“Klout matters to employers.”
When I read that bold headline in Todd Bacile’s post, Florida State University class using Klout to determine student grades, I had a visceral reaction. Why? First, because Klout really only matters to a very small percentage of employers in a niche of the business world, and second, because I wouldn’t want to work for any company that used “minimum” Klout scores as part of their hiring process.
If a potential employer contacted me to ask why I didn’t have a
@klout score for them to check, I’m pretty sure that would be a red flag. — Meg Fowler Tripp (@megtripp) August 27, 2012
A huge red flag. And while the article clearly explains why Mr. Bacile decided to use Klout and how he used it to help teach his marketing students how to engage using social media and not to game Klout, it concerns me that, as a culture, we are willingly allowing Klout to pull the wool over our eyes. We are a culture of lemmings? We seem easily lead off any cliff that has even the slightest hint of “scientific” validity. In other words, we’ll believe anything with a number attached to it.
Which is more valid, your IQ number or your Klout number?
Hint: this is a trick question. My graduate degree is in School Psychology. I was carefully trained in how to administer standardized IQ tests. As a result, I understand how the scores from these tests can fluctuate based on the test administrator’s tone of voice, the pacing of the questions, and even the color pencil used during portions of the test. But until recently, I had never really questioned the “validity” of the IQ test, except to state that the accuracy of the test could be +/- 5 points, even if administered perfectly. IQ has simply become accepted as a real measure of intelligence.
But what does an intelligence test really measure? What can it measure? In Technopoly, Neil Postman, citing three points made by Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure Of Man, lays out a few of the dangers of abusing statistics in attempts to measure abstract concepts.
“The first problem is called reification, which means converting an abastract idea (mostly, a word) into a thing.” Like “intelligence”, [pq align=right]Klout, is not a thing. And the thing it measures, influence, is not a thing.[/pq] They are all just words with a very high degree of abastraction. “But if we believe it to be a thing, like the pancreas or liver, then we will believe scientific procedures can locate it and measure it.”
And based on what I see daily online, many, many people believe the abstract concept of influence is actually being measured by Klout. We believe it almost as much as we believe “intelligence” is being measured by IQ tests. I was shocked by the number of really smart people praising Klout’s update last week as being “more accurate” and including “real-world” influence metrics, and delighted their score had improved. Which brings us to the second problem.
“The second problem is ranking. Ranking requires a criterion for assigning individuals to their place in a singel series.” And what is better for ranking than a single objective number? Nothing. In fact, using a single number leads us to believe that Klout, influence, is not only a thing, but a single thing. As if this abstraction can have any meaningful objective number formally attached to it.”
The third problem is that it forces us to answer the wrong questions.
“In doing this, we have formulated our question, ‘Who is the fairest of all?’ in a restricted and biased way. And yet this would go unnoticed, because as Gould writes, ‘The mystique of science proclaims that numbers are the ultimate test of objectivity.’ This means that the way we have defined the concept will recede from our consciousness – that is, its fundatmental subjectivity will become invisible, and the objective number itself will become reified.”
We have been measuring intelligence using standardized tests for more than 100 years. And while we have generally come to accept them as valid, experts continue to point out the problems associated with attempts to measure IQ. E.L. Thorndike, the second President of the Psychometric Society, observed that intelligence tests had three defects: “Just what they measure is not known, how far it is proper to add, subtract, multiply divide and compute rations with the measures obtained is not known; just what the measures signify concerning intellect is not known.” Basically, people who administer these test don’t really know what they are doing or what they are measuring. And Joseph Weizenbaum, former Professor Emeritus of computer science at MIT added,
“Few ‘scientific’ concepts have so thoroughly muddled the thinking of both scientists and the general public as that of the ‘intelligence quotient’ or ‘IQ.’ The idea that intelligence can be quantitatively measured along a single linear scale has caused untold harm to our society in general, and to education in particular.”
Is influence any different? I don’t think so. And Klout’s recent changes to include “real world” influence in their metrics is laughable. What Klout has done, quite simply, is hypercharge the process of reification for a number that has no validity whatsoever. And we are falling for the fallacy of ambiguity and making the mistake of treating an abstraction as if it were something concrete, a real thing.
Soon, if not already, the gross subjectivity of an influence metric will become invisible and we’ll simply believe the number. I wish it weren’t true, but article’s like Mr. Bacile’s and the increased number of smart people passing out “I just gave so-and-so a +K in…” tweets like candy force me to believe otherwise.
So, tell us what you really think!
Is it possible that Klout is just a benign marketing ploy to get products into the hands of people who will sing the product’s praises throughout the social media universe for free?
Unlike IQ scores, my thinking on Klout is that it plays to people’s innate narcissism. People like to be made to feel important. It doesn’t matter if it’s the trophy or certificate or designation or academic degrees. It’s just another metric to set you (me?) apart from the masses.
In this case, it’s useful in the social media universe because it has been so widely accepted. Probably because of the “perks”.
Being a “thought leader” or “influencer” may not have much benefit in an of itself but it may be that toe in the door some people need to make the next move in their career or, at least, looked up to and made to feel important.
Jeff – I was in a class last spring, educational entrepreneurship, in which our goal was to deconstruct systems like standardized testing in school, something one could say parallels products like Klout. We aimed to redefine what it meant to teach and assess.
One thing we all agreed with was that most of our current methods failed everyone…students, teachers, employers, and society. We also agreed that ‘the standardized testing system’ could (and was being) “gamed” – which made already skewed results even more meaningless. Further, we debated what it actually meant to score well on these tests and to what degree of real-world value the scores had. We also debated what it meant for us as higher-education institutions, employers, and society to ‘score’ and ‘rank’ people with test scores and GPA’s. But more importantly, we started to ask questions about what was actually important for students, as citizens and ambassadors to the world, to actually learn – and did our questions and answers align with current models of assessment? Well, no they didn’t really.
