Klout Sucks and Why You Should Use It

The Twitter influence measurement service Klout was a huge topic of debate at this year’s SXSW conference. Its founder Joe Fernandez was on various panels touting  how wonderful it is that the startup has found a way to automate the influence measurement process – something many feel is the “holy grail” of social media marketing. Mr. Fernandez also discussed “Klout Perks” – a service that allows brands to target influencers by sending them tangible items in hopes they will talk about them throughout their social circles leading to increased sales. Unfortunately, Klout is nothing but snake oil when it comes to determining influence. That said, it’s an immensiely valuable service that should be incorporated into your reporting mix. Confused? Let me explain.

No matter what Joe Fernandez says, there is currently no tool that can accurately automate the process of identifying influencers on specific topics throughout Twitter. The only way to do this is to immerse yourself into the conversational context data manually. In fact, my own Klout profile says I’m most influential on the topics of “Social Media,” “Marketing,” “New York Yankees,” “Media,” “Family,” and “Public Relations.” Now I can see where some of those terms may come in to play as I do social media and digital marketing for a living, but I rarely ever tweet about topics related to my family or families in general. Perhaps a better example is a friend of mine that ranks as an influencer in “football” when in fact she probably can’t even name more than five teams in the NFL!

Now Klout claims they get their content analysis data on influencers from semantically analyzing tweets for engagement and reach to see which topics one is most influential in, but clearly this is a flawed method. I’m not saying it’s 100% inaccurate, but there is bad data coming back here. In fact, I recently spoke to a Klout employee on how I was personally targeted for two of their perks, one for Disney’s “Tangled” film and the other for an NBA promotion; these are two topics that I really couldn’t care less about, yet somehow I received invitations for their swag. When I mentioned this to the employee, I was told “sometimes people slip through the cracks” as if that’s an acceptable answer. If I was a brand paying good money to target influencers and there were people slipping through the cracks, I’d be very upset, especially with the value of some of these perks brands are sending out.

I also asked Joe Fernandez how Klout measures ROI on their perk program after he made the statement that some brands were so thrilled with the results that they came back for another go and was given no clear answer. It appears, from my take on his reply, that brands are using this money as “experimental marketing” and waiting to see if there’s any long tail effect. With no required action by those who receive perks, it’s impossible to measure any sort of ROI. (Klout users that receive perks are not required to say or do anything. The hope is that they will enjoy the perk so much they talk about it on their own.)

All this being said, I find there is value to be had in using the Klout score in social media monitoring as it aids in identifying those Twitter users that “get it” versus those that are speaking to a disengaged audience. While I firmly believe that brands should listen to and treat all customers throughout social media as if they have 100 Klout, I’m a realist and know that sometimes that’s impossible, especially if you’re a brand with thousands of mentions per day. When it comes down to reputation management and someone with a Klout of 50 is talking about how much they hate your brand, you’re going to want to put them on a higher priority list than someone with a Klout of 8. This score gives marketers some data to go back to CMOs with that satiates their need for numbers and data clustering.

I don’t want to come off like a Klout hater – I’d love to see the service thrive, but only if it’s doing it right. I had many conversations around this topic this week and can say that there are many out there that loathe Klout and everything it stands for. I just want any tool out there that can help me make my job easier. I don’t think we’re anywhere close to finding a way to automate the influencer identification process as there are too many variables that go into what makes one influential, but of everything out there, Klout at least seems to be heading down the right path, even if that path is thousands of miles long.