Here are two cute kittens to restore some sanity.
Hello, fellow tweeters! How’s your Klout health? Good? Middling? On life support? Cartwheeling across a grassy knol?
Go check it out because the numbers on your Klout report could very well make you a millionaire.
Or at least help you become an investor in some hot startups.
Klout is partnering with Wahooly to offer equity in a select group of start-ups to members with high Klout score. In return, you’ll have to tweet and help promote the start-up.
Sounds brilliant? Oh, it’s absolutely gobsmackingly smashingly brilliant, yes sir it is. Tweet in exchange for equity in startups. Genius.
Really, world, have we come to this now?
At a conceptual level, I can see the appeal: in the brightly lit halls of the Klout headquarters, a bunch of marketing guys in razor sharp Armani suits sip champagne and brainstorm marketing ideas. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that startups need publicity. Some badly enough to shill out a part of their company for it.
And Twitter celebs, well, it’s just one more tweet for them.
It’s a win-win situation for all. Everyone happy, turn down the music, turn off the lights, and let’s all head back home. Yay for social media!
But wait. Something’s wrong here.
First of all, what kind of entrepreneur would sell equity in his company in return for a few tweets? Not the serious kind, I’m sure. Can you fathom the meaning of this? You are essentially selling a part of your company for some cheap traffic. Good entrepreneurs take as much time to decide on which investors to pursue. That’s why we have sites like TheFunded which obsessively follow VCs. A good investor is as much a part of your team as your co-founder or your CTO. That idiot Tweeter who stifled away a yawn as he typed into TweetDeck? He might just not give a single fuck about what you or your startup.
Yet, Joe-Tweeter will get to carry around a business card that says “investor”, while you, dear Entrepreneur, will see your share in the company dwindle.
There are better ways to gain traffic. I can tell you a dozen right now (first: build an awesome product. The rest eleven: hustle). You shouldn’t have to sell stake in your company to no-name Tweeter for it.
More frightening is what it implies for our society as a whole. Is Twitter (or your Klout score) really that important? I know plenty of functional retards on Twitter with massive follower counts. But just because a train wreck is fascinating to watch doesn’t mean we, as a society, should give up our meaningful lives, gather inside a massive stadium and wreck trains, competitively.
Your Klout score should (and does) mean nothing outside of the echo chamber that is Twitter. And it certainly should be any qualification for someone to turn ‘investor’.
