Klout, social media and why they aren't going to make it work for them

For those of you who follow me on twitter you know I've been having issues with Klout for the last month.  Klout.com was a nifty page that allowed you to see your overall influence online.  Depending on what you tweeted, blogged about and put on Facebook they would give you influences.  You could then give 5 +Ks to people each day who you felt influenced you in certain areas.

I started using Klout a few months ago and realized just how many people I interacted with on a regular basis.  I also got to see how I influenced others.  After a week or so I ended up with an influence, parenting.  Now people could give me a +K on that topic while I worked on getting more influences.  It was at the point several people told me that they were surprised sewing and crafting weren't on my list of influences.

I started asking questions about new influences and finally got a canned response that told me they added new ones every week and to just keep tweeting and posting away. (amusingly I checked my page and this is what it said "You are currently influential about 0 topics:Last Klout topics refresh: Never", wait, didn't you just tell me the topics were refreshed every week?)
The next week my influence was gone. This was 3.5 weeks ago.

For the last 3.5 weeks I've been emailing them and tweeting them almost constantly with no answer.  Today I finally got a response in the form of 2 separate emails and a tweet.  They all said they same canned answer, which didn't answer my question.  I told them this and both emails gave me another canned response telling me that no one had given +Ks to my influence.  Again I told them this was untrue and wanted to know exactly how they decided influences but no one could tell me.


Again they stopped responding.  This is a company that pretty well depends on social media to work and yet they refuse to answer questions or work with their users.  They were generally rude and unhelpful.  Since people are going to them to try Spotify the service has gone downhill.

At this point what I'm wondering is why you would not only be so nasty to your user, but to the people who spread the word on the internet. I've seen all sort of people on Facebook and Twitter expressing that they are having the same problem and many who have left Klout because of it.

Well, I'm a blogging mom and I'm going to make my voice heard.