Beware of the Klout-Happy Prophets

Gathering steam during his presentation to industry peers, the speaker paused. "Why would we target all of our company's followers when Klout allows us to see who's most influential? That's why we're zeroing in on those with the higher Klout scores."

On the surface, this approach would seem to make sense. Why speak to the masses when you can zero in on audiences who can best amplify your message? Right? No, WRONG!

Blindly segmenting your followers (or targeted followers) solely based on Klout scores and insights is dangerous. Consider the following:

• A Klout score does not indicate a person's level of influence regarding a particular topic, although the tool tries to make sense of issues being discussed. If you're a commercial food products company, do you really care that Alicia has a 68 score when that's based on her expertise in scrapbooking?
• The "Influential About" categorization is still hit or miss. A person in my office recently mentioned how she was designated as a Seinfeld expert, yet that's among her least favorite shows of all time (nor did she ever remember mentioning Seinfeld in any of her posts).
• Users can somewhat manipulate their scores, linking only to social networks in which they've built a solid base of followers, while leaving others unlinked.
• Scores can fluctuate wildly. Case in point -- following a international teleseminar that I conducted for Ragan Communications last month, my score shot up by nearly 25 points. Why? Because I used Twitter to conduct Q&A over the course of a couple hours.

Don't get me wrong. Measuring influence and influencers is a step in the right direction for the communications and marketing professionals, and Klout provides a glimpse of what might be. That's fascinating, and we're in on the ground floor.

But at the same time, remember that Klout is a new tool that can be over-emphasized. As opposed to thinking about its scores in the absolute sense, use them as directional indicators worthy of more exploration.

And remember that no matter what Klout says, I am not influential about lambs (seriously, lambs... I'm still scratching my head on that one)!