The fudemental flaws

There are good ideas. There are bad ideas. Any campaign that involves Facebook likes, Twitter followers or the Internet as an advertising medium falls firmly into the latter of the two. While it was unknown at the time, the gold of ad revenue is only found in context of the platform. If your platform is the go to index for content on the internet, you have rich veins of ad revenue ready for you to mine because people are intentionally looking for unknown content and only want the best content to enter their mind space. If your platform, in contrast to Google, is a social networking website or dependent on the opinions of a few online, you will be wasting your time and money on a resource that can be bought for next to nothing and has been demonstrated to have no correlation to one's market share. The Pepsi Refresh Project is a prime example.

Is Klout worth it?

The idea of Klout affecting our ability to find jobs seems like a natural way for HR workers to sift through job applicants quickly, but it can also be a waste of time for both sides to focus on Klout scores. If you are gaming the system and elevating your score, because you perceive a high score as a direct factor in advancement, then HR workers are going to deceive themselves into hiring people on shallow qualifications. HR workers who use Klout score as a factor in hiring someone also end up wasting the time of interviewees who may not be so focused on what their score is, but instead focus on what they do best. In both cases, a company looking to hire a good analyst, engineer or strategist end up hiring Paris Hilton, a person who knows how to market herself better than presidents. No offense to Hilton; she is highly intelligent and knows what public relations is all about, but I wouldn't hire her to write company policy or manage a department. At the same time though, Klout scores is an indicator for how important your opinion is and its analysis can come with surprising insights, which is what is important to look at when one wants to highlight your Klout score; for what reasons do you have that score? A quick glance at that number will only tell you someone tweeted a lot about something and someone is listening. It could be a person who is applying for a position as a communications strategist is a fan about Red Bull and sky diving. It will not say this person is influential about physics, chemistry or corporate communication or give an assessment of the value of the articles, if any, this person has written, which is often a more accurate indicator of this persons value to any given company.

Is gaming Klout worth it? Not if you do not have the substance to back up the score.