The last time Klout rolled out major changes to their algorithm, they made a lot of people angry. People complained. There were those who thought that the change was the start of the catastrophic end for the service that measures social media influence and rates it on a scale from 0-100.
Employers have been known to check Klout scores, particularly when hiring people for outreach or marketing. For this reason, CEO Joe Fernandez told Gigaom:
“We want to make sure that we’re rolling this out in a way that we’re providing the information needed for people to understand their Klout scores,” he said. “We want to get it right.”
Starting yesterday, the message started popping up at the top of Klout profiles the changes were on their way.
One of the goals of the algorithm change is to include real-life components to the algorithm. Today, if someone is truly influential but inactive on social media, they will likely show very little clout in their Klout score. Fernandez hopes to change that with the update.
Once it’s live, we’ll do a full review. In the meantime, keep watching your score and don’t be surprised if it moves up or down.
It would like Klout to add some more social networks to it’s list. I hope Klout doesn’t prolong the update as I can’t wait for the update.
Would be nice if they stopped the score naturally dropping if you do nothing. It seems that most people’s scores tend to dip without any reason. It would also be great if they fixed the major gaps like not including Facebook pages, and many of the networks you can connect to Klout have nothing to do with the score. Only a few contribute.
Hopefully that will remove some of the voodoo analytics behind the influence score, but mind you- the more users know exactly how the score is computed, the more knowledge there will be for gaming it.
I wonder how much this is a response to the criticisms levied at these social scoring services and their inability to fully score someone’s influence. Klout is a great idea, but definitely needs major changes before they fulfill their vision.
“Don’t be surprised if it moves up or down” – I’m not surprised when it does that now for no discernible reason. I can’t take the score too seriously until I know what it is actually easuring. I hope THAT is part of this new update.
“Don’t be surprised if it moves up or down” – I’m not surprised when it does that now for no discernible reason. I can’t take the score too seriously until I know what it is actually easuring. I hope THAT is part of this new update.
I understand that Klout has a place in social media but in my viewpoint a company automatically loses credibility if they make decisions based solely on Klout score.