If you’ve been using your Klout score to tout your online influence, this post is for you. If you’re putting your Klout score on your resume, this post is for you. If you’re a social media guru telling people to go sign up for Klout immediately, this post is for you too.
I want to say this as clearly as I can – Klout is a game. Nothing more. Nothing less. This is not to say Klout has no value. The game can be fun. You can meet people while playing the game. The game is a nice form of entertainment. You can also get a feeling of pride from playing the game better than other people who are playing the game. But what you probably shouldn’t do is attempt to make the game out to be anything more than a game.
Playing Klout requires no real skill, it is easy to play. It’s also easy to “win.”
Using a combination of Rep.licants.org and Twitterfeed, I took a dormant @virtualtours account from a Klout score of 1 to 35 in 30 days, and from 27 followers to 141. Except for posting Klout increases and responding to one really angry lady, no human interaction was required to raise the score. Every “conversation” on the account was computer generated.
@VirtualTours was primarily driven by Rep.licants.org. Rep.licants.org “is a web service allowing users to install an artificial intelligence (bot) on their Facebook and/or Twitter account. From keywords, content analysis and activity analysis, the bot attempts to simulate the activity of the user, to improve it by feeding his account and to create new contacts with other users.”
Most of the description on the home page of Rep.licants.org seems to indicate that they’re interested in improving conversation and freeing you up to do other things with their little friendship-creating robot, but the last line reveals their true motive. And I must say, I love it. They state, “Moreover, this bot can be perceived as a threat by defrauding even more the reality of who is really who on social networks and by showing the poverty of our social interactions on these so-called social networks.”
“The poverty of our social interactions on these so-called social networks.” Let that sink in for a bit. The reason why the game of Klout is so easy to play is that a fair amount of the conversation in the spaces it measures is shallow. It’s relatively easy to get someone to mention you or retweet you. Just say something positive about them.
b9punk – @b9punk
R u gaming klout? @semanticwill @wrbeard @sidesreversedis @wrbeard @hoza @zhaus @pkthewriter @thekateyouknow @flohrs @jboogie @adamkolson
I don’t have a clue what @b9punk was referring to in this tweet, but if I were betting, I’d bet she was reacting to a classic example of how people “game Klout” (more on that later). The technique: name as many people as possible in a tweet in the hopes that one or all of them will reply or retweet. The best day to do this on Twitter, without attracting attention to yourself, is on Friday. The practice of lumping together tons of people in tweet after tweet is fairly common during #followfriday or #ff tweet fests. And it works. It works on other days of the week as well.
Klout takes itself very seriously. They make claims that your Klout score is not based on how many followers you have in your network, but on the “quality of your network” as a whole. But clearly, Klout doesn’t really care about the quality of the “conversations” it is measuring. Klout can only care about the quantity. And apparently, it doesn’t even matter if you’re talking to someone else.
I’m just guessing, but I’d say 90% of @virtualtours mentions were self-mentions. The other 10% were mostly mentions by two other bots I set up to have a conversation with it. 🙂 Those other two accounts, @virtualtour and @realvideo, are both climbing their way up the Klout ladder as well. Even though Klout itself says that these three accounts have not “influenced” a single other Twitter account.
Lots of people are playing the Klout game. And other are creating variations on the game. Even the highly respected Edelman, the world’s top independent PR agency and winner of the 2011 large PR agency of the year, has moved headlong into the online influence measurement game.
Kevin Spidel – @kspidel
Edelman Launches Social Influence Measurement Tools BlogLevel and TweetLevel http://zite.to/reaIYb
This is Edelman, a company I happen to admire, populated by some really smart people, so of course I had to go check out how my automated interactions on @VirtualTours would rate on the new Edelman Tweetlevel product. It did pretty well. 🙂 @virtualtours scores a 57.6.
Here’s what Edelman has to say about that score. Try not to laugh. “You may not be CNN but you understand the importance of Twitter and use it well. To increase your influence score, you will need to get people to re-tweet what you are saying more frequently – the posts you make and the number of people who follow what you say is critical.” You can stop laughing now. Does @virtualtours really understand the importance of Twitter and use it well? There is no possible way Edelman, Klout or EmpireAvenue can know anything about the quality of interactions using tools that measure quantity.
I was going to write a bit about what really constitutes being influential, but Matthew Shadbolt‘s recent post is so good, I don’t need to. His post on influence is simply excellent and worth a full read. He writes, “Influence, insight and sharing value with others online cannot be ‘gamed’, and it cannot be assigned to an integer.” Amen.
Gaming Klout?
