Fighting for @Klout at MIT

I learned a long time ago that the only way to earn your @Klout is to walk up to the biggest dude on the block and stab his brain with his nose bone.

But I couldn't track down @Klout kings like @KanyeWest and @BarackObama, so instead I went to hang with @Gregarious, who helps run the San Francisco-based @Klout (which he describes as “CarFax for people”), and who was at MIT buying rounds for Twitter geeks last night.

Heading into the meet-up, I was extremely skeptical of @Klout as the leading arbiter of Twitter worth. Or, to be more honest, I was straight pissed that they inexplicably knocked my score down from 39 to 25 a few months ago, and seemed intent on keeping me there.

We all know how embarrassing it is to have a weak @Klout score. Not to mention what a high score can do for a kid at the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas.

Having handled similar complaints before, @Gregarious dutifully calmed my nerves. Despite being one of the first @Klout employees, he assured me that even he'd been docked in recent months (he's currently a 19). Furthermore, the average @Klout score is 11, so neither of us are so bad off after all.

I also learned that I can get my score re-calibrated with a simple click on Klout.com (on the bottom right of the home page after you sign in). As it turns out, my current Klout is actually 30, which is hardly 39, but is nonetheless an improvement from my curiously low 25 ranking.

In the two-hour session, in which we were joined by, among others, @Eric_Andersen (@Klout score: 67!), @Gregarious broke down the evaluation system, and in the process enlightened the group to how “you don't have to have expertise to be influential,” and on the ever-contested subject of whether follower-following ratio matters (kind of, but not really).

So with that said – please be sure to follow me @FARA1. Some day a brother's gonna have some serious @Klout up in this bitch.