All I can think of when I hear people talk about their Klout scores is the famous opening line from the popular TV Show Whose Line Is It Anyway:

Welcome to “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” the show where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter. That’s right, the points are just like Twinkies Lite. They do not mean a thing.”

Here’s the modern version for Klout: Welcome to Klout: the app where everything’s made up and your score doesn’t matter.

I hope this will stick for you and you pass it on, because it’s a perfect way to describe any form of influence score.

The premise of an influence score is inherently flawed. It is usually wrapped in marketing language to make it sound “official” but it is no more or less silly than those old sites that tell you how much your website is worth.Or HubSpot’s attempt at giving your website or blog an SEO or social media “grade.”

An influence score or automated grade just doesn’t work. It is attempting to take something qualitative and reduce it to quantitative, but not all data needs or should fit into quantitative. In a world obsessed with numbers it’s a brilliant play and I’m sure they’ll make lots of revenue being a score in marketing software, providing something quick and easy to add to reports. That’s what previous generation marketers want. But is it meaningful or actionable to any truly data-driven marketer focused on outcomes and conversions? Please.

There seems to be a boon in tools like Klout that measure influence or social analytics in general. Klout aside, for the most part businesses aren’t even ready for social data. There is far more wealth in their own web analytics that most don’t even use properly, and yes the order here matters. You probably already have all the tools and data you need to make decisions, if you’re not doing so now adding more to the mix is not going to help you.

In fact, it could actually hurt you. To those who have been marketing online for years, remember when people obsessed over toolbar pagerank? It has always been irrelevant and only an ego thing: the people who focused on the right metrics grew their sites and those who worried about meaningless scores didn’t go anywhere.

We’ve already shared the notion that you need to connect and build trust, not influence, so I don’t think we need to get into this too much further. Just persuading you not to use fluffy metrics to make decisions. Dump the garbage and focus on the critical few metrics. If Klout makes it into your critical few: wow, just wow.

I wasn’t going to write this post but I have heard enough nonsense and am calling shenanigans: modern marketers know better.

Obsessed With Your Klout Score? You’re Doing It Wrong is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing

Of course, reality doesn’t make for as controversial (read: inaccurate) headlines. Those false headlines do more harm than good and ruin any trust or credibility with the media or companies pushing them. They fall apart under scrutiny.

So all we can do is continue to point out the false representation of a concept. OnlineEducation.net is the most recent offender, having put out an infographic unfortunately titled: “is social media ruining students?”

Social media is “ruining students.” Not, perhaps, oh I don’t know… alcohol? Which has by this logic been “ruining” students way before social media (although even here it’s a false notion any one thing is “ruining” students because smart students generally practice moderation).

We could call out many other things wrong with this infographic. Seriously not much in there is defensible from either a data and storytelling angle, but we’ll just leave it at clearly the creators of this infographic didn’t actually use Facebook in college. Many readers here (myself included) did. Go read their “final verdict” at the bottom. Really?

Poking holes in the whole infographic would be fun (and pretty easy) but would take a bit longer to go through it all. I’ll leave that to you. However, what I am going to call out specifically is their shoddy analysis and obvious data spin of the social media addiction concept. Because OnlineEducation.net should know better than to spin this. Here’s the part of the infographic where they make the claim:

They claim “social media is addicting” by referencing the Maryland Study. Except as others have already pointed out: researchers for this study have based their conclusion that students were “addicted” to social media by the very scientific fact that students simply said they were. As Mike goes on to note in the article linked:

Just taking common modern media consumption and communications tools away from users for 24 hours doesn’t seem to prove much of anything — aside from the fact that people have grown used to modern media consumption and consumption tools — which they’d adapt to living without in time. The American Psychiatric Association does not recognize so-called Internet addiction as a disorder (despite efforts to change this to help sell more “cures”), and real addiction generally involves people with real problems who usually aren’t quick to admit they even have an addiction. As we’ve discussed countless times — the real problem is that we’re annoyingly in love with (but not addicted to) calling everything an addiction. At least when we’re not busy getting high off of everything.

