Today I have looked at my Klout score. For those of you who do not know, Klout is a web service that offers a measure for your online influence. It gives you a score between 0 and 100, the higher the better. For some time my score was somewhere around 60. Today it dropped suddenly to 16.
I have started to look what happened. I’ve looked at my followers, retweets, @mentions and so on. No major change. I’ve looked at Klout twitter stream thinking that something was wrong or that they’ve changed the algorithm. No mention of any of these.
Then I looked at other people scores. I looked at @dmscott (David Meerman Scott, the author New Rules of Marketing and PR and Real-Time Marketing and PR). His score was down to 1. So according to Klout I was more influential than David.
Then I looked to @ChrisBrogan (Chris Brogan is the author of Trust Agents and Social Media 101). His score was 12 and again, according to Klout I ranked better.
I sought that this was my lucky day so I looked to @GaryVee (Gary Vaynerchuck is the author of Thank You Economy and Crush-It). But his score didn’t drop. It was 74 way above mine (16). And so ended my 10 minutes of internet glory.
And here is what I’ve learned from this little story:
1. Do not mistake the reality with numbers we use to describe it. Klout is just a way to measure influence. It’s not perfect but it is one of the best approximations to it. The score I had didn’t change me overnight, it didn’t make me a better person. I have the same influence as 2 days before. I have a stable audience but not so numerous as David Meerman Scott or Chris Brogan.
2. You may be lucky but it won’t last for long. My internet celebrity lasted for 10 minutes. According to Klout there was an error in one of the DB clusters. In order to have the influence of @dmscott, @chrisbrogan or @garyvee you need a lot of work and even writing a successful book.
3. You can become a celebrity overnight but you have to be prepared to handle it. I had no plan for what to do if I become famous. But now I have one and you should create one because otherwise you may loose the momentum. I was lucky enough to get 2 screenshots of my Klout score but that was it (photo 1, photo 2).
Photo credits: aafromaa
