While every marketer would love a way to quantify social media influence, is there really any substance behind Klout’s numbers? Does a high (or low) Klout score really have an impact on whether you can influence others’ behavior — or is Klout simply an imprecise  measurement of one’s social media prowess? Here are three reasons Klout’s algorithm is probably more alchemy than science.

Measuring the Wrong Things

One of the main problems of Klout is that it relies on third-party APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to get data from the networks it scans — and those APIs have limits. A good example of where this falls short is that Klout has no way to monitor click-through rates. The service has no way of knowing what volume of traffic flows through the items a member posts, or if these posts actually lead to any action offline. How can a service claim to adequately monitor influence with such a huge blind spot?

Another issue is what Klout actually tracks and how it tracks it. With Twitter, scores are determined by monitoring things like follower counts, mentions, and retweets. However, it doesn’t give credit very well for those using Twitter’s native retweet system. When a member retweets something, Klout gives credit back to the original account, even if another user’s retweet exposed it to a larger audience.

Some Twitter members don’t like this and have devised ways to game Klout’s handling of this metric. These individuals choose to use the older manual “RT @name” style retweets instead of the native Twitter system. This way, when the post is retweeted by their audiences, they get the score boost and increased visibility instead of the original user. This is essentially a way of stealing influence and Klout’s algorithm (as it is today) encourages it.

An Ever-Shifting House of Cards

In February of last year, an infographic made the rounds on the web highlighting a Justin Bieber Twitter spam account with an astoundingly high Klout score. This illustrated some major flaws with Klout and served to embarrass the company briefly.

To combat the loss of confidence in its service, Klout has attempted to iterate and improve its scoring dramatically over the past year. However, it has often done this without notice or explanation. It was not uncommon for members to log in and find that their scores had plummeted by tens of points without explanation. These changes, while aimed at improving the service, essentially stomped all over Klout’s credibility and gave the company a boy-who-cried-wolf reputation with each new algorithm upgrade.

Perhaps most damning is the way Klout has de-emphasized and removed certain metrics in its latest redesign. For example, the latest revision has removed things like user classifications and score analysis. The company has even hidden the ability to track changes to certain metrics over time. If Klout felt more confident in its algorithm, it would expose more of this data, not less.

Topical Misunderstanding

Klout’s system of topics are, in many cases, baffling. For example, having one tweet including the words “Paparazzi” and “Matt Damon” retweeted by someone Klout deems of greater influence can get you labeled as influential on those topics. This can happen despite that tweet being the only time you ever mention those topics. It doesn’t matter if you have many other tweets pertaining to broader topics, such as politics or technology, that achieve a broader reach.

It appears that Klout matches its “topics” to keywords used in social media posts alone, instead of using actual, objective, topics. It also appears that Klout’s algorithm is not smart enough to understand and classify posts based on context — without the usage of such keywords directly. These are some of the flaws of automation. Algorithms cannot understand things like sarcasm and tone, and they have an especially hard time with nuances of language and meaning that only humans would pick up.

At the end of the day, Klout is trying to quantify something as inherently subjective as influence. But while some metrics can be helpful to understand audience reach, influence cannot be distilled into single number. While Klout’s promise is tantalizing for marketers, it will always need to rely on a certain amount of assumption and fabrication to seem legit, thus leading its value to be questionable at best, and bogus at worst.

[Image credit: Peter Roberts]

Without further ado, An Event Apart Chicago 2012 in Impossible images:

My dear friend Laura is having an album release show at the Double Door in Chicago on August 18th. I did the photo and design work for the poster you see above.

Needless to say, I think it’s going to be a great show. If you can make it you should.

You can buy tickets here.

“You talk about handwriting and keyboard, how about speech as a human interface?”

