Do you have any social media Klout?

Who are you most influenced by?

The standard response might include your parents, a trusted friend, a wise teacher, or even a religious leader. Of course, these influencers will change throughout your life. For example, your mother might play a very important role during your youth, but this gives way to your peer group in your teenage years. A university professor might guide your choice of profession and then your colleagues at work play a more important role during your adult life.

Influence is defined as the ability to have an effect on the character of someone. Pre-internet, this meant that face-to-face contact with people enjoying a dynamic conversation was the critical context for developing ideas, rapport and influence. Today, some argue that rich conversation has given way to online interactions as measured by Facebook and Twitter. My position is that these social networks are more about interacting with content generated by people as opposed to interacting with actual people. There’s a difference.

One organization at the forefront of measuring social media analytics is Klout (www.klout.com). This San Francisco-based company creates profiles on individuals and assigns them a “Klout score.” These scores range from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a higher assessment of the breadth and strength of one’s online influence. Klout has even developed supplemental measures. “True reach” is based on the size of followers and friends who actively listen and react to their online messages. “Amplification score” relates to the likelihood that one’s messages will generate actions (e.g., retweets, likes and comments). “Network impact” reflects the influential value of a person’s engaged audience.

This is all fine and dandy and provides an interesting exercise for determining who actually “roars” the loudest when she tweets. However, there are several objections to Klout’s methodology, including assuming that any online user has no major influence in the real world (i.e., the old- fashioned way, by actually talking to people). Nevertheless, I checked out my own Klout score and it’s 31. This compares with The Hamilton Spectator at 54, Dalton McGuinty at 61, and Barack Obama at 86. I have about 2,000 Twitter followers, but to be honest, I don’t know how many of those actually read what I tweet or how many server bots that total includes.

I think the more interesting analytic is the list of topics that Klout says I’m influential about (i.e., business and communications). Well, thank goodness, that makes sense. Klout also tells me whom in particular I influence. I won’t share that list with you, but let me just say it’s pretty cool to see who reads your stuff, “retweets” your comments and “likes” your commentary. It feels a little weird to know so much about how you virtually operate in the social network universe. Plus, to summarize all of that activity with one number seems a little absurd.

I understand that Klout’s next logical move is to partner with retailers, which then offer special discounts to highly influential people. Imagine a luxury watch company offering 50 per cent off to a high-Klout-score individual who promotes the brand. So, we might see different prices for the same product on Amazon’s website based on your Klout score. Now I see where this is going.

I recall some time ago when we had a similar debate about one’s credit score. Everyone cried, “How can you come up with a single numerical expression of a person’s credit worthiness?” Well, we did, and refined it over time, and now everyone pretty much accepts the methodology. Perhaps this will happen with Klout, too. Maybe, maybe not. I think that being influential is something you can’t artificially manage. Either people listen to what you have to say or they don’t. If, as Klout recommends, you have to ask certain people to “retweet” what you said in order to boost your score, well then you clearly aren’t influential at all.