Guest Post : What’s Your Klout Score?

Author Bio:

This is a guest post from Laura Backes, she enjoys writing about all kinds of subjects and also topics related to internet providers in my area.  You can reach her at: laurabackes8 @ gmail.com.

What’s Your Klout Score?

By this point you’re probably a member of Facebook and it’s likely that you tweet frequently on Twitter as well. You may even be a member of LinkedIn and perhaps you have a blog. So that begs the question – are you on Klout? When Klout first debuted it boomed, but news around it has been shockingly scarce in the past few months, so it came as a big surprise when technology website Wired came out with a story about how people are being discriminated against in the job market based on their Klout scores.

But let’s back up for a second. If you don’t know what Klout is yet, it’s a website that assesses how “influential” you are on the web by factoring in your activity and interactions on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It then uses an algorithm to determine your perceived level of influence online. You are given a score out of 100 to determine your online worth and that can be improved by interacting more online or lowered if you disappear off the technological grid.

This all seems normal enough given how influential technology – in particular social media – is on our lives. We regularly use the number of followers, fans, or friends we have on any given social media website to estimate our “value” online, and this site just consolidates it for us in one neat little package.

However going so far as to use it to determine if someone should be hired at a job or not seems a bit extreme.

The article in Wired, in a nutshell, explains how a prospective job candidate, Sam Fiorella, was recruited for a job position, went in for the interview, was questioned on his Klout score where he had to admit he had no idea was Klout was, and then was dismissed as a job candidate because his Klout score was too low. It goes on to give a few more examples, but the resounding message is clear.

To succeed in a world that revolves around technology your online worth is important.

Technology is playing an increasingly bigger role in our lives and to ignore it is a grave mistake. While the idea of basing a person’s worth on an online score may seem ridiculous, it’s not so far out of the realm of possibilities that this will soon be the way that many employers choose their employees. After all, employers already routinely check out prospective job candidates’ Facebook pages or search for them on Google to see what kind of person they are before hiring them.

If it wasn’t clear before, it certainly is now: pay attention to your online presence. Technology is paving the way of the future, and to ignore it would be a grate mistake.

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