What if in the future a “Social Scoring” system like Klout, would determine, just like credit reports do, your job hiring, promotions, life, etc? Brick and mortar assets are becoming online assets. What if in the future an established system like Fico, Beacon, Transunion, would determine an exact “Social Score.” for you. Just like credit reports do now – it may impact your job hiring, promotions etc. Maybe your social influence is perceived as a measurement of how you are personally stable, social, team oriented etc. If your score is low is it assumed you “do not play well with others” and not as likely to be hired. Will I get better job promotions because I’m seen as more socially popular and thereby better to lead teams and companies? Will your social score be something your first date inquires about? Its not that far fetched. Merchandisers and credit cards are more willing to share their products with high scorers. Maybe your credit score is aweful but Visa likes how your social popularity brings them business and offsets their losses? Heres one – will Google put your score next to your search links and use it for ranking?
I’ve been at a Klout parties (thanks Klout) and witnessed how differently people treat you when they see your score up the Klout screens. At blogworld, I stood anonymous in a crowd and when people saw my score I was circled with people suddenly wanting to chat. It does make a BIG difference in how people treat you at those events so I can see the same transforming in life. The future?
I like what Klout is doing as opposed to many of the “rating services” that have tried to measure this. Klout is actually monetizing it or creating a bit of economy for it if you will. Yes, Klout only measures Twitter and Facebook and namely only ONE account on those services. It really should cover Blogs, and groups you control on Linkedin and other sources that your influence has been curated on and I think their vision is to get to that. Major companies on Twitter and Facebook sometimes have what I call “Brand Flavors” of their brands targets and of course employees and customers service accounts.
I talked about this on my blog review of Klout. There should also be a measurement of original thought, valued differently from copiers such as “retweeters” if you will. I know many high scoring Twitter people, who for the most part, just retweet everything a tech news service puts out. I’m NOT discounting the influential value of that on its own, just that they should be measured differently. I like listening to original thought that has had some work put into it like on a blog, plus it usually has visions of the future. I dont need people yelling whats already happened, I’d like to know what the future is. Going up and down Mashable.com pages and jamming all the retweet buttons shouldnt be valued the same. To make the point, if 1,000,000 people on Twitter are just retweeting all the same links, at some point in my stream that isnt really news – its more noise. Frankly, its almost spam. If 1,000,000 people are all copying the same thing THE VALUE is very watered down of these curators. I think Klout and other scorers should measure that. I’d have paid millions (and saved) to learn the stuff I find and share on smart blogs like mine when I was starting as an entrepreneur. Retweeting 100 news stories a day is NOT the same value.
One of my corporate investments was in the mortgage business for 20 years. We saw the pre-Fico score days and then years of Fico scoring. During that time it was always allusive as to the “perfect evaluation or score.” There were always too many cases of flaws in the system. I think the same is going to be true of Social scoring, especially with the quickly changing dynamics of Social Media. It will never be accurate or perfect. Over the last few years, I’ve seen scoring companies fad in and out. Until that stabilizes, it may be moot. Klout I think has the best chance so far at being widely successful long term, where they are turning it into a meaningful market.
All in all its great discussion, let me know what YOU think in the comments below!
Hey Chris, I’ve been really scratching my head at Klout.
To me Klout should, as you mentioned, have some aspect of genuine personal content or observation and originality… and preferably (strongly preferably) also social engagement.
I actually came to your blog today looking to see what you had to say about Klout as I’ve been seeing some odd things with it (beyond that it’s not terribly hard to game it). Hootsuite has a dlicious ability in their Pro version to filter columns by Klout and I like to do that to make sure I do not miss any important DMs and sometimes to sort the home feed to ensure I am not missing any real engagers amid the clutter that is a very active and fast paced feed. It seems when I first played with this tool I had better results than I’m seeing today but I may be biased/mistaken.
This week I re-subscribed to their Pro tool, and set the filtering on my home feed and was absolutely appauled at how *many* individuals with a klout score both over 35, and many over 50, were nothing but an auto-fed stream. No engagement, no real content, no real insight, many of them piped from (as I mentioned earlier gaming the system) a combination of mashable, your own feed, and a quote stream, which one might say is the ideal mix to get RT’d without ever having to RT someone else. As I opened up their personal streams and look at them you can tell “the lights are on but no one is home”. This is heart breaking and totally destroys what value Klout should be bringing to the table.
If I cant look at a score of 50 and know that someone is actually a real person, engaging, and carrying some social “weight”, then what good is this number to me? If I can game this number by doing as these have (which I’ve certainly experimented with an proved can be done), then so can anyone.
It is a very real and very scary idea that a score like this could get too much value placed on it before it has hopefully been fine-tuned to filter out this miss-behavior.
Klout is a neat tool and a powerful algorithm but like many algorithms its succeptable to the human tendency to cheat the system and needs to take that into account and weight in factor of strong authentic engagement.
Kimberly
Chris, I know I’m coming to this very late, but I found it through search so perhaps others will to.
Just to note that Klout doesn’t seem to have any influence whatsoever beyond the West Coast – I’ve never come across even the most dedicated bloggers and tweeters talking about it in London – it’s just not on the radar. There was a worrying study done by some academics recently (forgive me I can’t recount the source) that showed exactly how easy it was to influence Klout scores using bots on Twitter etc.
On social scoring systems, they’re already in place and have influenced hirings and firings and social status for centuries… In that respect Klout offers nothing new