Whether you simply employ Facebook for your personal use or you are actively blogging, you are creating a sphere of influence online. If you engage in online activities for your business, odds are you are trying to build a community of advocates – to buy your product or service, generate word of mouth or simply to influence the search engines.

The question is: What is the potential to instigate action or reaction, based on your content and online reputation?

Klout (www.klout.com) is a social media tool that measures your online influence by evaluating your activity on a variety of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube and others. It doesn’t just take into account your actions but also how your fans, followers and friends react to what you share.

According to Klout’s website: “The Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action. Every time you create content or engage, you influence others.” The Klout Score uses data from social networks in order to measure:

• How many people you influence (after filtering out spam and bots – how many people are you really connected to).

• How much you influence them (what actions do they take based on what you share).

• How influential they are (the reach and influence of the people that you inspire to take action – the ripple effect).

All of that data is crunched together, and you’re issued a score from zero to 100, with 100 being the most influential. The average score is about 20.

The score becomes harder to increase as you move up the scale. Ad agency giant David Armano has a score of 82. Joe Pulizzi from the Content Marketing Institute has a 71, Arianna Huffington of Huffington Post is a 75, and superstar blogger Chris Brogan has a 77. All four would be considered megastars in the world of Klout.

I can hear you now: It’s just about ego and popularity contests. But the real value of Klout isn’t the score. It’s the label, which shows how you appear to others online.

Klout has divided and defined influence into a 16-grid scale. It doesn’t just measure volume and reach, it measures HOW you influence. Based on your behavior and what people do with what you share, you are given a label. David Armano’s behavior and interactions make him a tastemaker. Joe Pulizzi is a pundit, Arianna is a celebrity, and Chris Brogan is a curator.

I think it’s the grid that makes Klout worthy of our attention. A wealth of tools count what you do – the number of tweets, how many comments your Facebook status update receives, the quantity of thumbs up you get on your YouTube videos. But there are very few that allow us to see the sum total of how our interactions are perceived and what actions they inspire.

Your Klout score refreshes every day, so you can experiment with different blends of content on the various social media tools.

Based on your own marketing and social media goals, you can keep tweaking until your label matches your intentions. Being able to see how you are perceived and then being able to make adjustments to that perception are what make Klout a unique and valuable tool worthy of your attention.

Drew McLellan is Top Dog at McLellan Marketing Group and blogs at www.drewsmarketingminute.com. He can be reached by email at Drew@MclellanMarketing.com. © 2011 Drew McLellan