<see my newest Klout post: Killing Klout for an update on this continuing story.>

When a new system for social media comes out, I'm pretty slow on the uptake. Klout has been around for a bit, but I wasn't really intrigued until the topic started showing up in conversations.

Quick tip: Know your Klout score. Love it. Influence it by being a real participant. Respect the Klout.

There is no question, managing and improving your social media reputation (sometimes called authority) is a hard piece of social media puzzle. You can post like hell. You can LIKE everything and every company in sight. You can Tweet your ass off. And still your "authority" is only as good as your current job, or publication, or speaking engagement. Some of this is about to change, IMHO, with the next generation of "influence" measurement and reporting. KLOUT.

Here is what my initial Klout dashboard looks like.

Extracting a few of my top connections from Twitter, Klout has assigned me a few key topics, social media (check), austin (check), blogging (check).

Here's an interesting part of Klout's scoring, the Network Influence graph:

There are some deeper analytics of your Tweeting influence deeper inside Klout. But the chart above gives some examples of things that factor in on your score. Unique mentions, Unique Retweeters, Unique Commenters, are all quite interesting to me.

And then Klout puts your influence style in a matrix along with some of your associates.

And finally, the piece that I think will bring Klout above the noise of "me too" influence apps. The browser plug-in. Once added to my Chrome browser (there's a Firefox version too) the Tweeters Klout scores are reported next to their image.

In the process of Twitter discovery (finding new people to follow) I believe the K-score is going to be a huge help. The spammers and pornsters on Twitter won't be able to build up a K-score at all. And those of us working within the boundaries should see our influence and the influence of our influencers increase.

Let's hope Klout keeps the gaming opportunities to a minimum. What we do need now is another clean social media measuring stick that can guide us toward the  gold and away from the chafe.

@jmacofearth
permalink:  http://uber.la/2011/06/klout/

The Disciplines of Social Media:

• The 10th Discipline of Social Media; Socializing Your Content Effectively 
• The 9th Discipline of Social Media: Listening. Building Your Social Media Dashboard
• The 8th Discipline of Social Media; Tagging with Delicious, ReFinding Your Links
• The 7th Discipline of Social Media; KLOUT, the New Measure of Influence
• The 6th Discipline of Social Media: Slideshare Is Great for Marketing
• The 5th Discipline of Social Media; Story, Voice, and Connective Threads
• The First 4 Disciplines of Social Media: Google Analytics, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter

Check out your Klout score.

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