No non-influencers allowed. (Photo: OnGig)

It's been building for a while now. Klout, a social media power user index that is totally based on science and not at all on meaningless, imaginary metrics, has officially nudged its way into the competitive job market.

Last November, we told you that you might soon be able to get a credit line based on your Klout score (no word on if that ever actually became a thing). Then in April, we reported on someone whose interview was stopped short as soon as his boss discovered his Klout score was an abysmal 34. And if this Salesforce job ad is any indication, now the floodgates have finally opened: having a passable Klout score is creeping into "desired skills." How long before it's a job requirement?

According to a community manager job posting from the cloud-obsessed Salesforce.com, an important and desired skill for getting hired is a "Klout score of 35 or higher."

To be fair, the community manager role requires a robust knowledge of social media platforms and how to manage them. But don't you think anyone with that kind of experience would know that Klout is complete bullshit?

(h/t Spencer Chen)

Mr. Fernandez. (Photo: Twitter)

Today Klout debuted a sweeping revamp, meant to make that pesky social media score more accurate and their methods of calculation more transparent. That's right: No more excuses for your underwhelming score, pal.

The new and improved Klout Score now factors in 300 new signals (as opposed to 100, previously). New metrics include various actions on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other sites. Wikipedia has also been incorporated into the score, which is important, because it allows someone like Barack Obama to rank higher than Justin Bieber, thereby making us all feel much better about the state of social media and America more generally.

Another new feature, aptly dubbed "moments," allows you to track the most important incidents in your social media history, so maybe now you can figure out just what you did to become so influential on Fiber-Rich Vegetables and Humidifiers. That'll also enable you to keep track of what your friends are up to, you cyberstalker. 

CEO Joe Fernandez explained the changes to PandoDaily:

The goal is to make you feel less like a lab rat, less judged and put into a number and more celebrated and praised for the clever thing you wrote that resonated with so many people. Fernandez says this isn’t a retrenching, that he always intended for the score itself to just be the tip of the iceberg. “Influence is a complex thing,” he says. “We never meant for it to just be a number.”

See, now don't you feel a little less like you're living through sorority rush every time you see mention of the words "Klout Score"? That number is based on data, and metrics, and algorithms, and your depressingly low score is really no one's fault but yours and also maybe quit wearing that trashy red lipstick, okay, honey?

However, we can't resist noting this unfortunate comparison:

He describes Klout internally as the “Los Angeles of the social Web.” If you’ve never actually visited the site, you have all sorts of preconceived notions, and you probably hate it. But if you spend time there, you see it’s not such a bad place.

Mr. Fernandez might want to refrain from associating his superficially significant service with a town that is typically thought to house the country's largest portion of bullshit artists.

Mr. Scott. (Twitter.com)

Earlier this week, the Internet was alarmed and disheartened to learn that a piddling Klout score can now cost you a job. (At least in certain segments of the marketing business, anyway.) But it's no secret that the service favors a tendency to self-promotion, and therefore driving up that number often has an invisible social cost. Digital jokester Tom Scott has now quantified that cost with Klouchebag, the self-proclaimed "standard for asshattery." Finally, the index Twitter has needed all along. 

The single-serve landing page is straightforward, explaining that, "Klouchebag measures how much of an asshat you are on Twitter." To learn whether you've been abusing the microblogging service, simply pop over and input your username. Metrics for terribleness include anger, retweet abuse, social apps, and English misuse. Not particularly scientific, but sounds about right--although Betabeat would argue that "look at this nice thing someone said about me" RTs should weigh extra heavily, if they don't already. Self-promoter extraordinaire and sex tape starlet Kim Kardashian earns a 75, "Quite Horrible," guilty on all charges but anger. Investor and Butterfly Effect headliner Ashton Kutcher escapes with a 45, "Mostly Noise," for abuse of both retweets and English.

Oh, and creator Tom Scott's score? 100, or "Prat of the year." Someone isn't happy with the amount of time he wastes on Twitter.

(blog.thedaysman.com)

People who care too much about social media will argue that a low Klout score is an embarrassing blight on your Internet presence, but apparently a subpar number derived from a startup's questionable algorithm can now also ruin your life.

According to Wired, a man named Sam Fiorella had 15 years of experience and was interviewing for a VP job at a marketing firm. When the boss saw that his Klout score was an abysmal 34, he basically terminated the interview right there, and ended up hiring someone with a much more impressive score of 67.

