About.Me partners with Klout – brings influence ranking to a new audience

About.me have just announced an interesting parternship with the measurement tool Klout, to bring influence stats into your profile. About.me is a recently launched service that allows you to build a dashboard of your social media activity and profiles.The new dashboard will give an indication of your online influence based on your reach (i.e. how many people are engaged with you) , amplification (how engaged your community is i.e. how often do you get retweeted) and network score (how influential your community is). The analysis is based on your Twitter activity alone, and is presented to users within a simple dashboard :

To access the Klout dashboard on about.me , all you have to do is connect your Twitter account by clicking on ‘Add a site’ , then the Klout information will be available to you.

A whole new audience for influence

What’s interesting about this move is that it brings social media measurement and influence ranking into a new audience. Whereas previously this would have been the reserve of die-hard social media fans or brands wanting to measure campaigns, this integration has got everyone talking about influence. A quick look at Twitter shows results for ‘klout about.me’ updating every few seconds with people discussing their number or category.

This shows the huge appetite that’s out there for people attributing a number or an indicator of success to their social media activity, so the move by about.me was clearly the right one. What remains to be seen though is just how people understand this number, other than something new to shout about or for comparing with friends. The understanding behind this number could be missing for a lot of people, and if you’re not using it for business or measurement purposes, the question could remain as to why you need this number or what it means.