The prevalence of social media exploded in the past five years. Hashtags have been introduced for almost every television show, commercial and magazine article. It’s no surprise this rapid growth correlates with the surging smartphone market.

About 98 percent of 18-24-year-olds are active on social media, according to MacWorld. Because there is an incredibly high penetration the new question is: Who is worth listening to or following?

In the real world, it’s fairly simple to gauge the trustworthiness of a source or individual. A glance at a resume or at a uniform can usually affirm or deny that individual’s credibility.

If someone held a degree in graphic design, you would be more inclined to listen to him or her concerning website construction matters. Similarly, if you ask a cashier at McDonalds to recommend a refrigerator purchase, you will likely dismiss that person’s opinion more readily because it is not his or her field of expertise.

When perusing your social media feeds it is much more challenging to decipher the credibility or influence of the friends, celebrities or companies you follow. Often when a tweet includes a link or makes an outrageous claim, it’s difficult to discern if the information is factually correct or supported.

A new breed of startups emerged to statistically calculate the amount of people an individual can influence, how much to trust that individual and on what topics. The leaders in computing these complex calculations include Klout, PeerIndex and Kred. Once the user connects his or her Facebook, Google+ and Twitter to the company, it uses algorithms to calculate influence.

Klout, the most ubiquitous social media influence ranking platform, has more than 100 million accounts globally. Klout searches your accounts for the amount of retweets, likes, 1+s, tagged posts, comments and other metrics that appear on your profiles. Then, a numerical value is associated with your activity and influence level, and therefore others can understand your social media influence.

Microsoft recently initiated a partnership with Klout. This partnership will integrate Klout’s statistical analysis capabilities into Bing’s search engine results. Over the past few years, Bing established itself as a social search engine and hopes Klout will help the second-place search engine bring a new style of results to users. Now on Bing traditional results are given in addition to a list of individuals who are influential on social media about that topic.

Critics have ridiculed Klout for its lack of transparency concerning the exact formula it uses to compute these ranking scores. Salesforce.com now requires the disclosure of an applicant’s Klout score when applying for certain social media-related jobs. Even though states like California and Maryland recently passed laws banning employers from asking for social media account passwords, but the disclosure of a Klout score is still permitted.

As more weight is being placed on social ranking mechanisms, it is imperative that students and young professionals keep actively participating in the social conversation. If you are an appliance salesmen, “talking” about or linking stories related to news in that industry could be advantageous. As companies take Klout scores seriously, it is important to ensure you are influential in your desired field of work.

The concept of ranking an individual’s influence on social media is a metric that may provide insight into the credibility or social reach of a given source. It’s foolish to value an opaque measurement, like a Klout score, as an effective indicator to judge a person’s capability to perform a job.

Jared Rosen is a sophomore advertising and marketing management major. His column appears weekly. He can be contacted at [email protected] or followed on Twitter at @jaredmarc14.

Published on October 9, 2012 at 1:00 am

Contact Jared: [email protected]