Klout is going to make me crazy, I can tell already.Well, crazier. It’s like going on a diet and stepping on the scale 3 times a day (yes, I’ve done that). Worse, it lends itself to comparison with others, which might be the only thing less healthy than chronically measuring yourself.
Klout uses data collected from social media sites (Twitter & Facebook) to measure your online influence. There’s more intelligence to the algorithm than simply counting followers. That said, I’m not sure I fully understand the intelligence behind the algorithm and I definitely don’t know how to explicitly affect my score. After a day of heavy Twitter engagement I woke to the alarming message that I’d lost a point IN ONE DAY! Then after a couple of days of significantly less engagement, I regained that point. Then, this morning, I lost another point IN JUST ONE DAY! Except, weirdly, my score was 3 points higher than the day before.
It was like the scale had shifted by 3 points. It also seems that my efforts to improve my score, regardless of the scale, are not necessarily netting a positive outcome. NOTE: The score was stable before I started paying attention.
Another feature: Klout lets you instantly compare trends with others. Yep, that’s right. “Here’s how you stack up, baby.” So it’s bad enough I can’t figure out how to improve my own score independently, now I can also fret about how to improve my relative score.
Recently, the lovely @kat1124 retweeted a link to a Fortune article (I think the original tweet was via Harvard Business Review, but that’s beside the point). The article is about how we damage ourselves when we start comparing our performance and success, or lack thereof with others’ successes. The focus of the article is on careers and corporate ladders, but I’m applying the lessons to my desire to establish a PLATFORM, or an effective launch pad for my career as an author. I know it’s important to build a tribe and to demonstrate my ability to self-market, but I am feeling ill-equipped to manage this.
What I do believe is that for now, my focus needs to be on writing, publishing, communicating, and trusting God. If I’m truly on a path of His plan for me, then all I can do is keep walking in faith; relying on Klout to get there will just make me crazy(-er).
Do you compare your follower count with others? Is it healthy to do so?
