Klout is about network influence and What they call True Reach

Network influence

Network Influence is the influence level of your engaged audience. Engagement is measured based on actions such as retweets, @messages, follows, lists, comments, and likes. Each time a person performs one of these actions it is a testament to the authority and the quality of your content. Capturing the attention of influencers is no easy task, and those who are able to do so are typically creating spectacular content.

True Reach

True Reach is the size of your engaged audience, eliminating inactive and spam accounts. Klout calculates influence for each individual relationship. For example, if you are followed by a person who follows 5,000 other people and you have never interacted with this person, share very few common friends, and generally don’t tweet about the same topics, it’s likely that the your tweets are barely seen by this person, and you probably have little to no influence over them. On the other hand, if a person takes the time to put the user on a Twitter list, it means they really value the content the user produces, and will increase the influence the user has over them.

Klout will break down all your different scores, but they do give you a Klout score which is your overall rating on Klout.

The Klout Score

measures your influence online based on data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and soon, other networks. Our philosophy is that influence is the ability to drive action so we focus on tangible indicators of influence like @ mentions, retweets, likes, and comments. Currently they use over 35 variables total and you can learn more at klout.com/kscore

Data Limitation

Scores are updated daily, but all scores are for past 30 days and no historical data is kept. This means your score is about what you are doing for the web lately.

What is +K?

+K allows you to share that someone has influenced you recently in a topic. Just go to their topics tab and click the +K button next to the relevant topic. Learn more.

Most of this information is right from the Klout Site. Unrelievedly, it was the best explanation I could find.  You can also find great info at: The Social Media Examiner http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/is-klout-a-good-judge-of-your-social-media-influence/

Starting with how many people follow you or like you or are connected to you, the social networking world has kept score, but now everyone wants to know what this all means.

Ok so I have built huge lists; Do they hear me or see my stuff. Is all the Facebooking, LinkingIn, Twittering, Digging, and Stublling all over each other help us, be better people, sell goods and services or help the world as a whole?

What Klout does do, is a pretty good job of giving you a score or allowing others to see your score. This can help you if you are a marketer or social media educator as the world can now tell if you know what you are talking about.

Having a list is useless unless that list sees you and Klout shows you if you are being seen. It can be fooled as with all the systems.

My thought is that it is fun and shows great promise. I have been using Empire Avenue which is a game that rates you like a company. You have shares and your share price is based on the amount of people that see you on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and all your blogs. It is great if you don’t let the tail wag the dog.

EAv can become addicting. If I add my share price to my Klout score and divide it by my followers I become very confused!

The truth is that if you have more that one Twitter account your score is not as reflective as it should be. The technology is moving and someday, all people will want to know is what is your score. – JW