Indeed. So what about the “Facebook addiction” is searched 350X more than “cigarette addiction?” The SEO in me loves this. Google’s Keyword tool pegs Facebook Addiction at around 12,100 local searches / mo, and Cigarette Addiction at 1,600:

Multiply 1,600 by 350 …yeah, they should probably check that math. But for this one query, “Facebook addiction” is actually 7.5 times (not quite the claimed 350x) more popular than “cigarette addiction” to compare just those two queries.

However this comparison is nonsense, regardless of actual difference, and just proves that:

• People know cigarettes are addicting already – not much of a need to search this one (you guys understand what actually drives search demand, right?).
• Media are hyping up Facebook addiction and popularizing the concept.
• You can always find at least one comparison point to tell your story – but that by itself is not necessarily defensible.

Want to see what real addiction looks like from a search demand standpoint? Also according to Google’s keyword tool, 550,000 people search “quitting smoking” per month compared with a paltry 2,900 people searching for quitting Facebook. In fact, you have to get way down into queries in keyword suggest to even find one with volume for a Facebook quitting-oriented phrase if you throw them both into keyword suggest:

It is similar if you search Facebook addiction and cigarette addiction and force rank by popularity. They have cherry-picked 2 phrases here to try (but not very well) to backup an already false claim. But if you actually fleshed out two keyword glossaries, one for Facebook and one for cigarette addiction, it wouldn’t even be close. Cigarette addiction dominates, hands down.

So, can we please stop the social media addiction nonsense? If we’re going to do this, why not call out the clearly more damaging TV viewing trends? Or how about video game addiction? Email addiction? Cell phone addiction? But that would be equally silly because where does it stop? By this logic, we are all addicted to pretty much everything. And it shows the term addiction has become misused for attention or to sell something.

There are physically addicting substances out there that real addicts deserve medical attention for (and legitimate mental health issues we need to address in the population). Labeling any technology addiction is not just inaccurate, it is misleading and mistakes a symptom for a root cause. And treating symptons but not actual disorders is not going to help anyone.

More People Confused About Social Media “Addiction” is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing

But the other day I saw a link from a pretty trusted source, Steve Rubel, who surprisingly shared more datapoints that don’t actually point to addiction, rather to a general usage trend.  But of course, those who conducted the study wrap it in language that’s stickier, if inaccurate, by slapping the “addiction” label on it.

Let’s first look at the graph without the title, and just the survey question:

Now that’s not very interesting is it?  Just the question and the survey result data presented accurately (surprise surprise, more people are using social networking sites multiple times a day in 2009 when compared with 2008).  How can we make this more interesting if we’re Experian?  Easy – let’s slap the addiction label on there since our society has an addiction to, well, calling everything an addiction without actually understanding it.

Here’s the version they published:

Let’s visually show why this is absurd, by showing another data visualization and doing the same thing:

Now, I’ll add a label to contextualize, even though it wasn’t part of the original image:

Was it wrong I just added TV addiction to that graph?  The average person watches a lot of TV, so I can just add the addiction label, right?  By Experian’s logic, it’s as easy to define something as an addiction as slapping a label on a graph.  No scientific research or consensus among cognitive psychologists needed – just some consumer survey data is rigorous enough.

Of course, if you look at more data points within the same study, you could just as easily draw a conclusion that we’re addicted to keeping in touch with friends:

Two paragraphs of text from the original article packaged with the data mention addiction as well:

Whether it’s keeping in touch with others, playing games, debating politics or any of the other reasons people use social networking sites, it cannot be denied that there’s a sense of addictiveness to it all.

There’s a “sense of addictiveness to it all”  according to Experian, not according to the data.  That is 100% subjective – however when writing it next to their visuals it seems authoritative.

Social networking is an increasingly addictive activity, with nearly half of those who access such sites (43%) reporting that they visit them multiple times per day.

According to this logic, let’s think what else we could call addiction.  After all, we just need to find things that around half of survey responded do multiple times daily.  Email?  Talking on the phone?  Using sticky notes?  We’re addicted to everything!

This is data spin – nothing new to marketing and PR – but that’s the problem with the web.  You can’t spin data, you need to be accurate or you’re just going to get called out for it.  The web will always question data sources, the motivations behind those publishing datapoints, and call blatant examples of pure subjectivity or inaccuracies out.

More Examples Of Data Spin – Social Networking Addiction is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing