I just wanted to drop a note and give a hearty congratulations to Joe Fernandez and the team from Klout on their $8.5M funding round this week. Clearly Joe and his team are onto something with their quest to become “the standard for influence” in the social web and so we congratulate them on that!

When I first met Joe last summer in San Francisco and we chatted about what we wanted our respective companies and platforms to become Joe was clear: he wanted to be the “Nielsen of Social Media,” a public aggregator of social influence metrics that could be used to determine the, well, social clout of any individual. Regardless of whether you agree with your Klout score, based on the great marketing work Joe’s team has done this year, you have to agree he is doing a great job executing on his vision.

During the same meeting Joe asked what Jeff and I wanted Twitalyzer to become. My response? “The Google Analytics of Twitter.” Whereas Joe’s goal has been to be outward-facing, our goal all along has been to become a business platform used internally at companies trying to measure the effectiveness of their presence in Twitter. To that end we have iterated the product four times, most recently launching version 4.0 on January 2nd, and added hundreds of companies who share our vision.

It’s not $10M, but we’re not beholden to anyone and we’re wildly profitable (for those of you counting at home.)

I bring this up because recently Shel Israel brought to our attention a specific use of Twitalyzer that honestly makes me uncomfortable. Shel related a story of a social media consultant who had been passed over for some work because he had a “low Twitalyzer score.” Shel, using himself as an example, made the comparison between himself and Michael Jackson (the deceased pop-singer who still manages an update or two a week.) The big “oh crap” comment was:

“I have low confidence that many people will like to contract [a social media consultant] whose score is 13.1%.”

Here’s the thing: I personally think that any company or individual who is making a hiring or contracting decision based on our data, Klout scores, or any number is making a huge mistake! I expressed this much to Mr. Israel and I think he understood:

“They made it clear that they did not intend for their product to be used in the ways I described and I think I made clear that at least a few people are using it in precisely that way.”

Our data is designed to objectively evaluate your efforts to use Twitter for a business purpose and to make comparisons against other businesses and individuals taking a particular approach towards the medium. We provide over 30 different metrics so that YOU can decide which measures of success are right for you, and our goal is not to be some type of divining rod for influence or any other type of social capital.

Right, you say, so what about our benchmark reports and all of the comparative stuff in the application? A reasonable challenge, but hopefully some of you noticed that in the 4.0 release we have included a very complete set of metrics in every comparative report and, more importantly, we allow you to order your benchmarks by whichever criteria you choose. Also, in version 3.0 last year and as a general rule we have moved away from “influence” as a primary metric, instead preferring our “impact” calculation which we think A) is more comprehensive and B) is much more well-aligned with a business use of Twitter.

We did explain to Mr. Israel that a 13% score for impact is actually very, very good … better than 97.7% of the hundreds of thousands of individuals we are tracking in Twitalyzer. We also have an update in version 4.1 which we call “Shel’s fix” that should be out soon that will do a better job of highlighting percentile scores which I believe are equally valuable to the averages and raw data we present.

But the fact remains, and I want to be very clear on this point, to use Twitalyzer (or Klout for that matter) to make any decision about an individual other than broadly how they use Twitter as a tool is a mistake and does disservice to the individual, Twitter, and our analytics platform.

No disrespect to Joe, Klout, or any of the other measurement services out there, but there is no calculation that tells you nearly enough about an individual to allow you to make a buying, hiring, or any other kind of personal decision. At the point where we are making personal decisions based on a single number — one that even in a transparent system like ours people still don’t take the time to understand completely — our humanity has been lost and, in my humble opinion, we are better off turning the damn machines off and calling it a day.

Use Twitalyzer data to determine whether the things you are trying are working; use Twitalyzer data to explore how other people use Twitter in an effort to find people who can help you with your goals; use Twitalyzer data to understand who has an outsized impact in this still emerging medium … but please, please, don’t use Twitalyzer data to decide whether to take a phone call, respond to an email, or reply to a tweet.

I welcome conversation around this point, either in public via my personal Twitter account (@erictpeterson) or in private via email (eric at twitalyzer.com).