Roger Dooley – @rogerdooley
If Klout gains importance, @schachin, I expect even more sophisticated techniques to game it. @btabke
Game it? You mean like video game cheats? That’s what you’re supposed to do in games. And the fact that Klout has companies giving out perks based on the high scores makes it even more of a game. I say this having received some pretty great perks for my own Klout score. So, saying “game Klout” seems redundant to me. What if everyone stopped “gaming Klout” would it matter? I don’t think so. And the simple fact is, right now, you don’t need terribly sophisticated techniques to win at this online influence game.
A few people I trust were let in on my 30-day robot-driven play of the Klout game. They’re geeks, so I thought they might enjoy watching. One of them was Dan Green. When I informed him I wanted to write this post a week ago when @virtualtours first hit 35. Dan’s advice at the time was, “wait until it hits 50, then it will have more ‘influence’ than the vast majority of people looking at it as a measure of influence.” That was good advice. Unfortunately, to get @virtualtours to 50 or higher I would have had to program a few more automated interactions. Quite frankly, I don’t have the skills to program it myself and our team at Zeek is too busy doing real work, earned from real influence. If you know what I mean.
So, I’m ending this little test. I think I’ve proven my point. It should be noted, however, that I’m writing this on Friday, August 5 and won’t publish it until Monday, August 8, so I expect the Klout score @virtualtours to actually actually drop after I turn the bots off. Or, a least it should. 🙂
But… What would we have done to push the score higher?
First we would have written a script to search Twitter for anyone using the following combination of words, “I gave @fillintheblank +K about fillintheblank on @klout.” Then we would have have simply retweeted variations of the following, “Well deserved! RT @whoever: I gave @fillintheblank +k about @fillintheblank on @klout.” A percentage of those would retweet and mention back. Klout values that, whether it has any real value or not.
Then, we’d program a script to check every hour for the last person to say, “My @Klout score is XX. I improved it by XX.” The script would then retweet them with variations on this, “Congratulations! RT @whoever: My @Klout score is XX. I improved it by XX.” And we’d automatically follow them as well. My bet is that an even higher percentage of people would reply back and mention @virtualtours in this case. If you’re tweeting out your Klout score, it means you probably value it. And since you value it, you’re more likely to respond when someone congratulates you. The rule of reciprocity is a powerful force.
Then we would have scripted the account to unfollow anyone who had not followed us back within a seven day period, lowering the ratio of follows to followers. Klout likes that. It’s one of the rules of the game. 🙂
I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, I could have gotten the @virtualtours Klout score above 50 without any human interaction. It would have continued to spew out streams of “vague and overly familiar tweets” to people following the account. It would also have pissed off a few more people. And, in doing so, I would have had no real influence on anyone. Not one single person.
And it would have been fun to watch. Becuase Klout is a game.
————–
EDIT:
Since posting this morning I’ve been led to two posts I had not read before today. I think they’re worth linking to here:
Alex Braunstein – Why Your Klout Score Is Meaningless
Adam Singer – Obsessed With Your Klout Score? Your Doing It Wrong.
Other than playing the “game” just for the fun of it, does Klout have any real value? I think most, after reading this, would say no.
But I was wondering what you think. What mechanic could Klout change to really measure influence? Or is the point that influence is in the eye of the beholder anyway, so who cares what someone says your influence “is”?
As I stated in the post… you can meet people playing games, you can create some level of “interaction.” Giving someone a +K for a keyword is a way of initiating a contact, etc. But it should be evaluated based on that, not as a real measure of influence. In my opinion.
Jeff, what are the metrics of “influence”? Assuming that there’s a spectrum of 0 (absolutely no influence) to 100 (everything person A suggests to person B is done) – what would you measure and how would you count it?
Good question. Let me think on that for a year and get back to you. 🙂
Here’s my beef. It says it is measuring online influence. Does my influence become less if I take a weekend off to go on vacation? Or, like when I was in Seattle for a week speaking at a conference of over 15,000 people did I have less influence?
No, I just had less time to log onto Twitter & have regular conversations with my friends that reply back to me. While I didn’t tweet 20-30 times each day for a 4 day period, I did asssist over 500 people get started down the right path of using Facebook or Twitter properly online.
Does that make me more or less influential online?
THANK YOU!
I have been seeing a bunch of real estate agents in my market “play the game” recently and I am wondering if they will be using their Klout scores as competition against me in a listing appointment. I am curious how it will benefit them.
The answer is right here 🙂
Leave it to you to debunk and test out your theory. Love it! Mine dropped when I went to TN for a long weekend, like Jeremy.
You gotta feed the beast. 🙂
I just increased both the Klout & the Empire Avenue IPO price for @VirtualTours thanks for the article :)http://twitter.com/#!/EAVSHARES/status/101535622946230272
Thank you. That made my day.
Just took a friend’s score from 17 to 68 in a week Jeff.Without any robots.
Another 2 intersting stories are that I was dropped from 82 to 76 in one day recently. No idea what what was about.