I’m not a parent, but when I am – I will hold a high degree of interest in how my children are being taught to interact with the world. Surely there is more to their education than preparing them to ace the SAT’s?…A gaming of their educational process.
Measurement is a tough subject.
I’ve gone a little of course here, but I’d like to share Sir Ken Robinson’s video with you. You may already be familiar with him, given your background…but if not – enjoy. http://youtu.be/zDZFcDGpL4U
Greg, I’ve watched that video several times. He shares some of the beliefs about how education has gone sideways with Postman, whose writings inspired this post. I think you’d find Postman’s thoughts on “scoring” in education to be very interesting and perhaps in line with your groups discussions. I happen to agree with you on this. My objective here is to bring that thinking to the discussion of Klout and ask what the measure does to our behavior, how it changes how we communicate and to what degree this improves or degrades. Measurement is indeed a tough subject. And I’m just not ready to follow the herd on this one.
I love this. I personally never give Klout any consideration because I just don’t care about some number that they decided to give me. When a new lead comes in through my website, I usually look to see if they have a facebook profile. After several years of this, I have decided that it’s a waste of time. A large percentage of my best clients do not have a facebook account and say they never will.
I believe that most realtors spend too much time on facebook and twitter, and not enought time on the phone or face to face.
Maybe someday we will have a klout score for that, but for now it can be measured with more sales.
Have a good day
While I’d never mean to offend, I think that article (aside from some typos) has enough logical fallacies that I cannot decide which it errs the most. Perhaps ‘claiming the antecedent’ or ‘affirming the consequent’ or perhaps even the “ludic fallacy.’ In fact, his argument may be the very ‘reification’ he warns against. The article’s argument is not ‘prove’ anything at all.
In short, David Hume in “Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” proved that there is no logical necessity between the past and the future. It was mind blowing. That the sun came up every day for billions of years holds no logical proof that it will come up tomorrow.
This ‘Riddle of Induction” as it’s been rephrased is still an unsolved problem in philosophy of science. Does it mean we thrown all of scientific observation out? I wouldn’t.
Clearly I’m in the minority here, but I think this is another instance of real estate being late adopters to media trends. Klout is not perfect, but we accept algorithms and their predictions everyday with less friction. The Google search algorithm for one. There are even big data algortithms that measure how people act on Twitter to effectively predict the stock market…and it works!
If that can be done, they can narrow down influence to some degree. I dont know how many of you are in the corporate world, but Klout is something that is highly regarded in marketing, PR and recruiting.
Patrick, it’s hard to offend me. 🙂 I know Klout is highly regarded in marketing and PR, though I fail to see how it is highly regarded in recruiting outside of those channels. I also haven’t seen anything but anecdotal evidence of even that. And while I’m not certain which aspects of this argument fall in the ludic fallacy category, I’m not really trying to prove anything at all. I’m presenting an opposing view, and simply drawing analogies between previous arguments about the reification of IQ as a measure of intelligence and the reification of Klout as a measure of influence. I think the parallels are interesting.
As for Real Estate being late, I’d question that in this case. In fact, it’s the leading edge of real estate’s technorati that have moved quickly to adopt Klout as a standard measure of online influence and have applauded Klout’s recent addition of “real world” metrics to further validate their approval and adoption. Some in the real estate space have been suggesting for some time that Klout scores be used in listing presentations to prove a real estate agent’s online influence. That this has influenced their behavior seems obvious to me, but I’ve been wrong before. I’ll be wrong again.
And, this post is certainly not arguing against predictive analytics. I’m not even sure how that comes across, but I’ll take full responsibility for not being clear. As it relates to Klout’s ability to “predict” who will or will not create the greatest number of “shares” in the social media space, I’ll concede that Klout may have some level of validity, but even in this, I think the real power of Klout is not in their predictive ability, but in their ability to get people to opt in to be marketed to and to market on behalf of their clients. I’ll point you to Morgan Brown’s post for an example: http://pmorganbrown.com/2012/02/27/how-klout-perks-really-work/
And thanks for making the time to comment.
Jeff, Thanks for carrying the torch on the conversation. You make some great points. I spent a year studying this subject, and specifically what “influence” means in an online world with no rules or hierarchy, what Klout (and its kin) can and can’t do, and whether it makes any difference. I wrote a book called “Return On Influence” which explains my findings and in short, I think they are on to something. A summary of one premise can be found here: http://www.businessesgrow.com/2011/09/12/why-klout-matters-a-lot/
… but I think you would probably enjoy the entire book. It features both Marilyn Monroe and Peewee Herman. I mean, how could you go wrong?
Thanks again for the thought-provoking discussion.
Thanks, Mark. I’ll definitely go read and thanks for recognizing my attempts to raise the level of conversation… albeit in an odd kind of way. 🙂
Hi Jeff, great article mate. I referred to this and the whole Klout ‘fallacy of influence’ in today’s Electric Avenue Show over here in OZ…
http://www.gregvincent.com.au/2012/08/28/does-your-klout-ranking-mean-anything/
It means f**k all. At least to me.
I might have written that, but then the post would have been too short.
🙂
LOL
“I believe that most realtors spend too much time on facebook and twitter, and not enought time on the phone or face to face.”
Now that made me smile – thanks Larry.
Ask the top 500 agents in the country how much of their success they put down to Facebook and Twitter – or more broadly their Social presence/strategy. I would be interested to see the results of that…
Nice article Jeff – always like reading you stuff, when it’s about something like Klout, I enjoy it just a little more…