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Photo Credit: David Elfanbaum on Flickr

Since Virgin Atlantic Airlines started to give flights away to online influencers, my perception is that people on Twitter have become obsessed with their Klout scores. I do understand that we all want to be influential in our social circles and have our key messages noticed by our audience. Last week, when I believed that my Klout was 7, I had a very defensive reaction to being rated by the website. However, after a long conversation with a friend about the pros and cons of Klout, I decided to pay the website a second visit and sign up for the service.

I believe that having a website telling you how influential you are can be great for your ego, but shouldn’t you know it already? Why are we (social networks users, marketers, companies) giving so much power to an algorithm? I know it’s based on the same old google search science, but should we really trust a tool that allow a social media campaign based on very old school concepts achieve one of the highest Klout rates with an imaginary man?

Please, don’t get me wrong. As a marketer I love the fact that we have another free tool to measure our online campaigns. I do believe that klout.com is allowing us to easily identify the key community influencers and sort out the spammers from the real people. However, I can’t get over the fact that the people who really influence my opinions have low Klout scores or that some celebrities have high scores when they don’t actually engage with their audiences. It seems that all that we’ve been studying and exploring on Twitter, Facebook, etc is a lie, since we all embrace another measurement tool to please clients who require numbers to justify our pay checks.

Call me crazy, but all this Klout hysteria brought me back to the old competition between marketing and sales departments. Yes, at the end of the day we all want our client/company/non-profit to succeed, but what do we actually want to create? Short-term sales or brand awareness?