Klout: How influential do you think you really are? Klout will tell you...

How influential do you really think you are? You know what they say...sometimes it's not so much what you know as who you know. Klout works along those lines. It is a social analytical business tool that tracks the impact that your messages make and also analyzes your friendships and professional connections and your influence on them. Klout is an app that's all about personal publishing analytics and understanding the impact of your messages.

In this day and age many of our friendships and professional connections have moved online making it possible to make the influences that you put out there measurable for the first time in history. You influence others when you convince your friends to go see a movie, share your favorite YouTube video, or start a discussion about the upcoming election. Basically, every time you create content or recommend, share files and engage in some form of discourse with others online you have some influence on them and have an impact on their life in someway. Klout has found a formula to rate that influence and impact on a scale of 1 to 100. 

The Klout Score uses data from social networks in order to measure how many people you influence, how much you influence them and the influence of your network. By filtering out spam and bots and focussing on the people who are acting on your content Klout analyzes what effect you have on others when you post a message and whether people tend to respond to or share your content. The more they spread it to their influential friends the more your score rises.

Klout helps you understand your influence and how to leverage it. Whether you are trying to convince people to go see the latest Whit Stillman film or having a political opinion or recommending a product you can gear things in the right direction with some influential content spreading. If you are an influencer and are the type of person that people look to when purchasing a new product you can use your influence to guide them into buying the Mac rather than the PC. But funnily enough, the most telling comment about Klout came from the New York Times. Their columnist claimed that progressive businesses will use Klout as a recruitment tool because they naturally want to hire salesmen who have some influence on others-and this is the perfect place to find those people. Klout could well be giving us a glimpse of the future of social networking.