This morning I got a completely meaningless email update from Klout.
What the F- does that mean?!
While I have never been a fan of Klout, more recent updates to the service have made the scores even less useful. There was a time when the score was broken down into some sort of profile of user behavior, which was actually somewhat useful albeit flawed. Now it’s just a score that changes by fractions of a point. Can anyone explain to me why I need to be informed of a change in my score of less than a point…or really at all? What difference does that make in my life?
We collectively have almost no idea what this score means and yet there are companies using Klout in their hiring decisions, and Joe Fernandez, CEO of Klout is even promoting this behavior. There are companies using Klout to decide who’s customer service complaints to respond to.
When will the madness stop?
I get it Jeff, you don’t like Klout, what’s the point?
I’ve gone over this again and again and I’m sorry for continually bagging on Klout, but I just have to be very clear, if your goal is to improve your business, Klout should barely even register as something to consider. Don’t make your hiring decisions based on it. Don’t make customer service judgements based on it. Don’t you dare relate to it as people’s online FICO scores.
I’m all for measurement, just not bullshit measurement.
What happens after the tweet?
Klout, Kred, PeopleBrowsr and every other competing service, have absolutely NO IDEA what happened after the tweet. Sure, they can measure retweets, favorites, likes and +1, but that is not influence. If I tweet someone saying “you should talk to CreativeMMS about your website redesign project” then that person searches Google for CreativeMMS, clicks through to their site, calls them and buys something, I legitimately influenced that person. That scenario would never show up on Klout. Even if someone clicked a link from my Tweet or Facebook post, until someone takes real action with follow through, it’s not influence it’s just attention. If someone clicks through from this post either on the blog or via email it won’t show in Klout. It’s like calculating ROI without all of the income or expenses…it’s just not real.
Ignore this meaningless garbage and focus on what matters. Dr. Seuss gave us the best reason to ignore Klout scores:
