Klout algorithmically quantified social media influence and status.

Evidence

In 2008 the startup Klout began aggregating data from multiple social sites to see how often individuals are “liked,” re-blogged, @replied, and so forth, claiming that they measure “influence based on your ability to drive action.” If your algorithmically generated “Klout Score” is high enough, you might qualify for perks such as free Essie nail polish or a visit to the set of Dallas. (My Klout score hovers around fifty, making me eligible for nothing.) Klout never uses the term status, but it measures influence in three vectors: the number of people you reach, how likely those people are to act on your content (for example, by commenting on it or re-tweeting it), and how influential your network is. Klout rewards people precisely for achieving the status metrics of Web 2.0. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 252

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘influence’ as operationalized by Klout: reach, likelihood of action, and network influence — a canonical early definition of quantified social status.
• XREF: Connects to later micro-celebrity theory and to present-day metrics like follower counts and engagement rates; also echoes earlier status metrics (newspaper clippings) established in the prior chapter [251]. — connects to: Social media metrics reduce complex relationships to visible status rankings; Social media metrics convert audience size into a comparable measure of personal status — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 245; Follower counts conflate popularity with influence, visibility, and personal status — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 213 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Social media metrics convert audience size into a comparable measure of personal status #corroborates (0.85) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 245
• Follower counts conflate popularity with influence, visibility, and personal status #qualifies (0.75) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 213
• Pentland’s sociometer turned social interaction into instrumentable, predictively modelable data #expands (0.70) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1339