A few months ago, I publicly bashed Klout in an article on Mashable (How to Gamify Your Marketing) for not thinking things through and as a result, undermining their mission. So this morning when I got their email newsletter featuring a post from their CEO Joe Fernandez on Klout's vision, I felt obliged to see what they had to say.

According to Joe, "We believe that every person who creates content online has influence on some topic, to some group of people. We want to help every person maximize their reach and influence and to be recognized for the impact they have."

My frustration with Klout is that they consistently undermine that goal (that I think is a great goal) by taking the end user experience for granted. Here's what I wrote about them in my article on gamification:

For instance, Klout is jockeying for position as the authoritative metric for social media influence scoring. They use an algorithm to make it simple for marketers: A Klout score of 15 = not so good. A Klout score of 99 = awesome!

However, Klout is jeopardizing its core objective by applying gamification principles to its user experience. It added the game mechanic of “group play” to encourage viral spread. (Klout allows you to gift five “K” points to people who have influenced you to log in). But if a company wants to gauge the influence of a user, they don’t want it to be affected by a system that can be “gamed.” The second business objective (increasing membership) may undermine the first business objective (establishing credibility).

While Klout has done some gamification exceptionally well — like getting brands to offer perks to those with high influence scores — their mission to become “The Standard for Influence” is being threatened by their lack of a holistic view.

Klout has since removed this ability to "game" the system. I'd like to think I had something to do with that, but I probably didn't.

Today, Klout is once again taking their user experience for granted and as a result undermining their agenda.

Roadblock 1. Useless data visualization.

The big in-your-face hero visual you get when you look at your influence on Klout is supposed to give you a snapshot for how your influence is trending. But the way the display data is useless.

Why? Well, take a look at my "Score Analysis" below. First of all, you would think it was plunging, but it's really just dropped three points in the past month. If I want to get a longer view of how I'm doing, I can't. The result is that it's not really a very valuable tool.

Roadblock 2. Useless perks.

Clearly, the monetization strategy for Klout lies in "perks." Perks are rewards that companies give to people based on their influence. Great perks in some cases. Microsoft was just giving away free Windows Phones to people with influence scores over 50. As you can see, my influence today is 47.5 so I don't qualify.

The problem is that none of these Perks are actually things I can use. I browsed through every item in their nav and each and every perk had a message that said "Sorry, you don't qualify" or "Sorry, this perk is full."

How hard would it be to have a tab that said "available perks" and didn't make me as a user feel frustrated? Not so hard.

Roadblock 3. Big ass bugs.

In writing this post, I logged in to my Klout account and saw that I needed to update my Facebook password. I followed the instructions on screen, clicked "merge accounts" and nothing happened. And did it again. And nothing happened. So, my Klout score doesn't include my Facebook.

Facebook is kind of important.

Klout needs a holistic view. 

My opinion is that there is consistent pattern of missing the mark in critical parts of the user experience that Klout needs to address. I think they have a really good chance at becoming "The standard for influence." I think that they have a really good shot at becoming the GroupOn of influence marketing.

But I think that if they don't focus on their users first, they are going to fail.

Related posts:

How to Gamify Your Marketing

7 Steps to Improving your Brand Experience

11 Tips to Improve Social Media Measurement

What Works in Social