Here is Steve’s answer transcribed by an iPhone 4S using iOS 5′s Dictation feature:

“You know that the last part of that question is is exactly right I I I’ve been almost 30 years and it’s speech is always been five years away because I’m trying to completions
But it went most of the really smart people of speech I know have gotten out of Beelitz it’s like nuclear fusion a lot of bright people went into it and and and people now think it’s a ways away you can do what you can do adequate speech today to meet your correcting a lot of stuff if you just have to know even 1% area try cannot as it turns out you can speak a lot of words in a few terrible so it’s got to be very accurate and so far no one’s come up with the technology Apple’s got a very we got to speak working on stuff Microsoft has a group you want GreatWorks be done in academia but it doesn’t look like it’s been a be real anytime soon I wish it was different”

Here is what he actually said:

“Ya know, the last part of that question is exactly right. I’ve been in this industry almost 30 years and speech has always been five years away. It’s been constant time to completion, just moving along 5 years away. Most of the really smart people in speech I know have gotten out of the field. It’s like nuclear fusion a lot of bright people went into it and people now think it’s a ways away. You can do you can do adequate speech today but it means you’re correcting a lot of stuff. If you just have even 1% error it drives you nuts. Because it turns out you can speak a lot of words in a five minute interval. So, it’s gotta be very accurate and so far no ones come up with the technology. Apple’s got a speech group working on stuff. Microsoft has a group. A lot of great work is being done in academia but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be real any time soon. I wish it was different.”

Looks like Steve was right.

This weekend I will be riding, with my good friend Laura, in the ILD Bike MS: Tour De Farms 2012 in an effort to raise money to fight MS.

This is a cause that is very important to me. Growing up I saw MS devastate and eventually take the life of my “Aunt” Kathy , my mother’s best friend.

I’ve set a small goal of $400 but I’d like to blow it out of the water. If you’re interested in helping out you can donate here. It’s tax deductible and goes to a very good cause.

Thanks.

I want to change this.

Many people suggest things like “go vegan” or “go paleo”. The problem is, I like meat, dairy, and wheat. Whether it’s healthy or not to completely cut foods out of your diet can be debated until we’re blue in the face. The fact is I simply don’t want to stop eating these things. I enjoy them regardless of their health benefit or lack thereof.

What I’ve decided is that Starting Monday April 30th I, along with other friends and followers on Twitter, will be going on a self-imposed cleanse diet for at least one week, potentially the whole month. We are calling it #ManCleanse May.

The rules are as follows. From breakfast on Mondays until dinner on Friday:

• No Alcohol
• No Red Meat
• No Fried Foods
• No Soda
• No Coffee (optional)

The coffee is optional because I recognize that some people are dependent on it to do their jobs. For many it would be too hard to kick cold turkey. Besides the idea of this is to not cheat yourself of the things you love. Some people really enjoy their morning coffee. I already don’t drink coffee regularly so it’s no big deal for me. If you want to give it up, we support and applaud you. Those who don’t, we won’t judge.

My goal is to generally start living healthier in general without completely sacrificing the things I love. I imagine the benefits will be potential weight loss and increased energy.  You are welcome to join in for just one week or the whole month. You’re welcome to take this as an opportunity to give up other things as well if you see fit. If you think it’s time to quit smoking, we’ll get your back and cheer you on.

Who’s with me?

Men, if you are interested tweet out this article with the hashtag #ManCleanse, encourage your friends to join in and connect with and cheer on other men taking the challenge.

Women, while our goal is to promote healthier eating for men, you’re welcome to join in as well!  Your support is also welcomed to encourage and cheer on the men in your life to eat healthier.

If you are already a vegan or paleo dieter, props to you for your healthy eating choices. That said, you are still welcome to join in as well on the applicable parts of the #ManCleanse if you’d like. Just because we’ll be having a big burger and fries on Friday nights doesn’t mean you have to!

From 2010- 2011 I published a photo blog on the Chicago Tribune’s blog network ChicagoNow. The focus of the blog was to travel from neighborhood to neighborhood in Chicago and publish photo sets of my exploration.

The idea may at some point be resurrected and reworked but for now you can find a full archive of the blog and it’s photos here under the Focal Points category.

In 2010 I decided I was going to try to make a point to create and publish something every day. Whether it was a photograph on Flickr or a blog post here or elsewhere it would be my own personal accomplishment.

Unfortunately I didn’t even come close. I could make excuses but I simply didn’t do it.

With the advent of Instagram in 2011 it became increasingly easy to do the “one photograph a day” type of project. As much as I’m a fan of digital photography it takes very little effort to shoot a single image daily on your phone and that takes all the fire out of it.

So I thought: Go Big or Go Home.

