I think some of my brain cells exploded yesterday.

I think I have officially gone off the deep end when it comes to social media.  Working in the tech industry I am inundated with the stuff every single day, and the only way I can get through it without losing my sanity is by doing the Braindead Techcast with Steven Hodson every weekday evening.

See, I think Steven and I (along with Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins) realized long ago that the whole concept of “social media” is a sham.  This whole, “It’s about conversations!” line is just a whole lot of clap trap.  No, what it’s about is giving even more information to marketers and letting them find whole new ways to sell you things.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t some value in it.  It’s an easy way to keep up with friends and family, to find out about interesting links you may have never stumbled across, but at the end of the day it is just a giant marketing tool, and we’re all playing along like good little lemmings.  I’m a part of it, I admit it, I belong to so many “social” sites that I have probably forgotten some of the one’s I’ve joined, but I also have no delusions of grandeur about being at the fore front of some wave of world change.  There have been moments where it has empowered people, such as last summer with the Iranian elections, but most of the time it is just a way to promote yourself, boast about how drunk you got or to share photos of your life that no one really cares about.

Then yesterday I think I had a minor aneurysm.  I saw a Tweet from a well-known social media “expert” who shall remain nameless because they simply don’t need any more ego boosting of their importance that said:

so interesting to see how many internet marketer types have 4000+ followers and a klout of 5. that’s what happens when you twitterfeed only

Now, I had heard of Klout, but I honestly hadn’t bothered to check it out because I simply didn’t care, but now my interest was up.  I went to their About page and … well, I’ll let it speak for itself:

Klout is the standard for influence. We believe that every individual who creates content has influence. Our goal is to accurately measure that influence and provide context around who a person influences and the specific topics they are most influential on.

Klout tracks the impact of your opinions, links and recommendations across your social graph. We collect data about the content you create, how people interact with that content and the size and composition of your network. From there, we analyze the data to find indicators of influence and then provide you with innovative tools to interact with and interpret the data.

The Klout Score is the influence metric. It measures overall influence through 25 variables broken into three categories; True Reach, Amplification Score and Network Score.

I’m sorry, “the standard”?  And who exactly figured this out for you?  Is there a new division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology that I am unaware of?  Have you been certified to be “the standard”?  Uh-huh, right.

And this, kind readers, is two of the main problems with social media: That people set them as experts and people just accept it, and that anyone would every really give two hoots what their “klout” is.

The first point is obvious.  Since the dawn of social media, people have been proclaiming themselves to be “experts” and “gurus” in the field, and I just laugh my rear end off at them.  This is still a field in its infancy, and it changes daily as to what is in and out.   Remember when we all had Digg buttons on our posts?  Funny, now they all say Twitter.  How’d getting to be a Digg “expert” work out for ya?  Still getting a lot of calls?

Klout saying they are “the standard” means just as much.  It immediately conveys a sense of importance and weight to their service that just simply doesn’t exist.

And that brings us to the second issue about anyone giving a hoot about this.  The above quoted Tweeter later said it was just a number and then went on some namby pamby commenting spree about its the quality of the conversations and so on.  Sorry, but you brought Klout up, you get stuck with it.  Why in the world are you looking up other people’s Klout numbers if they are “just a number”?  It means you put some importance on it, and I just don’t get that.

How about we just go back to using social media for what it’s best at?  Fun.  Who cares what my “reach” is?  Who cares how much “influence” I have?  Social media isn’t science, and I think we’re stripping out some of the core components of it by caring about such stuff.  I don’t ever want to see the day where I think twice before sending out a Tweet because it might damage my “influence”.

I’ll save you all the trouble since I know some smartass will go look it up, @seanpaune has a Klout of 30