Oh, but that's not all:

Matt Thomson, Klout’s VP of platform, says that a number of major companies—airlines, big-box retailers, hospitality brands—are discussing how best to use Klout scores. Soon, he predicts, people with formidable Klout will board planes earlier, get free access to VIP airport lounges, stay in better hotel rooms, and receive deep discounts from retail stores and flash-sale outlets.

So.... let's get this straight. An imaginary number determined by how much of your life you share online may now be responsible for how you get treated IRL? Yikes.

Luckily, only marketers care about people with high Klout scores, because it makes it easier for them to identify influencers--the people they want talking about their brand. If you're unconcerned with becoming an unofficial brand spokesperson just because you once tweeted "I love Starbucks!" to your thousands of followers, then you probably also don't care about your Klout score.

The types of people who would gun for and brag about a high Klout score have always existed--they're the Type A self-promoters with whom you can only spend 15 minutes before feeling overwhelmed and slightly icky. Let them have their high Klout scores. The rest of us don't mind toiling away in Internet obscurity.

As for Mr. Fiorella, we think he dodged a bullet--who would want to work for a company that cares so much about a fake Internet number?

Your topics list can also be edited and impacted by friends who give you +K's, or recommendations, on certain topics. But occasionally Klout unearths a bizarre couple of topics that leave you wondering just how much you talk about things like bacon (we're looking at you, David Karp).

So what topics are tech titans influential about? Apparently some pretty hilarious ones.

Dennis Crowley

We think it's sweet that Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley is influential about moms. Who doesn't like a guy who tweets about his mother?

Cameron Winklevoss

One half of the imitable Winklevi duo, Cameron Winklevoss apparently has a lot to say on Twitter about 80s heartthrob John Cusack.

Nick Denton

Mr. Denton, self-proclaimed "gossip merchant" and overlord of the Gawker Media empire, is influential about trauma, which we suppose makes sense considering the rigorous workload he expects from his staff.

@Betaworks

Company Twitter accounts can also have their own Klout scores. Startup non-incubator Betaworks, for example, is influential about cookies...and drag queens.

@Tumblr

Angsty tweens and fashion porn were oddly not under Tumblr's popular topics. Luckily, knives and Kid Cudi were.

Mayor Bloomberg

Last but not least, we have our very own Mayor, @MikeBloomberg. He is apparently influential about both fascism and bullying, though we have to guess that Occupy Wall Streeters may have had something to do with that.

And just for good measure, did you know that Betabeat is influential about cosmetics? Yes, this tech blog is one of the few run entirely by ladies, but we never tweet about our makeup routine. What gives, Klout?

UPDATE:

Klout wrote in to tell us that the Klout profile for Mark Zuckerberg, listed in the original edition of this piece, is unfortunately fake. His real profile is here, with nary a Justin Bieber reference in sight. The real Zuck is in fact influential about money and celebrities, though his low influence on privacy still remains true.

In an email to members today, Klout, everyone's favorite dubiously scientific social influence analyzer/punching bag announced it would be teaming up with Badgeville, a gamification platform that lets companies like eBay, Samsung, and Dell find and reward engaged customers with badges, tokens and online prizes.

By integrating Klout's "influence ranking technology," Badgeville will now, in theory, be able to help those brands figure out which loyal users have more influence and reward them accordingly. Judging by our latest Klout score, this only works for Betabeat if there's a brand out there interesting in courting someone who influences 2,000 people on topics like "Blogging, Stanford University, Reddit." That has to at least qualify us for a "Nerd" badge or something, right? What about "People who spend too much time in front of screens"?

Klout has tried to monetize its ranking system with partnerships before, reports Mashable, pointing to deals with the Palms Hotel and Casino's "Klout Klub" or the three-day loans Chevrolet offered those with Klout scores of 35 or more. But it remains to be seen if that's enough incentive for the norms to open up their Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and LinkedIn accounts to Klout's algorithm.

As we learned earlier today, "perks" are merely one of 18 business models the company contemplated. In an interview with TechCrunch that we told you about this morning, ff Venture Capital, a Klout investor, said that early on, other were dubious of the startup's premise. "A lot of people saw a Twitter analytics company and said, 'Hey, do I really want to invest in that?'" said ff partner John Frankel. "What we saw was a company that had potential to help people by the middle of this decade to really understand their online footprint, what they're really doing on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Normalize that data and allow people to understand and then manage their online footprint."

Perks, Mr. Frankel assured TechCrunch, were just the start, "I sat down with Joe [CEO Joe Fernandez], gosh back in April 2010 and we laid out 18 different business models and we decided perks was the first one to focus on."

