I hope everyone who attended SxSW Interactive 2011 had as much fun as I did. I had a blast as one of the #5kilts guys (for a little taste of the insanity, check out the 5 Kilts KeepStream that Alex Jones set up at http://keepstream.com/BaldMan/5kilts). 

To summarize, we walked around in kilts, took lots of pictures with people, got interviewed a lot (CNN, GenConnect.com, Maxim Magazine, Karma Movement, you name it), got to hang out with Stella the Tito's Vodka Spokesmutt, played Live Angry Birds with the kilts on, and danced backup to Jen Wojcik and Kate Buck of Pinqued during Tech Karaoke. 

It turns out that if you have 4-5 guys in kilts walking down the street, people want to approach them and talk. Sometimes the talk is all about "what are you wearing under the kilt?" ("my boots!") but other times these encounters led to some interesting conversations and connections.

In other words, we had a good time, didn't get arrested, and our stuff was retweeted on Twitter or shared on Facebook about 1000 times in the course of 5 days of insane shenanigans. Although only one of the kilted guys (Simon Salt) has marketing bona fides, I'd say we did pretty good at attracting attention for our daily sponsors--not bad for a stunt that went horribly right.

Why do I mention all of this? Well, because I've been thinking a lot about influence lately, and how we engage on these silly social networks, and how we add value and gain notoriety and all that--all of which has me thinking about Klout. I've had my differences with Klout in the past--some of you followed the fiasco that occurred when we showed up to see a pre-screening of The Adjustment Bureau, and if you did, please excuse the next 2-3 paragraphs of summary. 

To make a long, boring story a short, boring story, we ended up being turned away by the Alamo Drafthouse (big confusion about "being sold out" and "no, no, the people invited by Klout already have tickets, etc"). So we left and I bitch-slapped Klout on Twitter for that, they got on and said, "No, no, the tickets are here, come back" but by this time we were already back home. Since it took an hour to drive to the theater in rush-hour traffic (it was way down in South Austin where we don't go normally) my wife and I were pretty pissed off and not in the mood for more debacles.

After some cajoling by Klout, we ended up going to the next screening a few days later, and even on this attempt, the new theater's management was all confused about our status. We bullied our way in (not proud of that, but Jesus Christ, let us see the fucking movie already), and thanks to having Meghan Berry's cell phone number at Klout, we were able to actually get seated. None of this is Klout's fault, really, but the shitty experience didn't inspire confidence et cetera. It would have been far better if we'd waited for the movie to come out, paid our money, and enjoyed the show, but I digress.

You get the picture--huge gap between Klout's VIP perks idea and the actual execution. I ended up having a mini-spat with Klout's CEO over Twitter, which I'm also not proud of, but we hugged it out, blah blah. Just suffice it to say that people who are used to going through life as a VIP would sneer.

At SxSW, I ended up going to the Hanes Happy Hour (thanks to being a Kilt-wearing guy) and actually met some of the Klout folks (including the divine Meghan Berry and their Chief Scientist, a woman by the name of Ramya--super smart by the way). 

During the course of that encounter, I managed to be extra charming and say to Ramya that I didn't think a person's Klout score mattered much. She was way too nice to point out that I was basically taking a crap on her work right there in front of everyone, but I eventually backpedaled enough to explain what I meant.

To me, this whole Klout thing is pretty simple. It's trying to measure influence on social networks. The algorithm probably takes a look at your followers, how much you engage with people, how often you're mentioned or retweeted, that kind of thing, and assigns a score to your activity. It has to be some kind of moving average, blah blah, because it changes over time.

A few days before SxSW, my Klout score sat at 68. In some Twitter circles that score would be viewed as terrific, but I'm afraid most of the planet would just shrug their shoulders. By the time SxSW was over, despite being mentioned in a 1000 tweets and Facebook photo tags and videos and interviews and God knows what else, my Klout score had dropped to 66.

I just checked it now and it's now at 65, possibly because I've been low-key on Twitter for the past few weeks as I battled strep throat and the blahs.

My point in all this? Well, there is a growing focus on or awareness of social influence. Klout seems to be the leader in trying to measure this influence, and by publishing a score they're merely inviting all kinds of people who will try to game the system. These people won't be interested in actual influence building, just in racking up their score. Which means a race to the bottom in terms of actually figuring out who has real influence.

It's one thing to look at your Klout score (go to www.klout.com/ to see it) and try to puzzle out why your score is 10 points higher or lower than someone else, and then see that you're a Specialist this month whereas before you were an Explorer. That and $3 will get you a pint of local Texas beer at The Gingerman's next Happy Hour.

It's a totally different thing to actively change your score. Sorry to say, but the people who do this are no better than the SEO tweakers. To me both activities are basically a gigantic time-sink because we don't have any direct insight into the algorithmic details. In both cases, what you should be focusing on is being awesome--creating great content, engaging with people, and all that other good stuff--and not on "will this affect my SEO/Klout score."

I fear that we're about to enter the next evolution to all these social reindeer games--and anyone who has survived high school can offer the same prediction. It's not good enough to do interesting stuff, no, no, now we start measuring all this inane bullshit and start assigning numbers to our activity, then we can start forming little cliques and maybe even host Klout parties.  

Next will come the reprehensible activities like not following someone because their Klout score is way low, or maybe not retweeting someone's link because their Klout score is 30 points lower than yours, and that might affect your score, or hey, all your friends are checking in to such-and-such a bar every week, why aren't you there, let's clip a few points because you're obviously not seeing and being seen....

Companies will start bowing down to this notional Klout crap too, and that will be just great for the diva enablement. Just think, if you build up enough Klout you can have customer service departments across the country jumping through their skins to make sure you're not let down in any way. Didn't get the waiter to respond quickly enough to your every whim? Whip out your phone, dude, you've got a 73 Klout score. Had a bad day of travel? Let the twitterverse know, make that 82 Klout work for you! 

After all, you've worked hard for that score, you deserve VIP treatment. Just make every day like SxSW Interactive, so we can pretend you actually are somebody just because your blog has 10,000 readers. Bleh.

As a quick, personal aside, I enjoy the fact that I have a higher Klout score than some veritable bright shining stars in the social media firmament. It's mostly because these individuals are gigantic pain-in-the-ass self-involved diva dipshits, and if liking that aspect of Klout is wrong, then I don't want to be right.

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