douglasmkelly's posterous

I attended (and moderated) an aimWest event this past week. I'm writing a future post about the event topic: the Filter Bubble. It was an awesome event! More on that to come, but this post is on Klout. Klout.com was discussed a little at the monthly aimWest - but more importantly "Have you quit Klout yet?" was the theme of that discourse. Klout is a site that presumes to measure your social media influence. You wind in your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and WordPress IDs for tracking. Those of you that only use Posterous, you're out of luck. Klout only measures from WordPress and Blogger. Also, none of you on Android cells with other social picture sharing apps can increase your Klout - only we iPhone users that have Instagram get the bump. Nice, huh?

So why would you want to quit? Why wouldn't you? is the better question. I know, I know, we humans want to measure and score everything. We like competition. But does Klout really do that for you? For one thing Klout keeps changing their algorithm, stating that the changes will make things more even - more realistic. After the last change, however, Klout's CEO feared (publicly) that he may have made a mistake. I think monetizing people's clout in Social Media was the first mistake, personally. But seriously, did your Klout "score" actually make you want to better engage your audience? Did it change you? Did you tweet more? Did you use Facebook better? Did you actually influence more people?

I believe true influence is noticed on and off line. A friend coined the term "Meat Space" (or at least started using it) a while back. It means to meet in 3-dimensional space - actually pressing the flesh. Touching the meat of someone by shaking their hand, patting them on the back, and interacting in person. To me, you influence someone by receiving a reaction or at least an action. You can see their reaction in person. You can tell you've influenced someone if they take action - like signing that contract. Klout doesn't measure your offline influence. 

I did partake in the Klout.com phenomena for a while. But I never really understood why I should care? Other than measuring myself against others - in that same competitive way that everyone else liked about it - why use it? If any of you can give me a valid reason, I'd possibly consider joining Klout again. Until then, I'm going to use Google Analytics and link shortners to track hits and clicks to my blog, site and other websites. I am going to measure my clout by getting new customers or perhaps new members to aimWest. I quit Klout. If you want to quit too but can no longer find the opt out, do this:

Klout disconnected the link between "profile settings" and "delete your account".  The removed function is now pushed to the very end of the "privacy" policy page which you can only access through a text link at the bottom of your "profile settings" page.

Last week a virtual friend sent me this "Hey what's with this post about you" Twitter Direct Message. I actually clicked the link, as I had believed there might be some bad feelings in the local area about my company. Of course I'm not telling you why - suffice it to say a competitor may not like my firm for some strange reason. So Google Chrome saved me from going to that site. w00t! Today two friends' twitter accounts were hacked. They're both very Social Media savvy.

I also received a call today from a lady who clicked the spammer's DM link and got through to that site. Lucky she didn't fill out the form that was there. I DON'T LIKE SPAM! This kind of spam is the worst kind. It plays on your emotions and draws you in - then steals your identity. The viagra spam emails never trick me - I'm not 60. I don't know why they continue to find their way to my inbox. But this new Twitter DMing is a little scary.

Here's one way to not get hacked: Only use https://twitter.com. Its the secure version. In fact, only go to sites that have a security seal or SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certification when in a public wireless area. Facebook has one. My blog has one. The cert's not owned by me, and you might get an "Error" if you try, but it works and is legit. This is only really necessary if you are using open wifi. If you're in a coffee house and browsing the interwebs and log in, you can be "Sniffed" by a FireFox plugin (there are actual sniffing programs too) that can view all your open tabs, and gain access to your logged in sites. If you normally have Safari, FireFox or Chrome (or God forbid, IE) manage your passwords for sites where you have to log in, ensure that you remove this saving feature for non-https sites. That 's' means the site encrypts your virtual transactions, thereby making your password very hard to learn. 

If you get hacked - and you're a business - you need to contact all of your clients and apologize. Then you need to give them the name of a very good internet guru (or this blog post) - and say that even you can get hacked - and if they don't want to get their sites and accounts compromised, they need to get some security in place. Suffice it to say that a guru I use had his twitter account hacked a couple months ago. It can happen to anyone. If it ever happens to me, I'll be referring you back to this post.