Finally…A Use For Klout Scores?

Do you know your Klout score?  I know mine – 51.  Is that good or bad?  I guess it’s all relative.  Mine is only based on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The bigger question is should I care.  I’ve struggled with why to care, but it finally hit me the other day.  There are a few circumstances where I might care:

• If my purpose was to get a job as a social media consultant.
• If I was trying to be a community manager.
• If I was trying to get a job in PR or as a reporter…or maybe if I tried to monetize my blog.
• If I was trying to get some role driving awareness of a product or topic.
• Maybe as an individual consultant.

As an average person working for a company, I’m not sure it matters.  Of course, you can argue with the “scoring” process, but the reality is that people do want some benchmark to compare themselves to for what they do online.  The interesting question is whether companies will care.  And, is there a minimum that you should have just to be able to say you understand and use social media?

Here’s a few recent articles discussing the topic of Klout.

• http://blogs.hbr.org/schrage/2012/11/should-your-boss-care-about-your-klout.html
• http://www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_klout/
• http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/29/klout-would-like-potential-employers-to-consider-your-score-before-hiring-you-and-thats-stupid/

It’s competitors are Kred and PeerIndex which I only went to because of this post.  But, I signed up for them to see what my scores where there.

My question would be how do you adjust this for people (like me) who don’t use Facebook or should that fact alone exclude me from certain things like being a community manager for a product that needs a Facebook presence?  Perhaps.

So, if you’re hiring a mHealth or social media team, you might want to know their Klout (or Kred or PeerIndex) scores (on average for the team).  I’d say it’s like gamification.  I wouldn’t want someone just using that buzzword with me.  I’d want to know the last game they got sucked in to.  Why it kept their attention?  And, then I’d ask them things like why they think Steam is gathering gaming apps in their and whether it’s critical path for them in gamifying their app.