Will users stick around to the mid 2010's to hear about the rest?

Outting Ben's Klout score instead of our own.

Open secrets have a way of getting out eventually. Betabeat first reported the scuttlebutt that Klout was closing in on a round of funding in October and now AllThingsD has confirmation from Klout. The social influence measuring service admits that Series C round everyone had an inkling about did indeed close in November.

CEO Joe Fernandez said Kleiner Perkins, which lead the startup's $8.5 million Series B round in January, also lead this round with KPCB partner Chi-Hua Chien joining the board. Although Mr. Fernandez wouldn’t comment on the price or valuation, multiple sources, including Business Insider, are reporting that it was a $30 million round, which put the company at a $200 million valuation.

Although based in California, Klout has a number of local investors, including ff Venture Capital (venture partner Mike Yavonditte was a seed-stage investor), which joined the round along with Institutional Venture Partners, Venrock, and Greycroft Partners. Mr. Fernandez told AllThingsD,  that Klout currently handles 10 billion API calls per month, up from 100 million per month in January 2010.

So what will the child-profiling service, which as angered early adopters with fluctuating scores, and confused observers with the kind of algorithm that rates Robert Scoble over President Obama going to do with the cash?

Considering revenue relies on Klout Perks, where marketers can target influencers with free stuff, hopefully they'll spend it on fine-tuning their algorithms and offering better Perks. Currently, Betabeat is eligible for lift tickets (we don't ski), Slimfast (we enjoy real food), and something to do with a Mark Wahlberg movie (we are big fans of Boogie Nights, +1).

If not that, there's always banking.

Mr. Dickert.

PeerIndex, a London-based startup that scores social authority on a 1 to 100 scale, just released its "most influential non-celeb voices this year" list. Top of the heap? Kara Swisher, London blogger Umair Haque, technoblogger Robert Scoble and Brooklyn's very own creative curator, Maria Popova.

Betabeat caught up with PeerIndex CTO Sanford Dickert, an occasional New Yorker, to ask about PI's take on the trend of banks experimenting with the social graph as a metric for determining creditworthiness.

It's something PI is aware of and has looked into, Mr. Dickert said, although it's not necessarily on the startup's roadmap. "Klout and PeerIndex and everyone, we're just starting out. We're about a year in right now but there's been research in this area for now over five years," the jetsetting Mr. Dickert told Betabeat over the phone from Barcelona.

Using social media to evaluate creditworthiness makes sense, he said, but it's not perfect. "It's like actuary tables... over time as people use these self publishing tools it's going to provide greater insights of what the likelihood is in terms of risk," he said. "People who have high social reputation tend not to risk their reputation on not paying the bills. But here's the funny part: for every time you hear that as a norm, I can show you Bernie Madoff."

Is this use of the data a privacy concern for consumers, we asked.

"Every business is about mitigating risk and maximizing return. If you want X, you need to help us understand if we should take a risk and what is the equivalent risk on you," Mr. Dickert explained.

But every company that uses your data also has to keep your trust, he said. "There are certain beliefs that we're keeping true to, which is the responsibility to the individual rights and privacy, and how this personal data or this social capital is used," he said. "It's part of our interactions and transactions with the users to determine what we can do with it."

Can't pay? Well, what about your friends?

Let’s take a trip with the Ghost of Christmas Future. The year is 2016, and George Bailey, a former banker, now a part-time consultant, is looking for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage for a co-op in the super-hot neighborhood of Bedford Falls (BeFa). He has never missed a loan payment and has zero credit card debt. He submits his information to the online-only PotterBank.com, but halfway through the application process, the website asks for his Facebook login. Then his Twitter. Then LinkedIn. The cartoon loan officer avatar begins to frown as the algorithm discovers Mr. Bailey’s taxi-driving buddy Ernie was once turned down by PotterBank for a loan; then it starts browsing his daughter Zuzu’s photo album, “Saturday Nite!” And what was this tweet from a few years back: “FML, about to jump off a goddamn bridge”?

A new wave of startups is working on algorithms gathering data for banks from the web of associations on the internet known as “the social graph,” in which people are “nodes” connected to each other by “edges.” Banks are already using social media to befriend their customers, and increasingly, their customers’ friends. The specifics are still shaking out, but the gist is that eventually, social media will account for at least the tippy-top of the mountain of data banks keep on their customers.

