Katdish.net

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What is Klout you ask? Good question:

From Wikipedia:

Klout is a San Francisco based company that provides social media analytics that measures a user’s influence across their social network. The analysis is done on data taken from sites such as Twitter and Facebook and measures the size of a person’s network, the content created, and how other people interact with that content.

The scores range from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score.

True Reach is the size of one’s engaged audience and is based on those of their followers and friends who actively listen and react to messages. Amplification Score is the likelihood that one’s messages will generate actions (retweets, @messages, likes and comments) and is on a scale of 1 to 100. Network score indicates how influential one’s engaged audience is and is also on a scale from 1 to 100. The Klout score is highly correlated to clicks, comments and retweets.

The final Klout Score is a representation of how successful a person is at engaging their audience and how big of an impact their messages have on people. The accuracy of Klout Score has been questioned several times by different researchers however Klout Score is being used by most social media marketers as a barometer of influence.

Klout’s increasing popularity over the past several months and its own influence over high profile people in social media has garnered a typical response from me.

I make fun of it.

A lot:

And because, according to my high-falootin’ Klout score of 60 and my Klout title of Broadcaster (Broadcaster: You broadcast great content that spreads like wildfire. You are an essential information source in your industry. You have a large and diverse audience that values your content.), immediately following my mafia refrigerator tweets, many of my “broadcastees” headed over to Klout to boost influence in both categories:

My inclination to make fun of Klout as a measure of online influence certainly isn’t an original one. Alise Write wrote a great post about her Justin Bieber influence and Naomi De La Torre wrote another about her influence in the categories of Unibrows, Vomit, Tuna, Poop and Placenta. I’m sure many have put their two cents in on the subject.

I think our collective need to make fun of Klout’s measure of influence stems from a common realization:

Because how can anyone tell me with a straight face that they are influential about Christianity, Social Media, Writing, Publishing, whatever when the same brain trust which measured that influence also tells me I’m influential about Cats, Angel Investing, Mafia and Refrigerator?

All I’m saying is this: While I suppose Klout has its place in the narcissistic world of social media, how they measure your influence should have very little to do with how you measure your influence. Heck, maybe even the powers that be at Klout have recognized how inaccurate their influence measurements can be, because my high falootin’ score of 60 on Wednesday morning had taken a substantial nose dive when I checked it on Thursday:

Either that or I have angered the influence gods…

Google Search: “church authenticity” Results: 2,910,000
Yahoo Search: “church authenticity” Results: 37,000,000

Google Search: “church transparency” Results: 1,600,000
Yahoo Search: “church transparency” Results: 13,000,000

Google Search: “authentic worship” Results: 287,000
Yahoo Search: “authentic worship”: Results: 9,210,000

What can we learn? For starters, Yahoo seems to be a superior search engine to Google.

Don’t get me wrong. I think the church should be about all of the above. But when we say, “Our church is all about being transparent and culturally relevant with authentic corporate worship that draws people closer to God,” to me, it sounds like we think we already are. Or at least we think that’s what we should be. Must we overuse those terms to a point where they begin to sound laughable?

I suppose it is helpful to know our target audience. If we hope to increase the membership of our individual church bodies by targeting Christians who haven’t been to church for awhile, or those who are currently part of another congregation but are shopping around for a better offer, then I suppose that’s a pretty good slogan. But if I had never stepped inside a church building before in my life, I would read that description and think, “What in the hell are they talking about?”

I love the fellowship of believers. My brothers and sisters in Christ support and encourage me. They also give me some much needed accountability. Having said that, I think it is very easy for us to become so comfortable with only being around other Christians that we forget the task at hand, or worse – we become judgemental and Pharisaical.

I’m not a big fan of Penn and Teller. I really don’t care for magic shows of any kind. Not so much because of the negative spiritual undertones sometimes associated with it. The main problem I have with magicians is that they practice deception as a trade. I really hate dishonesty. I certainly don’t want to pay someone to lie to me. I already do that — I am a taxpayer. (Sorry – tangent.) Many of you have already seen the following video. Whether you’ve seen it or not, I’d love to get your thoughts on it and the post in general: