Klout: an Emerging Social Media Meter

 

Klout is a “social media relevance” meter that attempts to calculate your social web influence.  The scoring system attempts to rank users’ relevance with an overall score and a Klout score on certain topics.

 

Users can connect Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare and a growing number of other social media sites to Klout.  Klout then analyzes your data and your contacts and, with its algorithm, lets you and others see your influence on people and topics.

 

Klout has an engaging way to keep users interested in the site while learning about its capabilities.  With “achievements”, users learn to use Klout while also gaining the ability to help themselves and others in the process.

 

Klout may not be a perfectly accurate way to judge a user’s influence, but its algorithm has improved considerably and Klout continues to add functionality as time passes.  Currently there are ways to “trick” the system, but based on what I’ve seen, not many people appear to be manipulating their scores.

 

I’m just now starting to be active in Klout, so don’t make fun of me for my low score!