Does "Social Media Influence" Matter

Go to the website klout.com and see what your "score" is. That's right, Klout, a social media influence website, has set up a way to score how well you influence others through your social media outlets. This includes number of followers on Twitter, likes on Facebook, retweets, comments, shares, etc. You can link up your other social media accounts (LinkedIn, Youtube, Google+, etc), but these do not have as much influence as Facebook and Twitter yet. Users have a number of "topics" that they can be influential in/ These are determined by Klout or by the user. Users can then vote on the influence of others by giving them "+K's" in certain topics. These can help lead to score increases, both to the reciever and the giver. Does having a high score matter? Some people argue yes. For example, from personal experience, I applied for an online marketing job and they asked me what my Klout score was (at the time of this blog post, it is 63). Klout has a number of perks you can unlock depending on your score and what you are influential in. Finally, it can fuel competition with friends and give someone bragging rights. But how much can truly be determined by an online algorithm? It is a starting point, but not everything. A downside to it is that quite a bit of the influence is determined by how often you use Klout. For example, I did a comparison of my score to scores of people I learned how to utilize social media from. My score is 63. Neil Hair, one of the faces of the Saunders College, has a 44. Mike Johansson, my "Social Media and Public Relations" professor, has a score of 68, only five points higher than me. Both of those individuals are much more of an influence than I am. In conclusion, in my opinion, influence cannot be simply determined through a score online. It can be a good start to digging deeper into it, but if you want to make a profound impact on the world, take it outside of the computer. Say and act like what you tweet.