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Social Media

Klout is here to help…itself

It’s been more than a little while since I heard anyone seriously suggest that a Klout score is a good way to measure the influence someone carries in the online – or offline – world. That either means more people have wizened up or Klout’s clout is on the wain.

But Klout is here and wants to make sure people are still actively paying attention to and wanting to raise their score. That’s why they’re dipping their toes into encouraging content creation on-domain. Klout wants to suggest posts that it has determined will resonate with your social media audience therefore positively impact your influence ranking on the site.

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It’s not a bad idea, particularly if you’re Klout. First, this is going to appeal to the kind of narcissistic personality that actively monitors their score on the site. Second it’s only going to work by visiting and working within Klout’s own site, solving the stickiness problem that has been around for a while now. There’s nothing that’s really gone on on the site, and this could be something that encourages more regular visits, a behavior that may be foreign to many. The only previous reason to do so was to “+K” someone in your network, or affirm their clout/influence status on a particular topic.

It may sound like I’m ragging on Klout more than I need to, which isn’t my intent. This is a smart move for them and I’m sure plenty of people will take advantage of the suggestions the service feeds them and continue to grow their networks of influence as a result. But the benefits for Klout outweigh those to the individual, especially if my guess is right and this is the precursor to some sort of sponsorship or advertising deal that will be available on Klout’s site since that would be a huge reason for them to incentivize on-domain behavior.

But this is also solely about unidirectional publishing. If someone is posting from Klout they’ll have to go somewhere else – Twitter.com, Tweetdeck, Facebook, whatever – in order to interact. So it’s still a clunky process, geared more toward the shouter than the talker. That will be the next bridge they have to cross.

LATER UPDATE: ClickZ reports that there’s a native advertising angle in play that I’m kicking myself for not having thought of on my own. Basically Klout worked with a handful of consumer brands, who were allowed to insert their own suggestions into people’s feeds, prompting them to write about a product or whatever in their own words. That’s exactly the sort of monetization I was expecting to see from this kind of move since the only reason to encourage people into more on-domain activity is if you’re going to make money off that activity in some way.