Nobody Gives A Damn About Your Klout Score
Remember that time that astrologers decided that they had gotten all the zodiac signs off by one, and everyone was so bewildered because all of a sudden you were NO LONGER AN ARIES BUT A PISCES and it seemed like everything you had believed for so long was untrue.
Context & Ripple Effects
Klout spent early 2011 pushing its score into everyday browsing: a Chrome extension that surfaces Klout scores right on the Twitter timeline made influence ratings unavoidable for anyone reading tweets. This TechCrunch column is the backlash arriving on schedule — and its spread the same day to GigaOM ('Should you care how high your Klout score is?') and Marshall Kirkpatrick's defense of why Klout is 'really and truly valuable' shows the argument is no longer niche: the score's legitimacy is now openly contested across outlets.
The stakes are distribution and belief. A metric only works as social currency if people accept the number, and the same-week split between skeptics and believers suggests Klout's growth strategy — visibility everywhere — is also what exposes the score to ridicule.
First-order effects
- Klout's push to embed scores in the Twitter timeline via its Chrome extension now runs against a public-relations headwind: the more visible the number, the more people argue nobody cares about it.
- Commentators are splitting into camps the same week — GigaOM questioning whether the score matters at all while Marshall Kirkpatrick argues for its real value — turning Klout's methodology into a public debate rather than settled infrastructure.
Second-order effects
- Rival influence-scoring services inherit the same credibility test by association: if users decide one opaque influence number is arbitrary, every competitor's score gets judged by the same standard.
- Klout faces pressure to justify what the score actually measures; a metric dismissed as astrology-flavored (the column's zodiac framing) loses the perk-and-perks ecosystem that depends on users treating high scores as status.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, influence scoring survives only where the number maps to something buyers and audiences independently verify — otherwise such scores drift toward novelty, and the market consolidates around whichever provider can prove real-world correlation rather than assert it.
The trend: Social influence metrics are moving from novelty to contested commodity, with each provider's legitimacy — not its reach — becoming the deciding battleground.