You have friends but does Klout matter?

THE COMPANY is valued at around $200 million, it recently raised $30 million in series C venture capital funding, and it’s all about you.

But what is Klout.com, and should you be paying attention? Klout creates a score based on an individual’s influence in social media. People who score highly – based on their number of connections, retweets, comments, Facebook “likes”, and so on – may then access perks that have been established with company and brand partnerships depending on their location and general, well, clout.

By signing into the website, a profile is automatically created. Klout now has 100 million user profiles online.

So why is so much money flowing into the company, and what is its use exactly? Klout aims to help companies capitalise on the online authorities that they might be missing offline.

“Cool hunting” typified marketing in the 1990s, and Klout hopes to act as the successor to that school of influence. Peer recommendations are considered to far outweigh ads in terms of trust online, so if people talk about the perks they get, it should see its profile numbers soar.

But Klout has its critics. Apart from its functionality falling down, with some scores inaccurately reflecting how influential or not someone is, there’s also the problem of judging people based on how they interact, and how those interactions are amplified online, especially when the only perk seems to be some free merchandise from a company keen to cash in on cool.

The idea of ranking people and ascribing a score to someone’s online presence is also hard to digest, a crude shorthand for how much someone is worth targeting. Klout is still some distance from becoming a standard for measuring online influence, but its funders seem to think that it’s well on the way.