Deserved Or Not Celebrity Tweeps Have Klout.

The verdict is still out on Klout. It seems that there are as many posts about what is wrong with Klout, as there are talking about what is right with it. Personally, I like Klout. I like it a lot. It is a very useful tool to gauge not only my progress, but to see where others stand as well. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Klout, in a nutshell it is “the measurement of your overall online influence,” according to the Klout blog.

Having just read today’s (Feb 22) post on {Grow}, The Problem with Klout: An Infographic, I started wondering about other accounts. Mark Schaefer’s Infograph shows us a fake Justin Beiber account and how it’s Klout score is rather high given the visible information. This got me thinking about some of the verified celebrity accounts and how they might score. I keep up with my score and am sometimes baffled by how my score rises and falls on a day to day basis, but it does seem to have more to do with how active I am on Twitter than my level of activity on Facebook, though both are supposedly taken into account. Even more baffling are some of the scores of some of the celebrity tweeters out there.

The first three people were not specifically targeted by me, so much as I randomly pulled them off a list of Tweeps with the most followers. None of this is any kind of defamation towards any of these people, but simple observation.

Taylor Swift

Taylor’s Klout is 88, a very respectable score. She has almost 5.3 million followers, but only follows 53, and has tweeted a total of 860 times.

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah’s Klout is 79, also a very respectable score. She has 5.1 million followers, follows 21, and has tweeted 168 times.

Katy Perry

Katy’s score is an 89. Wow! She has just about 5.9 million followers, follows 68, and has tweeted 2569 times. Starting to see a pattern? High follower numbers seem to be equalling a high score, while the level of engagement seem to have little to do with their final score. One more thing I’ve notice, How can these people all be “Thought Leaders” when they don’t tweet that much, and when they do almost none of it has any bearing on anything past what they ate for lunch or what venue they are giving a concert in tonight. Thought leaders? Please.

So again, what are we seeing here? Is it really not about the amount of involvement but about the follow count? For my last celebrity I chose Stephen Fry. Stephen has a lot of followers , but also follows quite a lot of people, and tweets often. He also actively engages his fans. I have even had a couple small conversations with him myself.

Stephen Fry

Ok so Stephen’s Klout is…85? He has a bit over 2.2 million followers, follows almost 53 thousand tweeps, and has tweeted almost 8000 times.

Seriously? An 85? I thought that would have been a higher score given his interaction with his fan base.

Is your Klout score possibly based too highly on the amount of followers you do or don’t have? I really don’t know. I’m still working out how this tool really works, and like I said, this is just an observation. What I do know is that Klout is very much a work in progress, and it is just as promising now, as when it first came out.  Maybe I’ll look at a few average tweeps next.

What does this say to you? I’d be interested in your thoughts.