Management 3.0: To Klout or not to Klout??
[…]Last spring Sam Fiorella was recruited for a VP position at a large Toronto marketing agency. With 15 years of experience consulting for major brands like AOL, Ford, and Kraft, Fiorella felt confident in his qualifications. But midway through the interview, he was caught off guard when his interviewer asked him for his Klout score. Fiorella hesitated awkwardly before confessing that he had no idea what a Klout score was.[…]
With all the buzz about social media, and personal branding, one comes inevitably to the issue of his own Klout score. But what is Klout, and how does it work?
Klout is a measurement tool that allows you to connect your social networks and determine how influential you are. The more likes, retweets, shares, comments, the more your score goes up. It has absolutely no value as far as the quality of contents is concerned (the perfect score of100 is owned by Justin Bieber who has a whooping 18 million followers on twitter), merely a measure of your reach, and moreover of how engaging you are. How much people interact with you and so, how much you are influential.
And now, with the accrued interest from organizations to leverage on their Executives’ network in order to gain exposure and ultimately lead to new customers, this score is becoming of importance. It allows a professional to demonstrate how invested he is in the ecosystem, and because to gain exposure one has to publish digital content, only quality content will surface on the ocean of information that circulates daily. By quality, I mean content which demonstrates a clear knowledge of important trends, provides concise and usable information, elaborated in a spreadable friendly way.
This type of content will be shared and have a life span of its own, which in turn will raise one’s Klout score… So can we consider Klout as an efficient way of assessing one’s capacity to deliver in a work environment? As far as being pertinent in personal marketing and branding is concerned, most certainly. But what about integration capacity? Business operational acumen? Capacity to adapt? Certainly not…
Having said that, it is undeniable that for some positions, being influential in the digital world can be of importance. More specifically in Marketing and Communication, but also in Sales, Training, Coaching, or even for top Executives in other areas. They share credibility and influence with their organization, and it mutually benefits them.
So, take you Klout score into consideration when it comes to raise your visibility and overall credibility. But do not forget that obtaining a job is also a matter of operational competences. If for all the efforts deployed to gaining a better score there is no payback, then what is the point? One has to leverage on his personal branding, getting a score for the sake of it never helped anyone. It is the way to build up that score that matters…. And if you should bring your influence to an organization, you should also consider ways to leverage on theirs for your personal benefit.
