I’ve been kvetching about Klout for a few months. I blogged about it in June, complaining that the social media measurement company turns people into numbers. And then, when the company changed the way they measure people’s online influence, I had another hack (at a site called The Nervous Breakdown, in the technology section).
The same week, the mainstream media got in on the action. The New York Times picked up one of the stories I mentioned, about a woman whose children were assigned Klout profiles, without their knowledge or consent.
Salon.com ran a piece called “Klout is bad for your soul,” by a grad student studying social media, which made many of the same points (though I dragged out Michel Foucault to make my points … who’s sounding more grad-schooly now, eh?)
Anyhow. Turns out some of this backlash is making a difference. You CAN opt out of Klout, though if you’re on Twitter and/or Facebook, you should also update your privacy settings to disallow Klout access to those accounts (here’s how).
But once all that is said and done, know what you get? You get a really satisfying result (this is from Hootsuite):
Great post! Yes, I’ve been wondering about Klout…It’s definitely a numbers game – worse than Twitter which can be bad too since for many people the only objective is to reach as high a number of followers as possible (and in doing so they forget to stop and interact with their followers…)