Klout measures your influence in the online world. In a nutshell.

Why?

It helps others understand of how active and relevant you are for the topics you cover.  In other words, YOU know what the hell you’re talking about, AND you’ve got social proof to back it up.

Those with high Klout Scores have the ability to impact a large audience.

Marketing agencies around the globe really want to know who the “influential movers and shakers” of their specific niche markets are.

If they know who these “influencers” are – then they can target them to help spread their marketing messages.

Genius!

Just like Virgin Airlines did last year to 120 power twitterers with high Klout scores. Virgin offered a free round trip from LAX/SFO to Toronto – no strings attached.  No tweets or reviews required.  But influencers tweeted anyway, and it turned out to be quite a successful PR social media stunt.  Editors note: Have you *seen* the inside of a Virgin America jet? H-E-A-V-E-N! And the perks!

Bet lets talk about you and me.

With all the social media “noise” on the ‘net, how are we to know who knows what they’re talking about, and who doesn’t?  Who is a reliable source?  Who is credible?

Thankfully for us, Klout has arrived.  It’s behaves a lot like Google with its rankings based on a combination of relevance and authority.

Relevance pertains to a *new* feature on Klout. They call it +K,  or “Give Klout,” and it’s the ability to vouch for your peers’ influence in topics. See browser add-ons below so you can Give Klout.

Authority is measured by the number of other social media users that reference/retweet/share your stuff on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  This includes inbound links, and the authority of those sources.

So, if Mari Smith reads this post and re-tweets to her 100k follwers saying something like “RT @thewebcoach What is @Klout About? <–read this post 2 get deets 4 u 2 get more Klout!”, then my Klout score might go up a bit.  Mari’s Klout is 74.  Mine is 40, as I only invest a teeny fraction of the social media engagement time Mari does.

Competitors of Klout are TwitterGrader.com and PeerIndex.net.  But Klout seems to be the only widely accepted tool on authority thus far.

Marketing agencies aren’t the only ones who benefit from Klout – you can too!  Here’s how.

Find people in your industry “with Klout,” follow and engage them. Robert Scoble (@Scobelizer) follows people with Klout scores of 30 or higher – so he says – like HE needs more Klout? LOL!

You can use tools like Hootsuite, Cotweet, Tap 11, or even Klout Chrome and Firefox Twitter extensions to help you do this.

Curious who has high Klout scores?

Klout score of 80 or more:

Robert Scoble, @scobleizer – blogger, tech evangelist, and author
Perez Hilton, @perezhilton – the boy w/pink hair who loves celebrity gossip
Charlie Sheen, @charliesheen – #winning  duh!
Guy Kawasaki, @guykawasaki – entrepreneur and former Chief Evangelist at Apple
Justin Bieber, @justinbieber – I’m a Belieber!

Now It’s YOUR Turn! What are your thoughts? Post below, I’d love to know what you think!