Who’s Got Klout and Why We Should (Or Shouldn’t) Care

The Wall Street Journal reflected on Klout.com last week in John Bussey’s column “The Business.” He was referencing a couple of books recently published including Mark Schaefer’s “Return on Influence: The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social Scoring, and Influence Marketing.”  (UPDATE: Klout Closed.)

I have been watching Klout.com myself and not just because I’m interested in my score (37 today, which doesn’t indicate much influence).  Fact is, Klout picks up and uses some data for my score that’s not correct and it makes me suspicious of all their results. However, the important questions for me as a marketer of professional services are what do Klout scores measure and are these measurements useful in marketing our firm?

My first and intuitive response is “nothing useful.” This is within the context of looking at Klout’s scores relating our lawyers and clients. Since Klout clearly says it is a measure of an action taken from the foundation of social media, and since our lawyers (and most clients) are not using social media to spark action, the scores are not going to be relevant.

Suppose, however, that we believe that social media has a certain influential power on reputation of our professionals (something I happen to believe and the reason a portion of our firm’s marketing concentrates in social utilities). That reputation is searchable on the internet and various sources provide validation of the positive (or negative) data. As social media expand and their data pages get ranked in search results, and as they become more self-influential (that is, users see them as important and relevant to validation of online data), the clear implication is that they will grow in importance.

Meaning that the scores become relevant to us because they are relevant to those who are scored. As word-of-mouth (still the number one way lawyer reputations are spread) transitions to online conversations, recognizing those within the contacts of a firm who are highly influential online through these social scoring sites may provide a hierarchy of messaging and priority of communication that get the highly influential involved in positive reputational transmission early in a campaign.

Should we care about these ratings or not?