...By calling social scores “Influence Scores,” companies like Klout (who’s tagline is “The Standard For Influence”) have set expectations in the market that influence can be measured with scoring algorithms. However, influence is much more complex.
By setting the wrong expectations, social scoring companies have changed how marketing and PR professionals think about influence, and how to identify it. Instead of finding influencers from a context and audience approach, marketing and PR professionals look at metrics like follower count, unique visitors, and social scores to get a glimpse on who’s “influential,” which in most cases doesn’t work – popularity doesn’t necessarily equal influence....
Scores that are not
Measuring social influence isn't all about popularity on social networks...
This quote from the article says it all for me:
It’s not the size of the influencer’s audience that matters, or even how/if the influencer talks about your brand. What matters is how others react to what the influencer says about your brand.
Another example of how we get misled by not understanding the meaning of numbers - e.g. a high Klout/Peerindex/Kred score.