Really?  You pay enough attention to it that you know what it was yesterday in order to compare it to today’s?  Why?

Or a flurry of posts about what klout “believes” people happen to be influential about.  My top three when I hopped in to look?  Allegedly I am influential about Humor, Cancer and South Park.

Sure.  Uh-huh.

But since Klout doesn’t pay attention to blogs running on their own domain…only those running on the WordPress URL and platform directly…Klout has no idea what the three of us do here on our site, our metrics, our readers, or what “influence” we may (or, let’s be honest…may not) have.  Klout tracks and manages personal pages…but not Group pages, which is where a bunch of my interactions happen on Facebook.  It doesn’t account for “this is me on Twitter…oh, and this is also me on Twitter”, which many people do.

Never, EVER be That Guy

If you’ve been around IT for any length of time, you’ve heard of GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out.  You put bad data into a system, you’re going to get bad data back out of the system.  That’s just how things work.

Sounds like Klout has a whole lot of GIGO goin’ on to me.

So here’s one of my new acid test questions when I meet people – “What’s your klout score?”.

Except if you know the answer…you fail.

Because I have no time in my life for Klout Score Guy.

…and that’s all for this time. Check out our other Don’t Be That Guy entries or something else, and we look forward to seeing you at future events.