A social networking innovation or a passing fad - time will tell? Is Klout you or me? Klout does seek to serve a purpose where perhaps some need exists – to measure the impact of individuals/institutions on issues, and other people/institutions over the vast geography of the internet. That is also Klout’s first substantive limitation/shortcoming: real clout is developed beyond the internet and perhaps in many instances this is where the roots of influence are established. Can Less be More? Being new media biased also has other shortcomings – more does not necessarily mean less. Being technically part of more social networking circles does not necessarily translate to real life influence. A certain reserve in interaction has been employed in past to project exclusivity, accurate or not. Sometimes not offering an opinion may still be best advice/view on subject where none is readily discernable to project influence/views on issues where one may have an insight or source. Clout/Klout should not be attributed to mere opinions uninformed or following stereotypes and clichés even if leading the herd. A “Klout” Coming Out? Klout though appears on the verge of establishing itself as a Web standard. We should anticipate a dynamic product rather than something that will be defined by today’s snapshot and limitations. More Internet savvy people than myself have committed/invested in Klout: At “Business Insider” a proven Internet icon David Pakman (venture capital investor/blogger – “David Pakman Blog”) offers the following observations: ---“As the internet moves from pages to people, Joe Fernandez‘s (Klout Chief) vision of the need for “Pagerank for People” is spot on. Klout’s algorithms score the actual influence of people as they share on the social web. They attempt to measure your influence by observing interactions on the social web. As we all work to build and manage our online identity and profile, Klout helps measure our reach and topics of influence. In every other mass media, measurement provides a benefit to the advertisers who subsidize that media. Large companies have emerged based on, frankly, less than perfect measurements systems. In TV and radio, panel-based inference measurement somehow have passed as a legitimate way for advertisers to make decisions on where to spend billions in advertising. These incumbent measurement firms became standards for measurement within their domains. Klout has the benefit of being able to measure actual data, not inferred data. They aim to score the entire social web. They currently have scored more than 300 million users and are scoring and re-scoring a mind-boggling amount every day. With more than one billion people on the social web today, they are by no means complete. Nor are their algorithms perfected. Just as Google changes their PageRank algorithms hundreds of times a year, Klout will evolve their data science as the social web changes to provide the most accurate influence scoring on the web.Klout has the distinction of being one of the few companies whose monetization plans actually benefit its users.” Read more: www.businessinsider.com/why-i-invested-in-klout-2012-1#ixzz1jS9wZdbN Does Justin Bieber Really Have More Klout Than Barak Obama? Justine Bieber has a Klout score of 100, highest possible, and there are at least another 15 Justin Bieber related sites. President Barack Obama by comparison is 87 – a bit of a difficult score to translate into real life impact. Justin Bieber may have more individuals, probably mostly teens minding his every tweet, but the real life consequences of President Obama’s actions are considerably more profound, even when he does not share over Facebook or Twitter. Cher is 72 and the United Nations is 73. You get the point. Regardless, Klout is both new and dynamic. No reason to beat it down. It will either prove to be worthy of our attention or will fade away or be supplemented by a more accurate/clever measure of clout. In the meantime, I will not change much about the way I interact on the web. Most of what I’m authoring/editing on Diplomatically Incorrect reaches the social media through Susan Sacirbey (& Diplomatically Incorrect), her Klout score is 48 (after only a week) - klout.com/#/2_798003150. “Muhamed Sacirbey” is at a measly 17 - klout.com/#/MuhamedSacirbey. That’s OK - the UN Secretary General is at 50 and his Spokesperson is at 52. That’s Klout those who engage more directly over social media are higher, even if faceless. I just wish I could be like Cher, social media speaking By Ambassador Muhamed Sacirbey Twitter to Follow mo – MuhamedSacirbey Facebook = Become a Fan at “Diplomatically Incorrect” Twitter – Follow us at DiplomaticallyX