At some point I heard about the work of Jamie Livingston who took one Polaroid photo a day from 1979 to his death in 1997.

Unfortunately Polaroid ceased making new instant film in 2008 which seemingly ruled out that idea. At some point though I miraculously stumbled onto a group called The Impossible Project. TIP are a group of Polaroid enthusiasts who set out to reverse engineer the good old stuff and are now producing new instant film compatible with Polaroid cameras.

Armed with film and a “new” camera I’ve set out to shoot and then publish one photograph a day using Impossible Project film. With that in mind I’ve entitled my experiment “The Impossible Year” for a few reasons. The first and most obvious would be in tribute to the company making this possible. Secondly would be sorta tongue in cheek with myself as 2012 is the year the “world is supposed to end” according to the Mayan calendar, which if the world were actually to end, would certainly mean the end of my project. Lastly, it’s a challenge to myself not to fail, saying that my year would be “impossible” states that at some point I might drop the ball and fail, thus pushing me to prove myself wrong.

So yeah enough BS. I didn’t write anything about this back in January because I wanted to make sure I’d be able to get at least one month under my belt. Now here we are, March is almost over so it’s safe to say I’m going to keep at it. Please take a moment to look through the photos and feel free to leave comments or ask questions. Thanks!

As you may recall, or if you scroll down approximately two entries, late last year I was working on a social media travel experiment. The gist of it was that I was backpacking through Europe via train. Along the way I was taking people’s suggestions and recommendations via social media or where to go, what to do with the intention of reporting it here and sharing the total findings at this year’s SXSW interactive festival.

For a while I was posting daily, then it crept down to posting once per city and then finally I found out that the SXSW panel had been rejected. While that took a lot of the wind out of my sails I intended to keep going regardless. I kept collecting data and working on it daily just the same. I have a Moleskine notebook filled with notes, a ton of “starred” Tweets and gigabytes of photos to share. However, the issue that remains is what to do with it all. Without the panel as a destination, how the data would be presented requires a dramatic rethinking. I will compile it with conclusions at some point but right now, I’m unsure exactly what that will look like.

Aside from the SXSW rejection my trip was suddenly cut short. This was due to a variety of personal reasons including a death in my family. Despite my abrupt return to the states, I had still planned to head back out towards Asia and Oceania. However after a little while it became clear that it simply wasn’t the right time for me to do so.

All that said, I’ve been busy since my return. I’, working on a few different projects that I will hope to share sometime soon. I’ve also been spending a lot more time over on my Tumblr.

One of the things I will elaborate on very soon is something I’m calling The Impossible Year. Feel free to check it out ahead of time if you wish.

Cheers!

PS – The book is still on sale!

UPDATE 4/15/12: ‘Standing But Not Operating’ is now on sale on Apple’s iBookstore.

I am pleased to announce that I now have a photography book on sale for the holidays!

The book is entitled “Standing But Not Operating” and is a compilation of shots of Six Flags New Orleans.

For those unfamiliar: Six Flags New Orleans was flooded under 9 feet of water and destroyed during Hurricane Katrina. The property was subsequently left to rot by Six Flags who cherry picked what they could from it and left the rest as a liability for the city.

James and I ventured down there in April and found our way into the park illegally, eventually being caught by the police for trespassing and graciously allowed to retain our images.

From the back cover:

“Standing But Not Operating” is a term used for an amusement park ride that is still standing in place but for whatever reason not operating.

Since being ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005 the amusement park formerly known as “Six Flags New Orleans” has been standing but not operating after facing abandonment and an uncertain future.

For the few who have visited the park since it’s closure it has served as a place frozen in time. A haunting memorial to the devastation and perseverance of the city of New Orleans.

This is a 40 page 10″x8″ softcover book and includes 37 of my favorite shots from that trip which I am selling for $30. I am also making an iBooks compatible ePub available for $9.99 if you’d rather have that.

To date this is personally my most beloved photo project. I hope that you will enjoy it as much as I do and I really appreciate your support.

You can pick up the book here: Standing But Not Operating

Of course the original photo set will continue to exist on Flickr at a lower resolution. If you’d like a preview of the images feel free to check them out here: Standing But Not Operating on Flickr.

Thank you!