Got Klout?

You learn something new every day. Like there's such a thing as a Klout score. You have one whether you know it or not, and most likely, it's down in the basement somewhere. It's a measurement of how well you are known, collected using social media. You're a zero? Probably, unless you Tweet a lot, which will give you at least a couple of points. Justin Bieber is 100. Then again, he has 18 million Twitter followers. I can't even come up with 18 million people that aren't following me! And not only is your Klout a number floating in air (and a mighty suspect one at that), the higher your number is, the more likely you'll start actually acquiring benefits, like room upgrades at casinos and discounts at retail stores.

I gotta get my number up!

Throughout our lives, we are tagged with scores, some of them far more crucial to our well-being than anything [Klout CEO Joe] Fernandez has handed out. Credit scores are maddeningly opaque and can be used against us in infinitely more harmful ways than a Klout score ever could. Our health records are used by huge organizations to segment and sift us behind closed doors. And yet there is something uniquely infuriating about the Klout score. “They’re calculating a Q score for everybody, and it turns out there’s a lot of emotion tied up in that,” [Rutgers adjunct marketing professor Mark] Schaefer says. And the fact that Klout users’ status is so explicitly linked to material gain makes it an even more freighted situation, he says. “This is the intersection of self-loathing with brand opportunity.”

Seth Stevenson explains it all at Wired: What Your Klout Score Really Means. Great. Something else to worry about.
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