Do You Have Social Media Kred?

So you have a LinkedIN account, a Facebook Page and a Twitter account. Maybe you check in to your gym or the place you have lunch on Foursquare, post videos on YouTube and try your best to figure out how to fit Google Plus into the mix. In short, you’re doing what people like me have been urging you to do—you’re engaged in social media conversation. Congratulations.

Now, do you know what your social standing is? Do you have Kred? Do you have Klout?

Just as a bank uses your credit score to measure your financial soundness, and Google Analytics measures your website’s reach, services Klout.com and Kred.com measure your social media influence. If you haven’t used either of these services, it’s worth the time to head over to each site and check it out. But be warned, once you sign up and see your scores, odds are human nature will kick in and you will become obsessed with improving them.

Klout measures, as the language distorting name implies, your social “clout.” When you sign up, you authorize the service to connect to at least one of your social accounts (Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus) and allowing access to more will yield a more accurate measure of your influence across the entire social Web. Klout can also connect to LinkedIN, YouTube, Foursquare, Instagram, WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Last.fm and Flicker—with half a dozen more on the way.

Klout uses these connections to come up with your Klout Score, reported as a number on a scale of one to 100. The average score is in the 20s, and as one’s score moves up the scale, it’s much more difficult to increase one’s Klout Score. Klout defines influenced as “the ability to drive action” and looks at interaction through social networks over a rolling 90-day period.