My Klout Score is Zero.

I Don’t Even Exist.

Until a few weeks ago, I didn’t know what a Klout Score was.  I wasn’t even quite sure what Tweeting and Twitter meant.   Then my son handed me an article in Wired magazine by Seth Stevenson titled “What Your Klout Score Really Means.”  

http://www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_klout/all/

Stevenson explained that those who Tweet are given a score (on a scale from 1 to 100) that is designed to indicate the “online influence” of the little messages they send based on friends, likes, retweets, etc. Klout scores are not optional.  You Tweet, you get scored.  (Actually it is possible, though very, very difficult, to delete one’s Klout score, according to the article.) 

An example of a high Klout-scorer: Calvin Lee is a graphic designer in Los Angeles with a Klout score of 74. He has received 63 Klout perks, scoring freebies like a Windows phone, an invitation to a VH1 awards show, and a promotional hoodie for the movie Contraband. To keep his score up, Lee tweets up to 45 times a day—an average of one every 32 minutes. “People like food porn,” he notes, “so I try to post a lot of pictures of things I eat.”  

Yikes! Big Brother is watching us and rewarding chatterboxes with freebie flotsam and jetsom. 

I have never Tweeted.  I’m not interested in Tweeting, especially now that I’ve read about Klout. 

My favorite paragraph in the article was the last in which the author describes his Tweet study: “Over time, I found my eyes drifting to tweets from folks with the lowest Klout scores. They talked about things nobody else was talking about. Sitcoms in Haiti. Quirky museum exhibits. Strange movie-theater lobby cards from the 1970s. The un-Kloutiest’s thoughts, jokes, and bubbles of honest emotion felt rawer, more authentic, and blissfully oblivious to the herd. Like unloved TV shows, these people had low Nielsen ratings—no brand would ever bother to advertise on their channels. And yet, these were the people I paid the most attention to. They were unique and genuine. That may not matter to marketers, and it may not win them much Klout. But it makes them a lot more interesting.”

My Klout score is zero. I don’t even exist. That’s the group I want to be in!