Klout is a free online service that “measures influence across the social web.” You would think that when an entity decides to go live with this kind of service that they would have fundamental policies and practices in place. You know the kind of practices and policies to not only provide this service as consistently and as accurately as possible, but to deal with problems gracefully as well. It is looking more and more like Klout has either disregarded these practices altogether or are trying to experiment with these practices and policies on their live production environment. Either way this is looking very bad for them. There have been numerous articles and observations on how their algorithm is easily gamed and how some speculate it relies on an archaic model of measuring networks versus influence, but my biggest problem with Klout is how they manages problems.

Several times in the last few months something drastic has gone awry with the majority of user influences which is the foundation of their service and what has the response been? The response has been to leave the system up and running while obviously broken and to provide the typical vague and honestly bullshit customer service replies that do not address what the real problem is or when this pain point can be expected to be resolved. When you take the plunge and build your business model on something that some people can take very seriously, leaving up broken results and not providing an honest and open answer is a sure fire way to shoot yourself in the foot. Klout has a lot of growing up to do in this department and they could seriously benefit from taking a few simple steps to helping themselves in future outages or algorithm quirks.

First thing first Klout could really benefit from actually taking their service down for the periods when something is obviously broken. They can do this as simply as Twitter with their use of the Fail Whale, and maybe even have a statement saying what the issue is and most importantly state that they are working on resolving it. Being more open on their social media presences is also a huge step in building their own clout when Klout goes down for a while. Instead of making users chase their own takes and ‘reconnecting networks’ that were never disconnected and honestly won’t solve their issues they can prepare an honest and open statement saying what went wrong and a broad estimate of its rectification. I am not saying they need to set an exact time, but saying something like “We are currently investigating the issue and expect to have it resolved later on in the day” is a great alternative.

Once Klout actually realizes that they are dealing with actual human beings and not the numbers they put on their profiles, and evolve to deal with their problems more gracefully then I just might recommend Klout as a tool for measuring social influence on the web. Until then it is yet another handy tool for connecting with other like minded individuals, nothing more.