How’s your Klout score looking today?? Are YOU making too much Social Media noise??

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Brian Solis and other influencers of mine according to Klout

A day on the road, a little Social Media noise reduction and my Klout score takes a tumble!

What is going on here??

A good friend recently suggested that I send too many Tweets during the course of a day, so I decided to analyse not only my Tweeting habits, but also my general Social Media connectivity.  I wanted to look at my connectivity activity!

Of course, I can cope with a little technology or I wouldn’t live in the Social Media world and I wouldn’t have this Blog, but I am NOT super or even uber technical.  My strengths are more about being creative and dealing with people and communication; I generally leave the technical stuff to those that really understand it and enjoy it.  Each to their own, right?

Despite having always been a fairly noisy person with definite extrovert tendencies, I am also sensitive enough to be aware that too much Social Media noise is an issue.  I must confess to recently noticing a fellow marketing professional (Hi Pritesh) stating that Twitter and LinkedIn were not compatible in his view.  I did spend a couple of seconds wondering if his sentiment was correct, maybe ‘Twitter and LinkedIn were too very different beasts?’

My friend’s comments, combined with my fellow marketers Twitter and LinkedIn connectivity comments and my own concerns with Social Media noise left me with little choice.

So, prior to hitting the road for the day, I decided to do ‘the right thing’ and adjust some of my inter-connectivity and disconnected my Twitter account from my LinkedIn, Posterous and YouTube accounts.  When I’m relaxing on YouTube and liking some (Social Media) related sights and sounds and happily clicking LIKE with a little weekend abandon, I don’t really need every single action to be Tweeted to all my ‘followers’, do I?  Not really, they’re not interested, it’s not as though I’m posting some amazing news from the Social Media Examiner or Mashable or announcing more major changes to Facebook Groups.  The same with Posterous and LinkedIn, do people on LinkedIn really care about my recent conversation recently with The Marketing Assassin (Hi Rene) about the standards of contemporary Scalextric and the fact that mine, from circa 1967, is probably still in my dad’s loft.  Probably not!

So it was done, a little connectivity tampering on my Twitter account, a little ‘revoking’ and that was that.  From that moment on, I was determined to only be connected to a mere 59 Twitter connections (That’s connections, NOT ‘followers’.).

Social Media casualty?

I didn’t expect to lose nearly 15% of my Klout score from 58 to 51 in a day? Impossible?!

Maybe we should examine Klout’s methods?

About Klout’s Influence Matrix

The Klout Classification is a holistic look at your influence and how you use it. There are 16 possible classifications determined by factors such as how often you tweet, who you follow, who follows you, and how your audience interacts with your messages. Your Klout Class is like a personality test for your style of influence.

Your influence network shows who you influence and who influences you. Influence is determined by a variety of factors including retweets, @messages, follows, and lists.

I must explain that it has taken me months to improve my Klout score, OK, I’m not quite up there with Brian Solis, but I considered nearly 58 points pretty decent.  The fact that I spend a very substantial part of my life in front of my screens, quite happily engaging with people via various Social Media platforms seemed to justify my score.

I can’t NOT visit my clients despite loving Skype and what it offers; my business demands that I do occasionally and anyway, I like my clients, it’s good to see them and talk business.

So what’s the answer?  Don’t dare disconnect?  Keep up the Social Media noise at all costs?

Maybe I shouldn’t worry too much about my Klout score?  Maybe I should be happy my clients want to see me and discuss Social Media marketing and how it can help them. Maybe I should be delighted that people want to see me face to face and discuss ways to improve their business by cost effectively communicating their services and products and their brand.

Maybe, because Social Media is still growing and developing constantly, no one is right or wrong and we are dealing with a lot of grey areas at this time.  Maybe it’s all a question of connectivity, rather than quality right now and we’ll all become more discerning at a later date?

I’m not the only one to have pondered this subject. Here’s some Mashable comments from a Howard Greenstein article last year:

“Imagine a world where we can set up useful, personal filters that enable us to prioritize certain kinds of messages, especially if they come from specific people.  Xobni and Rapportive do some analysis based on people you e-mail frequently, and their connections to you in other networks.  Gist tries to tie your social graph from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail together, and rank the people you communicate with the most.

T.A. McCann, founder and CEO of Gist, told us that “Most of us have an inbox or three that are overwhelming, and the amount of personal communication is difficult to deal with … Most of us, irrespective of what stream we’re looking at, tend to look at it in chronological order. That might not be most effective — we should be looking at who is most important, and center the content around them. Gist is trying to help people prioritize by centering the information you get around the people or businesses you care about.”

“These third party tools are very useful, but they’re also limited by the amount of openness and connectivity provided by the networks to which they connect”.

This is the conclusion of a Mashable article on Social Media noise a while back:

“In the future we see the possibility of tools that enable us to see our “noise impact” on social media — similar in function to Klout, and others that show our online influence or sentiment. Social networks may also choose to give us feedback when people “mute” us or “dislike” what we’re posting, perhaps anonymously or in aggregate, similar to the way Facebook’s Insights for Pages show the number of people leaving every week.  This feedback, just like the sidetone on the old phones, may be just what we need to bring the volume down and allow us to make more sense of the social web.”

My own conclusion is that I’m the same Peter Masters with a Klout score of 51 as I was when my score was nearly 58, so what’s the real problem?  I’ve always maintained that Klout shouldn’t be taken too seriously as it’s a relatively new concept and bound to change as Social Media develops. (Look at Facebook’s continuous changes/development.)

So, maybe I should just relax, not take it personally or to heart and be pleased my clients want to see me and use my Social Media services to promote their companies!

Let’s just hope their decision to hire me wasn’t based on having a Klout score of over 57!

Factors measured by Klout to calculate your personal score: List inclusions, Follower/Follow Ratio, Followed Back %, Unique Senders, Unique Retweeters, Unique Commenters, Unique Likers, Influence of Followers, Influence of Retweeters and Mentioners, Influence of Friends, Influence of Likers and Commenters

If you want to know more about Social Media and how it can help market your company, services, products and brand, please call Peter on 01473 435308 or email peter@constructionmarketinguk.co.uk

www.constructionmarketinguk.co.uk

We build the builders!

Related articles

• My Klout Score is 19 – Social Media Explorer – Does it Really Matter [John Murray] (ecademy.com)
• Do you have Klout on Twitter? [René Power] (ecademy.com)
• Influence Scoring Platforms Duel for Relevance (clickz.com)
• Don’t Irk The Influencers: The Power of Klout (compete.com)