Klout Launches New Guide To Explain What The Heck It Is

On Twitter, they don’t understand Klout. They also don’t understand Klout on Google+. And they don’t understand Klout on Tumblr.

That seems to be a common thing: If you’re not angry at Klout for changing the scoring model in late October, you might be telling people to stop caring about their Klout scores. And if neither of those fits, you just might not understand what all the fuss is about.

Klout is taking steps to remedy the situation, especially the “I don’t understand” part.

Earlier this week, the company launched a new section of its website called Understanding Klout. It covers five topics, such as What is Klout?, The Klout Score and Klout and Your Data.

That section on the Klout score is bound to get the most attention. In addition to explaining that Klout influence is “based on your ability to drive action in social networks,” it offers some specifics about the types of social activities Klout uses to measure influence:

• Twitter: retweets and mentions
• Facebook: comments, wall posts and likes
• LinkedIn: comments and likes
• Foursquare: tips, to-dos and tips done
• Google+: comments, reshares and +1s

It seems like a step in the right direction, but some users are likely to want more transparency about how those activities affect scores. (Not unlike how SEOs want more transparency from Google and Bing about how certain kinds of links, on-page tweaks and so forth affect rankings.)

That score page also indicates that Klout is planning to add other social sites/signals into the scoring algorithm: Facebook Pages, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress, Last.fm and Flickr.

What Klout is doing isn’t unique. Remember all the times that Twitter has changed its home page in an attempt to “lower the barrier to accessing the value Twitter has to offer,” as Biz Stone explained during one of those home page relaunches.

Twitter has been fairly successful, I’d say, in explaining that value to new users. It’s too soon to say if Klout will have the same success in helping people understand what the heck Klout is. But look for more attempts in the future. A Klout spokesperson tells us via email that the Understanding Klout section is “the first step in a long-term plan to help people better understand their Klout.”