I’m not analytical by nature, I’m more of an instinctive and intuitive type of person. But most of my training in school and my entire first career were all analytical in nature, creating in me a strange combination of analytical and artistic.

So I probably spend more time on numbers, structure and finding the right way to frame a situation than most of my artistic peers. It’s a blessing and a curse. But it can reveal some interesting insights and perspectives on how to solve problems as a creative person in a fast changing environment.

Therefore, I was intrigued when I recently stumbled upon Klout.com, though it is somewhat known among the more digitally literate circles. Klout measures one’s level of influence in the social media world. I’m not sure if this tool is actually useful, or just fun under the guise of useful (dangerous from a time management standpoint). Nevertheless, it can be an interesting way to frame what is valuable in an online presence.

Klout starts by automatically connecting and evaluating everyone’s twitter presence — you can look up anyone’s Klout rating. From there it determines an overall score which aggregates many smaller factors, creating a much deeper and more revealing glimpse of one’s online influence than a mere “follower” count.

First, it measures “true followers” by eliminating inactive and spam accounts from the measured list. Then it further factors in how influential one’s followers are, how often they refer to the person being measured (indicating the strength of the followers to the followee), how often that person is retweeted and how effective the person is at getting a message to move through the echo chamber (or how valuable a person’s contributions are to the greater audience). It measures the kinds of tweets one makes — assessing whether one tends to share interesting finds or create original content, and whether the topic range is specialized or broad.

If you link your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, it factors that in too. In addition to the larger audience and the broader reach of one’s following, the Facebook component also measures the influence level of the audience, and the frequency with which one’s posts generate “likes” and comments. All of this is then rolled into the overall score. Kind of interesting.

So is there any value here? Well it identifies weak areas if one is trying to be more effective at social communication.  I discovered I have a more active interaction on Facebook than on Twitter. This makes sense since I have very little overlap between the two audiences on each platform, with Facebook being more friends and people I know more closely, and Twitter being people I tend not to know but have common professional or artistic interests.

But there are other potential uses for the information Klout provides. It helps one identify influential people in areas of interest. It can identify interesting leads and “go deeper” links to posts for those who want to explore a topic further. This is what I love most about social networks, its ability to screen the vast amount of information online and filter what is most likely to be of interest to a given reader. The key to this is “following” or “friending” people whose taste, judgment, and perspective you respect.

Klout also identifies who is most influenced by you, and who you are most influenced by. It will list your Facebook interests and identify who are the most influential people in each of those topics or categories.

Again, not sure if it’s just fun or actually useful, but seems to have some potential.

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