Today’s guest post is by Sam Fiorella.

Last year will certainly be remembered by many marketers as the year social scoring was “called out.”

Blog posts, articles, and conference presentations about social influence scoring platforms such as Klout, Kred, and PeerIndex were fodder for heated debate, criticisms, and rants.

Aside from the common “influence cannot be measured by a numeric rank” protest, common criticisms included: Inaccurate scores and faulty algorithms, lack of context represented in the scores, undefined relationships between influencers and followers, no real connection to sales results, improper use of scores by HR and customer service departments, and the scores are easily manipulated. (more…)