Is It Anyway? A bunch of algorithms seem to be in control of your persona and clout on the social web. But you could take charge and make it work for you

On the social web, everyone is not born equal. And indeed what would be the whole point if they were? Right from the start of the social networks, it has been clear that some people have social influence, while most others just have a presence, sometimes a rather noisy one. But what constitutes influence online is still a question that is being fought over fiercely today. On one side you have those who create social measurement tools; clever applications that track your activity on social networks and the response of people in your social communities, presenting you with wonderful looking graphs and scores that look as if you can’t argue with them. On the other hand there are regular “peeps” or people like you and I, who are getting uncomfortable with their influence being whittled down to a number by a bunch of algorithms.Dozens of web-based applications measure your social influence. But the big daddy of the lot is perhaps Klout, which defines itself as the standard in influence. Head to klout.com and sign in with your Twitter account. If you’re at all active, you’ll see your K-score. Think of it as a percentile, with 100 being the maximum level of influence possible. Check other peoples’ K-scores using their Twitter handles and you’ll see the differences and it will start to make sense. Graphs will help you make detailed comparisons of your influence style. The day-today progression of your score helps you spot when you were most active and engaged. An analysis of your score quantifies your reach and potential on your networks — you can add Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. Your Klout dashboard, profile, friends and lists give you additional information you can act on right from within the Klout interface. For instance, you can see who influences you and who you influence. The topics that are most discussed are also presented and you can choose to continue the conversation, leveraging their popularity. Also, rather useful is the set of suggestions on who is influential in your network. You can use this to start up conversations with them, because, after all, engaging with influential people adds to your own clout. The graphs are pretty and the logic seductive. My score of 58, which I suspect is trying to keep pace with my body weight, is not bad. But on closer examination I find that it seems to be influential about politics; a remote possibility since I tend to ignore politics and hope it will just go away. A few random tweets on something that may have made me indignant obviously resonated with a large number of people and went viral. That doesn’t mean I am politically influential. Another spike, with a lasting impact on my Klout analysis, happened when I made an unfortunate spelling mistake in one of my tweets. It obviously amused my networks, but surely that does not make me the gold standard in typos? It’s easy enough to ‘game’ the system. A Hollis Tibbetts set up a fake Twitter account, following and unfollowing people randomly and retweeting wholly uninteresting updates. It was a deliberate attempt to have zero clout. Imagine his surprise when he looked in after a few weeks of this, and found he had a healthy K-score of 37 points. Because of Klout’s steadily increasing clout, the K-score has begun to be taken seriously. Recently, they added a perks section where people with high scores get freebies, discounts and privileges of all kinds. Even the chance to pick up equity in startups. Imagine, however, getting an upgrade to business class on an airline based on your K-score, which in turn may be based on a spelling error. Surely, this is influence gone all wrong. You can notch up scores at many other social analytics services — and get an ego boost in the bargain. But true influence will come about when you are in charge of it; when you can take the very same tools and work them with your own understanding of who you are and what you want to achieve via your social networks. Months ago, I found myself unsettled by the description of my style online. Apparently I was an activist. That didn’t come out of the blue but from the fact that I may have tended to tweet more about things that made me indignant and less about my interpretation of happenings in my sphere of knowledge and expertise. Carefully, and over time, I steered the engagement in the desired direction and not only increased my K-score but moved from activist to specialist. So the same system that can be gamed to churn out garbage can also be used intelligently to let you decide the dimensions of your own influence.