I recently stumbled across an interesting site, Klout.com, which analyzes a Twitter account’s history and assigns a “Klout Score,” which is purported to be a “measurement of your overall online influence.

Of course, my inquisitive nature as it is, I had to try it for my Twitter account, @mgd.  The results were not great, but respectable, I suppose:

By contrast, the Klout Score of my favorite Phoenix Suns tweeter, Jared Dudley, was 70.

The three major components of the score are:

• True Reach – the real size of your engaged audience.
• Amplification Probability – the likelihood that your content will be acted upon.
• Network Influence – the influence level of your engaged audience.

Additionally, Klout offered a categorization for my twitter account.

I am certainly not a celebrity, but I do try to be consistent and focused.  I have a small number of followers who seem to be fairly well engaged.

For example, after I had received my Klout store, I joked on Twitter,

“Let’s hope that low @Klout doesn’t mean low worth.”

An “engaged” Twitter follower responded with this encouraging note:

“@mgd I’m sure our worth as human beings is not related to Klout. :)”

That was certainly good news.  I am glad that my intrinsic worth really isn’t dependent on my Twitter Klout score.  I was reminded of the profound observation printed on a framed picture my wife gave me many years ago:

“In a hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the type of house I lived in, or the kind of clothes I wore.  But the world may be much different, because I was important in the life of a child.”

The bottom line? Klout is interesting, but has little to do with my value as a human being and the impact I can make on things that really matter.