Gee, Klout Calculates Cool Points

At a company meeting yesterday, our in-house social media guru brought up the topic of “Klout” scores. She explained that Klout determines your social media influence on a point scale from 1 to 100.

According to their website, “The Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action. Every time you create content or engage you influence others. The Klout Score uses data from social networks in order to measure:

• True Reach: How many people you influence
• Amplification: How much you influence them
• Network Impact: The influence of your network”

I was surprised to learn that Klout has been around since 2008, but it has yet to catch on. How has its addictive appeal not combined with the global social media obsession to become a sensation? Perhaps because their appears to be no rhyme or reason to the scoring criteria.

With Klout, your influential score is constantly changing. Last night I had a score of 34, yet this morning it  plummeted to a measly 31. I was pretty discouraged with the drop. I did not significantly change my social media habits in 12 hours. If anything, I threw out some extra Tweets before bed in an attempt to boost my score.

Although checking my points is addictive, it’s also frustrating. I want to know exactly what makes you lose social media status so abruptly. Klout is cool in theory, but its execution is too mysterious for my liking.

Gee, Those Are Someecards

They’ve been around for years, but I am still obsessed.  The someecards website has the wittiest ecards that poke fun of celebrities and human kind alike.  The unassuming images of the vintage characters on the cards make the hysterical musings exponentially more entertaining.  The site even allows users to submit their own ecards which can be just as good as the site’s classics.  And get this: they’re FREE to send!  Which is much more than I can say for a lot of ecard sites these days.

The site has become so popular that they even sell their ecards in tangible gift form (i.e. shirts, mugs, magnets, etc.).

This Valentine’s Day, I spent nearly an hour perusing the site and laughing out loud at the cards devoted to the delightful day of love and affection.  My personal favorite poked fun at my least favorite team in the NFL:

What’s even better is that there are cards for the average day.  I’m especially fond of the ones that poke fun at our bizarre social media habits:

So if you’re looking for a good pick-me-up form of procrastination, I highly recommend you visit the site and share the love.

Gee, Tweetland Characters Make My Day

This summer, I jumped on the Twitter bandwagon.  I tried to fight it, but I finally gave in.  I’ve found that it is actually a great source for ideas and information on everything ranging from fashion to technology.  I can spend way too much time surfing through the witty comments and insights of the colorful characters of Tweetland.  There is no doubt that some people just have that Twitter talent to illuminate a 140 character tweet and truly make a statement.

Lately, news sources from the Washington Post to MTV have been buzzing about Kanye West‘s emergence in Tweetland.  He’s hilarious, crazy, and controversial with blurbs like this one:

…my mind is blown.  Needless to say, I am not a @kanyewest follower.  Not my cup of tea.  Plus, his frequent spelling and grammar errors really grind my gears.

I’ve found, however, that you don’t have to be a rap megastar to have a stellar Tweet personality.  Take Greg Laswell, for instance.  He is a talented indie music artist with quite the sense of humor.   After seeing him in concert a few weeks ago, I decided to follow him on Twitter.  I soon found that this was a wise decision as I was bombarded with his hysterical and amazingly real thought bubbles.  This evening, for instance, he remarked,

I adore this candid sarcasm.  Beyond that, his music is pretty awesome (check out “How the Day Sounds“).  Tweets like his really make me smile.

But you don’t even have to be a celebrity to have mad Tweet skills (SHOCKER, I know).  The other day, one of my Tweetland friends, LissiDesignYogi, had a brilliant Tweet that I could not help but love:

Mindblowingly true.

As long as inspiring Tweeters like these keep sharing their wisdom, I can’t help but frequent Tweetland.