The Trouble with Klout

Those who read my blog know that I have been writing about Klout a few times before (Do you have Klout? & Klout revisited)  to understand how online influence can be determined. This week I am adding to that because I went away for a few days and was unable to tweet. Look at what happened to my Klout score:

As soon as I stopped tweeting, even though it was for only 2 days, my Klout score dived. And the amplification score went right down with it:

which makes a lot of sense because when you don’t tweet, you don’t get retweeted.

The question I am asking is: how can an influence score be so susceptible to an absence of just 2 days? And what does that mean when you take a vacation of a few weeks? Looking at the scores above, this will undoubtedly lower your Klout score. But would you really loose that much influence when you take a period off? Or are people willing to assume you do not loose that much influence by not being around for a short time?

A few of my fellow Tweeters have a vacation coming up and I will be closely following what will happen to their Klout scores over the next few weeks. Nevertheless, I think the “dive” is wrong and it is something Klout needs to fix before they can really claim that they are “the Standard for Influence”.