You might call me a competitive person. I compete against myself to do better, and I always want to win. When the situation calls for it, I love to trash talk.
So when the group of people I work closely with started sending out a Daily Klout Score Card, I knew I had to step up my social media game. I want to see my name at the top of the card; not because I feel like I’m better than everyone else. But because it just feels good to be… winning.
Klout.com is a tool that measures your online influence, or your online clout. It calculates your interaction across multiple social networking sites to generate a score between 1 and 100. According to their website, the average Klout score is around 20. From there, “the score becomes exponentially harder to increase as you move up the scale.”
My score is currently at 63, but it was once at 67. I recently went down a K Hole, but that’s a subject for a whole other blog post. Now my goal is to reach a score of 70 before November.
Friendly competition is fun, but I also love to collaborate. That’s where Plus K Friday comes in.
At the beginning of the summer, Klout introduced a new feature to allow people to vouch for your influence. You can now acknowledge someone’s influence in a particular topic by giving them a +K.
For example, according to Klout I am influential about social media, creativity and Austin. If someone wants to vouch for me, they can go to my profile, click on “Topics” and hit the “Give +K” button next to the topic. A user can only do this five times a day, so you have to use them wisely.
For those of you who have random topics like clowns, puppies or peanut butter, the wesbite says you can remove them by hovering over the topic name. An “x” will appear. Click it to hide the topic.
While the Klout website says receiving +Ks will not actually increase your Klout score, I find that it does increase interactivity and THAT leads to a higher score.
I also equate giving a +K to giving a recommendation on LinkedIn. Anytime I give someone a +K in a topic, I like to tweet about why I gave them the thumbs up. Then hopefully they will gain more followers on Twitter.
Are you also familiar with the term “Follow Friday?” It can look like #FF or #FollowFriday on Twitter. People use the term on Twitter to recommend other people to follow. There have been many complaints made by the online community that #FF has lost it’s impact. I’m hoping that +K Friday can bring back the spirit of #FF.
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