Will Barratt, Ph.D.
I got an invitation to join Klout yesterday. I had no idea what Klout was so I spent some
time chatting on-line and in-person with colleagues and reading reviews of
Klout. Officially Klout is touted as “making influence measurable” by tracking your influence through social media.
Once I learned what Klout was I became fascinated by the
social class implications of this tracking software. Klout may have been designed to help
businesses track the extent to which their tweets are re-tweeted, or how often
people click their Facebook profiles, but Klout is being marketed to individuals
also. One of my Twitter active
colleagues noted, on Facebook of course, that “I monitor my score and prefer
not to see it drop.”
Paying attention to the rules that Klout uses will shape
your postings toward those which get you more Klout influence points. Any game player, especially complex computer
game players, will mold their behavior so that they can accumulate more
points. Klout, from one perspective, is
a social media game that you can win. Whether
or not the rules of Klout actually reflect anything in reality is a matter for
a discussion of measurement validity.
Since Klout is not a zero sum game (if I win a point then
you lose a point) losing has relative and not absolute meaning. Winning, having more points, is still
winning. Now you can have a real-time
assessment of your on -line influence.
Influence will be, for many people, equated with social status. Influence will be, for many people, equated
with social capital. If you have a high
score then you are a winner. If you have
a low score then you are a loser.
Which of us has not done a Google search on our own name
and the name of someone else to compare our scores? Which of us has not posted something to
Twitter hoping that it will get Re-Tweeted?
Klout can calculate your popularity in social media in real time so that
you can use it to judge your personal worth, your social status, and your
social class. Or not.
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