@klout May 10 To all of our fans: after careful consideration we have decided to shut down the Klout website & the Klout Score. This will happen on May 25, 2018. It has been a pleasure serving you, and thank you for your ongoing support over the years. Details here: lith.tc/2wtAAEp

Klout came into the world of social media back in 2008, the same year as we founded Be2Camp, a network to explore application and potential of social media within construction. (At that time an alternative to Klout, PeerIndex was founded in 2009 by Be2Camp member Azeem Azhar)

Klout, the leading ‘influence score’ platform, ever-present over the last ten years, has generated much debate on influence scores and metrics, and been the back bone to many influence lists. Many of which I have appeared in, and delighted to have done so, from the early Guardian Sustainable Business lists to Global CSR influencer lists, Tridos Bank Sustainability Colour of Money listing, to the current and excellent Jim McClelland’s weekly (Built Environment/BIM/Modern Slavery) Top 500 series.  I think my highest Klout was 68 and I think of that as something to be proud of..

We will no doubt see one of Klout’s current competitors take its space – Kred. (And I hear today from Jim McClelland that the BIM Top 500 has adopted Kred)

Or maybe Kout has achieved what it set out to do, creating an influencer economy and reached the end of its ride – as Liriel Higa wrote recently in New York Times, We’re living in the world that Klout built.

On May 25, Klout will shut down, but not because what it set out to do is irrelevant. On the contrary: Klout is closing because, well, we’re living our Klout scores now. The “influencer economy” is thriving, and it has created a new vocabulary. I just reached 500,000 Facebook fans! My YouTube video went viral. OMG, did you see who commented on my Instagram post? I’m trending worldwide. I checked in so many times I’m the mayor of my local bar.

I was happy to get a professional boost from social media influence; today, entire careers are built on it. In our influencer-driven world, Kim Kardashian gets paid $500,000 for touting a product on Instagram. Product placement on social media is so rampant that Olivia Wilde felt compelled to include the hashtag #notanad when she posted a picture of new sustainably made sneakers by Nike.

Within my social media workshops and coaching sessions I point out the work of Kasanoff in 2013, that true influencers across social media, are Generous and Expert,in that they, we, are proactively generous with expertise before people need that information. As Munish Datta wrote in a contribution to FutuREstorative, Sharership is the new Leadership. And, as such, maybe influencers do not necessarily need a score or a ranking to be recognised.

However, we all, or many of us, like listings, high scores and the recognition to be ranked highly in listings. Listings based on Klout algorithms were once a pleasing mix of companies and individuals, demonstrating individuals have as much influence on improvement as large organisations, particularly in the construction world of sustainability, CSR, BIM etc, Such lists now topped out and dominated by large corporate and institutional organisations, suggest Klout scores have been compromised by perceived importance bias towards of organisations. It will be interesting to see how Kred rankings pan out on the large organisation / individual influence issue.

Klout may be no more, but the influence of Klout will live long.