If you are not familiar with Klout, it is a service that attempts to define your impact on the web. For a free service, it does a relatively good job but at the same time, when companies give away products based on your Klout, we have a problem.
A few months ago, Microsoft gave away Windows Phones to those who have a high Klout score. There is no issue with attempting to give away products based on your Klout, but when the service is easily manipulated, you can understand that giving away products based solely on the score could be misguided.
Klout is based around your impact, how your content is shared and other indicators. After reading around the web what people truly thought impacted Klout, a few experiments were put in place to test the reality of what actually impacts Klout. A few of the tests conducted included not retweeting for a week, tweeting only links for a week, sticking to one topic for a week and other variants on these ideas.
What did we learn about these several experiments that we ran? Klout is about consistency, not about influence. Need proof? We were able to successfully boost our Klout score nearly overnight once we were able to target specific metrics. By a simple combination of targeting retweets, sharing targeted content and only mentioning certain products, you can see the results above. The model we used was not complex but simply observed the trends from the experiments we performed and then we blitzed Twitter with our findings; the results speak for themselves.
What does this mean? It means that Klout is far from a true measure of impact but it is more about consistency. Klout does have value, don't get us wrong, but just be careful what you use it for. Klout is purely about consistency which, at the end of the day, could be called influence but be aware that it is easily manipulated once you understand how it operates.
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