Just saw someone check in to 197 places on 4sq in ome morning the day after it was added to Klout as well. Mmmm….
I see great use in it for the analytics it gives me about my unique mentioners, retweeters and likers and commenters. That’s about it. Plus I am in the Klout squad which will be great networking
You have led me to the Edelman Tweetlevel.Fascinatingly my score on here is identical to Klout. 80.8
My Klout comes 80% of my FB profile though. I am told this is the highest in the world. My Edelman profile was extremely interesting though and told me my engagement score was low.I need to talk more. Mmmm.Will work on that for a week then go back
great experiment. i have also seen spambots with high klout scores, and i’m sure they weren’t even necessarily trying for that.
Hmmm…Interesting, Jeff! I would expect no less from you to do your geek testing and, of course, I’m glad you did! I have been trying to make my way to Klout each day to help others bring up their scores (and of course keep mine up!) and wondered if I was wasting my time. I kept hearing that there was going to be something ‘BIG’ coming from Klout soon so, we needed to get a ‘jump’ on everyone else. So far, nothing ‘big’ other than a big waste of my time, I suppose!
Thanks, Jeff. You just saved me a few valuable minutes out of my days!
O. M. G.
How did I not see this article from a month ago. This is freaking awesome. I’m now trying it on a languishing product account. Let’s see if I can get more followers and klout w/o any interaction.
Evil Grin >:0)
Great article! I can sleep now. I’ve been sharing information primarily about Social Media and how small businesses and non-profits should be using it and although Klout DOES seem to recognize this, it also seems to think I’m influential about “coupons”, “casinos”, and “jeopardy”. I don’t recall ever sharing any information on these topics and I don’t follow Alex Trebek… so I thought “Klout” was telling me where I should shift my focus. I really wasn’t prepared to alter my career path. Now I know I don’t have to. Thanks!
Maybe Klout is just uncovering the growing influence of bots and automated communications in our lives. For some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about stories I’ve heard of people proposing to lovebots the entire time I read this. Klout might just have more insight than we are giving it credit for!
Jeff, your example somewhat reminds me of when webmasters learn how to influence Google’s pagerank. Some people use blackhat SEO techniques to get to the top of the Google’s rankings much like the bots you used. If you use blackhat SEO techniques and Google catches you doing it, they say Google is punitive. I don’t know if this is true, but it’s what I hear and I haven’t heard of klout being punitive. Nonetheless, Klout is an interesting concept and even though it can be manipulated, it provides us with an arbitrary system, a system that we often see in other parts of our society, to distinguish people when too many people are competing for the top spot or attention. I can think of two other examples where we give scores to behaviors that can be manipulated. Matthew Ferrara gave one in a previous article about klout and that is the FICO Score. The one that I was going to reference was SAT scores or standardized testing in general. I was a public school teacher a long time ago and each year right around testing time (Feb, Mar), we would teach the students test taking skills as a way to game the system. All life is a game. If you know the rules, why wouldn’t you want to be the best or get the highest score? I have a question for you though. If Klout’s scores/ algorithms were not as easy to dupe and if Klout punished people who used Blackhat Klout techniques, would you then find value in the score?
Angie, I agree that all of life is a game. I don’t have a problem with the game, per se. I do think advertisers looking to “influence” should weigh the fact that some, and I have no idea how many, who have high Klout scores do not have any real influence. Ultimately, the real judgement of Klout’s value will come from those paying to have their brands/products trumpet in social media channels by the Klout titans. I’ve personally benefited from a high Klout score and I’ve even tweeted about a few of the items I’ve been gifted. So, it works on many levels. However, I discount the real word of mouth value of Klout tweets I see. I understand their origin.
What a great article illustrating your point. AH-MAZING! So good in fact I must give you a +k for influencing me about Klout now.
=)
As I have said on numerous occasions, I have never been overlooked or turned away by a potential client because of a low Klout score. It’s a game and needs to be treated that way.
As usual Jeff you’re the voice of reason. A zillion tweets flying by about the Klout changes, some people take this way too seriously. Do stuff that matters and the rest will take care of itself. 😉
Jeff:
Thank you for pulling the back the curtain to reveal the game. I’m laughing because I had no idea you could use bots to generate all that buzz. and here I was doing it the hard way by having conversations! Silly me.
Hasta la bye bye klout….
Byron
Thank you – I very much appreciate it when people run experiments on these tools. We only know their value to the extent they are tested.
In this case, it is easy to conclude that the net value of klout is negative. I believe that this is not quite true. Given the number of people who are determined to take this seriously, klout has provided us with a very effective way of separating out people with a limited sense of reality from those who know what the Hell they are talking about.
Simply put, anyone who references their klout score on a resume or advertising information should not be taken seriously. I think there is value in providing this information to the world in a self-identifying way.