Klout

What is Klout?
Klout is basically a tool to build influence. For decades we've relied on radio announcers, TV hosts, and traditional media to shape our opinions about things. Today, we can create and drive the conversation, voice our opinion, and connect with people all over the world using social media. Influence is the ability to drive action.

Oprah is a great example of an influencer; what she says goes! Her influence inspires millions to read titles from her book club and buy products she features on her show. Likewise, as PR and marketing people, one of our primary motives is to create an influential brand, product, or service. Klout helps us do that. Klout doesn't actually make you influential, it simply calculates how influential you are with some fancy algorithms, shows you this data and lets you know on what social networks you're most influential on, which ones need work, and it connects you to other influencers and people specifically influential in your area of interest.

How does it work?
As mentioned, influence is the ability to drive action. The more influential you are, the higher your Klout score. The Klout score measures your influence based on your ability to drive action. So when you sign up with Klout, it allows you to add all of your social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Foursquare, Tumblr, Wordpress, LinkedIn, YouTube - all of those and more! And it takes all of these networks and accumulates them based on your actions, what you talk about, and how people are reacting; are they liking it, commenting, and sharing? And it also takes real-world data from places like Bing and Wikipedia (if you're famous enough to have a Wikipedia page, of course), and it creates a score from 1 to 100 based on your social influence.


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