There has been much consternation and gnashing of teeth this week as Klout deployed its new scoring system that rates Social Media ‘influence’. As expected, the reaction was swift and noisy: many were incensed at the sudden decline in their score for seemingly specious reasons while many others took the opportunity to mock the fragile egos who fumed at the wild swings in a largely arbitrary index. Both reactions are equally valid.

I am sure that for a large number of users the sudden Klout haircut was little more than a trivial speedbump that has little effect on their online activity or network; at worst, perhaps, some might have felt a vague sense diminished self-worth as Klout’s external validation of their social media efforts evaporated. For those people the world still turns and maybe the ribbing about the stereotypical narcissism and self-absorption in social media is justified. People like to feel appreciated and Klout helped them feel that their online presence meant something to someone. However, there is a whole other class of social media users who use Klout for professional reasons. And those people were hung out to dry.

Like it or not social media has been infiltrated by the usual cohort of marketing, communications, and PR people that grease the wheels of the media machine [disclosure: I count myself as one of those weasely-weasels]. They buy ads, they promote brands, they increase awareness, and they foster communities that work both directly and indirectly towards corporate goals. This should come as no surprise to anybody. Like pretty much everything else in a business environment, the corporate bean counters need to measure things and to this end, many companies have flourished in the sunlight of social media, nourished by marketing budget dollars that need to demonstrate results. These companies have one thing in common: they all attempt to measure online activities and provide some quantitative basis for calculating the elusive Return On Investment (or, ROI in the acronym-heavy argot of business where words are time.)

Out of this field of companies that produce charts and graphs emerged one company that offered to explain social media success with single, easy number: Klout. People in social media like numbers—the bigger the better: how many friends, how many followers, how many likes, how many checkins, and how many +1′s you had became a way to assert your savvy. Klout was a great yardstick for hyper-social, type-A, extroverts who range over Twitter and Facebook: while gauche to directly discuss or compare numbers, a subtle sense of social media strata slowly formed, no doubt aided by tools like Seesmic that displayed a person’s Klout next to their profile (presumably to help determine if they were worthy of your attention).

Under the umbrella of influence [peddling?], Klout was able to co-opt brands to use Klout to promote their wares through people deemed influential enough to spread the word [and, in the spirit of disclosure, I've received plane tickets, hotels, a few meals, and movie tickets through said programs]. So Klout flourished and for a while, everyone was happy: the marketers got an easy number to demonstrate to brand bosses that social media spending was justified, the social media mavens got free stuff and bragging rights, and those who criticized such practices had a convenient target for their invective about the commercialization of social media.

But Klout was not content.

Their system has limits, the main one being that Klout’s scoring system is bounded by a top score of 100. As more people joined, more liquidity was created in the influence market. Scores floated upwards requiring occasional adjustments to relieve inflation-like pressures. Not everyone can be a top-tier tweeter and the Klout system requires scarcity: if everyone is highly-influential then nobody is influential.

Furthermore, that Klout’s methods and algorithm was unknown was troubling and cause for debate, demonstrably so after many revisions and seemingly arbitrary reassignment of Klout. Making the algorithm public would make it easier for spammers to game the system; or maybe it would expose the flimsiness of the premise and the small man behind the curtain furiously working the levers. We looked away not wanting to contemplate…for a while. Klout rejigged the scores of their black box algorithm several times without much incident, but maybe because previous tweaks largely kept scores the same (or lofted them even higher!) people remained complicit in a system we all felt iffy about.

However, this week’s round of changes saw most scores drop 10-12 points, triggering loud and immediate Sturm und Drang, with, ironically, the loudest wails hailing from the most influential quarter. And rightfully so.

Klout put itself in the position as the arbiter of influence, and the marketers, advertising, PR, and communications people latched onto its promise like Titanic survivors clinging to life preservers. They needed Klout to explain what happened to the bags of client cash stoking the hungry furnaces of social media campaigns. They needed graphs with trendlines showing incremental improvement, increased reach, and growing customer awareness. They needed a hero of social media metrics to help them fight against skeptical CEO’s and flinty accountants.

For a while Klout was that hero, but like the Pied Piper, that reliance carried an unexpected price. With the hooting and hollering today, maybe influencers (and the people who want to influence influencers) are realizing that maybe social media is more nuanced than a single number on a slide. And I think that realization is a good thing.

Social media is about relationships and the value of a relationship is not just about a quick flash and grabbing someone’s attention, it’s about building trust and assuring mutual benefit. Speaking to a well-connected friend a few years ago he told me he “didn’t get paid to make phone calls, he got paid because people would pick up the phone.” Social media is not about phone calls, it’s about the conversation. Maybe we need to rethink how (or if) it’s even possible to put a number on that.