For the past month I’ve been making an effort to increase my Klout score. It’s been a success and a failure.

Before some of you take me to task for even checking my score, I am going to say that it’s been an experiment. I wanted to understand what impacts scores and what activities increase them. Also, if others are going to judge me and my social media knowledge based on it (and there are those people out there that use the score as a real baromoter) then I want to make sure it’s a good score.

So what I’ve been doing is content curation at it’s most basic. I find good content, or content I think others might find interesting, and I schedule it for sharing on my networks. Some of those are timed retweets, some of them are responses, some of them are followups or repeated information. In other words, things I normally do anyway, but with a schedule and intent.

I was surprised to see so little effort produce results. As of yesterday my score had increased by 4 points in the last 30 days, not astronomical results but consistent and positive. As of yesterday I was just a few decimals of a point away from a score of 60.

Today I’m at 51.
51.

Let me clarify that it’s not that I dropped from 59 to 51 overnight (though that’s what, essentially happened). According to my graph I’ve never been over a 52. At least not in the last 30 days.

What?

The Klout graph shows that I was at 52 a month ago, I slowly declined to 49, spiked to 52 overnight, and have been declining to 51 today.

Wow.

Who explains to me how the graph I saw yesterday disappeared and was replaced by this one? And, if I’d been one of those clueless people out there touting my Klout score as proof that I know what I’m doing in social media, who would have explained it to the potential clients using it to make the decision. (That was sarcasm, by the way.)

One last question to anyone who understands Klout better than I do — why do I have 5 K+ to give today, but had 10 yesterday?

I declare my Klout experiment a failure. If someone is putting in an effort to increase Klout score only to have it wiped out, artbitrarily apparently, and overnight… why would anyone else bother with it?

UPDATE #1 — Klout “improved” their rankings and “A majority of users will see their Scores stay the same or go up but some users will see a drop.” I’m still declaring this a failure.

UPDATE #2 — Marshall Kirkpatrick has a good post outlining why Klout scores have value for him and how they help him evaluate new Twitter accounts to follow or use as sources. It’s statements like these that made me decide to run the experiment and try to figure out the method to improve my score. 

UPDATE #3 — Read “Klout is bad for your soul.”

UPDATE #4 — Read “When Sites Drag the Unwitting Across the Web.”