“There is this concept of ‘birds of a feather flock together,’” said Ken Lin, CEO of the San Francisco-based credit scoring startup Credit Karma. “If you are a profitable customer for a bank, it suggests that a lot of your friends are going to be the same credit profile. So they’ll look through the social network and see if they can identify your friends online and then maybe they send more marketing to them. That definitely exists today.”

And in the last year or so, financial institutions have started exploring ways to use data from Facebook, Twitter and other networks to round out an individual borrower’s risk profile—although most entrepreneurs working on the problem say the technology is three to five years away from mainstream adoption.

“Credit score is a lagging indicator,” said Brett King, a tall, puffy Australian with white blond hair who is the founder of the online-only bank Movenbank and author of BANK 2.0: How Customer Behavior and Technology Will Change the Future of Financial Services. “At best, your credit score is about 60 days behind. What we’re trying to do is look for things that reflect the likelihood of a future default, rather than what’s happened in the past.”

Movenbank is an online bank in private alpha release that replaces plastic credit and debit cards with a mobile device such as an iPad or smartphone. Mr. King is a major proponent of the questionable young science of using social media to evaluate creditworthiness.

When it comes to online privacy, Mr. King subscribes to the Mark Zuckerberg school of thought: standards are evolving, and the world will be better for it. (As long as you're connecting and sharing, only good things can happen to you!) “Our view of what ‘private’ is, is changing,” Mr. King said. “We make friends with people we barely know!”

He predicts that banks will soon start asking customers to verify their social media profiles. Not everyone has a social media presence, of course, so submitting your Twitter handle will first be pitched as a way to provide customer support or account alerts, which will later open the door for “more complex products,” Mr. King said.

Employers have already started using social media to evaluate potential candidates, and in 2009 a woman in Quebec stopped receiving disability payments for major depression after Manulife decided, based on beach vacation photos on Facebook, that she seemed happy enough to work after all. “I’m sure that insurers now are looking at Facebook profiles and saying, ‘You’ve said you’re not a smoker? Well how come in three of these ten photos where you’re out with friends, you’re smoking?’” Mr. King said.

That means that tweet, “Just got fired, man. Spending my severance at the bar!” may have been ill-considered.

Mr. King is especially interested in identifying customers who can evangelize the service to a sizable crowd of cloud-friends. Movenbank requires users to connect their Facebook accounts upon registering, data from which will be baked into a proprietary “CRED” score, a number that determines which rates and products are available. The exact recipe is still being written, but eventually Movenbank will boost your CRED as you hook it up to your accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn and even eBay, which calculates a reputation score based on buyer feedback. It’s not the only metric, Mr. King said, but a strong Twitter presence could tip the scale in favor of a marginally risky borrower.

Much of this is driven by enterprising techies looking for the next big sector of the economy to disrupt with a social twist. Back in July, the 34-year-old internet pundit, angel investor and startup entrepreneur Kevin Rose, best known as the founder of Digg, sat down in front of his webcam in a t-shirt and baseball cap to talk to the internet about credit cards. “This might be potentially the dumbest, least-vetted idea I’ve ever put out there,” he said. “What if we could make credit cards a little more social?”

Mr. Rose was just spitballing, and his idea seemed innocuous enough. But there's a nightmare scenario: if banks learn how to use social media, they could gather information they aren’t allowed to ask for on a credit application—including race, marital status and receipt of public assistance—or worse, to redline segments of the social graph.

In other words: choose your online friends wisely, for they may one day determine your APR.

Lenddo, a Hong Kong-based microlending startup incubated in New York's FinTech Innovation Lab, calls itself “the first credit scoring service that uses your online social network to assess credit.” The first thing Lenddo asks for is a Facebook account; then it wants access to Gmail, Twitter, Yahoo, and Windows Live. The Observer was given a respectable score of 470. But when we tried to apply for a loan, we were told “you need at least 3 connections with scores above 400 in your Lenddo trusted network.” (We wouldn’t have been able to get a loan anyway: Lenddo is only available in the Philippines, although it recently hired an ex-Googler to head up the Americas.)

The company’s algorithm is proprietary and secret, said CEO Jeff Stewart, but the primary metric is what Lenddo knows about the people you’re friends with. “We think that in the age of the internet you should be able to establish your reputation and your identity through your social graph, through your on- and offline community, and use that to get access to financial products and information,” he said.

If Lenddo sees one of your best Facebook buddies took out a loan and paid it back, there’s a good chance you will too. “Our backgrounds are in machine learning and pattern recognition,” Mr. Stewart said. “It’s some serious math.

