Fighting for @Klout at MIT
I
learned a long time ago that the only way to earn your @Klout is to
walk up to the biggest dude on the block and stab his brain with his
nose bone.
But I
couldn't track down @Klout kings like @KanyeWest and @BarackObama, so
instead I went to hang with @Gregarious, who helps run the San
Francisco-based @Klout (which he describes as “CarFax for people”),
and who was at MIT buying rounds for Twitter geeks last night.
Heading
into the meet-up, I was extremely skeptical of @Klout as the leading
arbiter of Twitter worth. Or, to be more honest, I was straight
pissed that they inexplicably knocked my score down from 39 to 25 a
few months ago, and seemed intent on keeping me there.
We all
know how embarrassing it is to have a weak @Klout score. Not to
mention what a high score can do for a kid at the Palms Hotel in Las
Vegas.
Having handled similar complaints before, @Gregarious dutifully calmed my
nerves. Despite being one of the first @Klout employees, he assured
me that even he'd been docked in recent months (he's currently a 19).
Furthermore, the average @Klout score is 11, so neither of us are so
bad off after all.
I also
learned that I can get my score re-calibrated with a simple click on
Klout.com (on the bottom right of the home page after you sign in).
As it turns out, my current Klout is actually 30, which is hardly 39,
but is nonetheless an improvement from my curiously low 25 ranking.
In the
two-hour session, in which we were joined by, among others,
@Eric_Andersen (@Klout score: 67!), @Gregarious broke down the
evaluation system, and in the process enlightened the group to how
“you don't have to have expertise to be influential,” and on the
ever-contested subject of whether follower-following ratio matters
(kind of, but not really).
So
with that said – please be sure to follow me @FARA1. Some day a
brother's gonna have some serious @Klout up in this bitch.