Let's talk about Klout...

Whether you realise it or not, if you're active on social media then your Klout score serves as an important measure of your social influence.

Those of you who talk to me on Twitter are no doubt already aware that a few of the faculty members from the Pop UP Business School and I are currently engaged in a little challenge to get ourselves into the Klout70 club.  An almost elitist group of some of the world's greatest communicators, influencers and speakers in the social media sphere.  According to the developers, Klout takes a snapshot of your social media activity over the last 90 days and based on your activity or engagement on certain platforms, allocates you a score between 1 being the lowest and 100 being the highest.

When we first started the challenge, the vast majority of us already had a score somewhere in the 50s which would put us in the top 10% of Klout scores according to their current database, but I don't think I'm alone in that I've already started getting questions about why we're doing it and what we hope to achieve.  For me, it all started with a conversation with a colleague from the US, who advised me that if I wanted to be taken seriously professionally overseas then I would need to demonstrate a consistent Klout score of at least 70. She claimed that in the circles she worked in around Los Angeles, I wouldn't even be offered an interview for a job unless they could see that I was in the Klout70 club.

Now I know what you're thinking, and I wasn't entirely convinced by her anecdotal evidence either. However, over coffee with Alan Donegan from the PopUp Business School, he revealed that he'd heard the same from a contact who had openly offered him work if he could increase his Klout score to 70.  We've both since heard from many others suggesting that Klout score is more important than we initially thought and that it's being used as a measure of how successful you are at networking and engaging on social media.  Why? Because it's currently the only measure there is.

Klout has often come under scrutiny and courted controversy over it's secretive algorithm and aggregation techniques.  It's also no stranger to headlines and stories about whether it's useful, means anything or should be trusted as a true measure of user influence.  No doubt there are still many differing views on the subject today, but in the absence of any other measure there's hardly a case for it to answer.  Why Klout70? Because having a Klout score of 70 puts you in the top 5% of social media influencers across the globe. Certainly nothing to be sniffed at.

To put it in perspective, Barack Obama has a Klout score of 99, Kim Kardashian is up on 89 and Gary Vaynerchuck scores 84.

I have a Klout score of 67, and climbing...