“There's no reason there shouldn't be thousands of engineers working to assess creditworthiness.”

In another nifty but nefarious innovation, Lenddo reserves the right to broadcast your loan status if you fall into default. As the site warns: “Failure to repay will negatively impact your Lenddo score, as well as the score of your Lenddo friends. Lenddo MAINTAINS THE RIGHT TO NOTIFY YOUR FRIENDS, FAMILY AND COMMUNITY if the borrower fails to repay, however, this is only done after several notifications to the borrower and an attempt to work out a payment plan.”

“I think Mark Zuckerberg said it best,” Mr. Stewart said. “Every industry will be in fact impacted by social.”

Banks have been curious about using social media to gauge risk for at least a year, said Matt Thomson, VP of platform at Klout, which calculates “influence” based on a user’s social media activity. Determining creditworthiness is not a core product of Klout’s, he said, but banks have approached the startup to ask about it. He wouldn’t name names. “It’s really like the who’s who of banking,” he said.

(Mr. Stewart of Lenddo also said his startup is approached “regularly” by major banks curious about the algorithm.)

Klout, arguably the leader in developing a metric for social media power users, has taken a beating from bloggers for being spammy and potentially insecure. The New York Times wrote about shocked parents who discovered Klout had autogenerated skeleton profiles for their children, based on what it had gathered from their connections to others; the science fiction writer Charles Stross called the service “the internet equivalent of herpes.” R. Ethan Smith, who blogs as The Startupist, recently wrote a critique of Movenbank’s projected partnership with Klout. “Klout claims that I am influential about New Jersey, coffee, and iPads,” he wrote, noting that he has no real expertise in any of the three and doesn’t even own an iPad. “Now, let’s assume that King is completely serious about using online social profile data to determine a Movenbank user’s influences, which will essentially determine their ability access a line of credit... To stake tangible dollars on what seems to be a relatively easily manipulable algorithm is not something I would characterize as ‘good business sense.’”

Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff dismissed the idea that social media credit scoring is a serious erosion of privacy, mostly because there’s nothing left to hide. “We’re already in the nightmare scenario,” he wrote in an email. “They already know everything about you—more than most of us realize. If anything, the addition of social networking information to this data mining will help us come to some understanding of how much more these companies know about us than we know about ourselves.”

The precise formula for FICO, the most widely used credit score, is secret and proprietary to the Fair Isaac Corporation, a publicly traded company. Experian and TransUnion, two of the three national credit bureaus, did not respond to requests for comment on this story; Equifax, the third, did respond. “Our corporate development professionals are very aware of the opportunities to enhance our proprietary data and partner with companies who add value to the accuracy of our reporting, which helps our customers make better decisions prior to lending,” a company rep said in an email, adding that Equifax can’t comment on future strategies because it’s a public company.

This new use for social media data could turn out to be empowering, Mr. Rushkoff pointed out, if it leads to people lending to one another. A reputation score based on the social graph could lower the barrier to entry for peer-to-peer lending startups. “Instead of everyone outsourcing their savings, investments, and borrowing to truly evil institutions who use what information they about us simply as an excuse to drain more money from us,” Mr. Rushkoff said, “we would invest in one another.”

Snow is falling lightly outside as Mr. Bailey logs off of PotterBank.com. Suddenly, a bell rings. It’s his iPhone: a text message from Lending Club, a peer-to-peer lending startup based in San Francisco. His friends saw his Tumblr post with photos of the coveted apartment, and forwarded it to friends of friends. Collectively, they’ve pledged to invest over and above the needed deposit. He looks up, smiles; looks back at his phone, and taps out a tweet: “No man is a failure who has friends!”

CORRECTION: The original post incorrectly said Lenddo is based in New York. The company is officially headquartered in Hong Kong.

As far as technology scaremongering goes, this story is pretty egregious. First, the lead: "Can an online algorithm track down your child?" both exaggerates the danger of an automatically-generated Klout score and creates the false impression that an algorithm that tracks users on the web, some of whom are minors, is a new or unusual thing when in fact web browsing habits are tracked by an innumerable number of advertisers, market researchers and spammy directories.

The minor profiles cited in the story were created by crawling users' Facebook friends, a feature Klout no longer employs. Klout has also started allowing users to delete their profiles. So while Klout still remains spammy at its core, this article, which feels like it was written by a 90-year-old intern, falls short in its indictment--and the writer doesn't even mention the #OccupyKlout movement.