Will A Klout Score Damage Your Business Brand?

With news that Klout launched scores for businesses, how will that impact your brand?

Will it decrease engagement? Will people think that there is no longer a reason to promote a brand to friends and family if a business has a high Klout score?

Will people trust the Klout business scores? Consider all the things in the news recently about Yelp, and how positive reviews for businesses mysteriously disappear.

Will a high Klout score actually damage a business because it will dissuade fans from becoming enthusiastic brand advocates? Could this result in a loss of fans? Could a Klout score also result in a decrease in a brand's engagement across all social channels?

According to the company's announcement, "Klout for Business will continue to develop into a portal where we intend to help brands and agencies streamline their understanding, management, and engagement with this important segment of the digital population," explained Matthew Thomson, Klout VP of Business Development, "Our goal is to help brands and influencers build relationships that transcend the current advertiser-consumer dynamic."

I don't know about you, but that doesn't address any of my questions about Klout business scores.

Back in October of last year, Klout integrated Facebook into Klout scores. According to a press release at the time, "Klout integrated Facebook pages into its Klout score calculations, which should result in higher scores for page users." But consider this, if higher scores are the result by linking social profiles, then the score is just a combination of connections among all linked profiles - and that is not an accurate reflection of actual klout. How many conversations are ongoing? How many retweets are shared? How many other variables are not considered that should be?

With all of these unanswered questions, it makes one wonder how long the strategy sessions lasted at Klout before launching scores for businesses.

So, here's the question of the hour: will you promote your Klout business score? Please chime in.