Bieber is the reincarnated Elvis, but only when it comes to the popularity, he has not contributed anything valuable to the history of music. But he has many impersonators, which is amazing.

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He is not my cup of tea, musically, but I think he is talented and obviously has a winning personality. He seems to be handling his incredible fame quite well so far, so good for him. I don’t begrudge the young man his fame as long as it doesn’t start affecting my business efforts! : )

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Checked Justin Bieber’s verified account score and influence matrix, your score and Influence matrix and my group’s score and matrix and they all appear correct to me.

Not sure I get your issue with Klout Mark…

What {grow} blog have I missed reading?

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Great observation Mark! I always wondered why Klout would have me being influenced by the wrong Bieber? Looks like I’m going to have to re-think my strategy for becoming the next top model

Happy Tuesday

R

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Ouch. I am the CEO at Klout and there is no way to get around that this is embarrassing. We are working extremely hard on spam detection. It’s early in the game and we’ve got a long way to go. Thank you for making our team aware of this account. It’s being addressed now.

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These pictures are worth 10,000 words.

Terrific.

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Unfortunately — or maybe fortunately — my book only touches on the Twitter spam! Overall, Twitter has done a decent job stepping up to the spam that brought it to its knees in 2009. Klout is going to face the same thing. They need to zap the spam rapidly and NOW or they are going to be “Quora-ed” — overrun by bots and SEO gamesters. In business, it’s never good to become an adjective. Thanks for your comment Ray and I hop you enjoy my book!

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All good questions Tom. Nobody really knows the Klout algorithm but this example seems to blow apart any rational sense about what might make somebody influential. Thanks!

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Awesome Drew! Just wanted to try something different for a blog post. Shake it up a bit with something other than words! Glad it was interesting for folks and many thanks to Steve Farnsworth who sent this to me.

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How the hell does “he” have so many tweets?! Geez. Louise. I’m pretty pleased with how Joe Fernandez is responding to the blogosphere (he commented on Spin Sucks this morning, too). It’ll be interesting to see how/if they make changes based on all of this feedback.

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@Joe I could give you thousands of other examples of varying problems with your methods. I appreciate what klout is trying to achieve but right now it’s as dangerous as saying to someone to go drive the car with the brakes not working, but don’t worry were working on a fix, maybe by the time you get back

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A very rational view. Thank you!

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Love how companies like Klout are spending time listening and reading blog post and improving themselves. Hopefully more companies would spend more time following their footsteps.

As for the klout score.. I would say this made me miss twitter BB…………. BEFORE BIEBER… quote i stole from @unmarketing

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LOL Thanks Aaron!

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Thank you for clearing this up for me Mark!

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I would like to add we’re all getting worked up over an algorithm that calculates perceived influence that either already exists or does not. Online influence exists with or without Klout. There were online influencers before influence standards, before Bieber and even before Twitter. Klout is just one of the, if not the leading, forward-thinking companies attempting to standardize influence in a measurable way, and they should be applauded for the progress they’ve made.

We’re no less influential if Klout miscalculates our score or someone else’s – and we’re no more influential when it measures our influence “accurately”. We like numbers, data, fancy graphs and anything remotely referring to ourselves. I understand the desire to measure and improve online influence using Klout as a scale. I also understand the desire for accuracy from a marketing standpoint as no one wants to focus resources engaging the “wrong influencers”. That said, understand this is no more about Klout as it is our own abilities to interpret who or how we could or should be influencing and why.

We’re just as far away from confidently using Klout as we are from citing Quora as a source, but that doesn’t mean either company is wrong, nor should they be accused of wrongdoing, simply because we choose to reference them this early in their research and execution. That said, I’m a big Klout fan, excited for your growth and impressed by your engagement, Joe.

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slip and fall, slip and fall, climb ever the mountain though you slip and fall.
row hard and beat on, though borne back ceaselessly into the past
an instance of failure is not the all,
the emblem of trial is what will last.

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Wow, how cool is the comment by Joe Hernandez?!

