I’m on Klout, which purports to assess a company’s or individual’s “social capital” by the networks they belong to and the interactions they generate in those networks. You may be there, too. It’s a pretty good platform and I like the way it incorporates elements of other networks, such as importing the lists I’ve created on Twitter. Yet a new social media friend, Nate Riggs (@nateriggs), has shown how Klout can be gamed to artificially inflate one’s score. More broadly, right now Klout only lets one connect a handful of social networks (currently 12)–including some that are of marginal importance, and I can only guess are on the roster due to relationships between principals and organizations. So while there is no doubt it has some use as a social media indicator, I question its ability to fully assess and quantify one’s social capital. Continue reading