Klout is a company that measures your influence across the social networking platforms of twitter, facebook, and recently added, linkedin. The official description from their site is: The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score. Measuring social influence is not something new. Grader and plenty of others have been doing it for a long time. So, what is the big deal about Klout? The big deal is that it has quickly become the social media score lots of companies care about. What does that really mean? It means that your score could play an important role in your ability to be a part of campaigns, sell ad space, or even get noticed through customer service. There is a lot of backroom shop talk about how Klout is being used. It is becoming widely known that big hotel chains use it to decide if you are worthy of an upgrade. There are stories of people being moved to large suites and penthouses simply by mentioning their score. There ...