I commented in The Courier Mail about Klout, the social media influence metric service.

SOCIAL media-savvy Australians are turning to online services to calculate their influence on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

US-based website Klout now has more than 100 million registered members, who use the service to determine how much influence they have over their friends, colleagues and strangers.

“Increasing numbers of people are finding their voices online and, as a result, we are now adding millions of influencers to our index every few days,” Klout’s administrators write.

Users are awarded a “Klout Score”, which is derived from a complex mathematical process based on how they create and share content online.

University of Queensland social networking expert Dr Sean Rintel said social media users were increasingly wanting to know their worth in terms of  “social capital”. 

“Apart from counting your friends on Facebook, there hasn’t been a way to know this sort of thing,” he said.

“It hasn’t been something that ordinary people could indeed quantify and talk about in any kind of way.”

Dr Rintel said he wouldn’t be surprised to find people were including their Klout Scores on their resumes, adding that narcissism was also partly to blame for the growing interest.

“People have always been interested in themselves”, he said.

“We know that as soon as search engines became good at it, people stared searching for themselves and trying to find out how far and wide their presence was spread.”

Tin, J. (2011, September 17). Influence worth its weight in web gold. The Courier Mail.