Kudos, Joe!

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it ain’t the cough that carries you off, it it’s the coffin they carry you off in.

: )

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Have to agree with the premise of the post. I’ve seen Klout scores jump up and down and have blogged and tweeted my concern about it for a while. I do appreciate what the guys are trying to do and think that having technology that tries to understand the level of influence exerted through social media tools has to be a good thing.

But instead I see people like Kim Kardashian, Justin Bieber, Ryan Seacrest, AplusK and others with huge audiences, using Twitter instead of email and getting lots of retweets from people hungry to piggyback on their perceived ‘influence’ with the high scores. They don’t influence me, my brand choices or my buying decisions. It all seems so sycophantic.

Paul Flanigan makes some smart observations. If Klout was the finished article, we should be worried. Like I said there is a need, and there is promise.

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Great post, Mark. Joe Fernandez is not the problem and I admire the way he has responded to Klout criticisms. That said, as Shonali Burke mentioned in a recent post, Klout does market itself as “the standard for influence,” which is like calling the Kansas City Royals the standard for major league baseball success.

The biggest problem in the influencer conversation is lazy PR and marketing pros. Well, a couple of days ago I would have called them lazy. But lately I am seeing a second group of PR and marketing pros who get excited about social media, begin seeing the value in the conversations but are also persuaded by the ego stroke of a high Klout score. It’s that whole “I want to get an A or one more sticker on the sticker chart” mentality.

It is our job to continue conversations like these and make sure our peers do not take the easy way out. I challenge everyone to, as tactfully as possible, call out fellow communicators when they quote Klout score or any other quantitative metric as the stand-alone standard for influence. There is no such thing as universal influence. Write it on the board 100 times after class.

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The problem with Klout? Like most things in social media, it can be gamed. How? Notice some folks on Twitter suddenly getting terribly chatty with other users with mass followings? Prolonged conversations that should be taken to DM? Gaming underway. Spend some extra time on your follow/following ratio and you’ll get to boost your Klout score as well. When a service that can be gamed becomes the gold standard, real clout loses to gamed Klout.

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I certainly understand that emotion. But what happens when it matters to Nike? To Disney? To your customers? To your employer? The idea of public report cards is repugnant but I am also trying to approach this from a rational business perspective and that is, in life and in business we have to deal with the cards we’re dealt, not the cards we would wish for.

Thanks Jim — you speak for many people on this!

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I do not think Klout is really made for these type of account that are definitely off topic.
I would like to read a detail critic about Klout score of different type of “influencer” that are relevant.

I’d like to know if I can or not “pay attention” to my Klout score …

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Actually, I disagree. I think it is fairly easy to get rid of the empty accounts with a little attention to your follower list each day. There is a strong business case i think to bombing the bots as i explain here: Social scoring and the business case for blocking Twitter spammers http://bit.ly/fD59l

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I totally agree, Ed! Nice to bump into you on here. The comments are just as good as the blog post itself! So much to digest and think about…

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I think Klout will become like SEO — constnatly shifting and expense to keep up with. I think in the long term, we would be well-served to nurture a meaningful group of followers, provide great content and engage in a helpful way. I think the numbers will take care of themselves.

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Mark,

I realize I’m a bit late to this comment party, but I wanted to share another perspective on Klout scores and spam accounts like this. I think one reason this pattern occurs is due to the acceleration of followers: if accounts can gain a high number of followers in a very short period of time, this increases their perceived influence. It’s demand. Celebrities and newsmakers have this happen to them when the enter the social space (remember the furor over Charlie Sheen’s Twitter account?). What you observed is a combination of an effective spam operation that creates fake communities based on trending or popular topics attracting other fake accounts or rabid fans happy to share whatever they can get their digital mitts on.

It’s great that you pointed this out and I agree that it’s something that influence scoring algorithms will need to keep an eye on. Kudos to Joe Fernandez for the swift reply and honest admission in his comment.

All the best,

Mike Zavarello (@brightmatrix)

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