I think part of the issue is that currently users see the score as only of benefit to marketeers, it offers little value to they themselves (bragging rights aside!). I believe the reputation graph is here to stay, but that in the social enterprise realm at least, we’re measuring the wrong thing.

It’s about relevance rather than reputation. That’s the issue we’re focused on. How is an opportunity relevant to me? Whenever a score is generated, be it Klout, PeerIndex, Kred or others, I need a little instant gratification – the score needs to work for me, give me something, it needs context.

The reputation graph is mired in influence when all it needs is relevance.

As an interesting thought experiment, pretend for a moment that a person with a high level of “influence” were to receive a low “score”. His influence may then be undermined by those who base their opinion on score, or his score would be ignored as he already has sufficient influence over his listeners. Next, take a nobody in the social world and give them a high “score”. Suddenly, throngs of people flock to this “influential” person and hang on his every tweet, check in, and like. Ultimately, people would leave this impostor influencer, as he doesn’t actually have anything of substance to share.

In the end, if this “score” were to disappear, influential people would still be paid attention to and non-influential people would be still be ignored. This system of quantifying a value can only lead to non-influential people gaming the system to achieve artificial influence. This system doesn’t benefit those who already have influence, which are the people the system actually needs to become a trusted reference for influence.

There are a couple of things I think those charting the course for this space should consider, 1) Klout is not in the reputation graph game….that’s for the ProSkore’s of the world. And 2) PeopleRank is the term I gave the coming “social consumer hierarchy” in January 2008 before Klout’s launch: http://www.briansolis.com/2008/01/value-of-online-conversations/

I have a report coming out on this very subject shortly…I believe Klout attempts to track both a digital form of social capital and through it’s Perks service, can also pinpoint a tiered interest graph, which only one other company can do well. What we can also use, is a service, or perhaps this is something that Klout can work on, is defining a true measure of influence…the cause, effect, or change that happens because of an individual in social networks. That’s what influence is…the ability to cause effect or change behavior. It would be interesting to also see to what extent someone contributes to social proof.

It’s interesting, debatable, but more importantly, I hope all services providers here look beyond the score to find ways to deliver value beyond initial narcissism.

#crosspost to Google+ post