Klout Deepens Its Bing Integration By Placing ‘Snapshots’ Alongside Your Search Results

Well, here’s another reason to care about your Klout score (and, y’know, actually create an account on Klout) — the company, which aims to measure social media influence, is announcing a prominent new integration with Microsoft’s search engine Bing.

About a year ago, Klout took a strategic investment from Microsoft and said it was integrating with Bing, for example by incorporating Bing results into its Klout score calculations.

Today it’s expanding that integration with something called Snapshots, which, if you opt in, will apparently show up on the right hand column of your search results in Bing. Once you’ve logged in to Klout and claimed your profile, the Snapshot will include your public LinkedIn profile, links to the other social network accounts that you’ve connected to Klout, your most “influential” recent moments on Twitter and Instagrams, topics on which you’re influential, and of course your Klout score.

This gives people a way to have more control over what shows up when others search for them. At the same time, Klout and Bing aren’t changing the search results directly or giving people too much overt control over what shows up in their snapshots. (I wouldn’t be able to make my Snapshot say, “Anthony Ha is the most awesome tech journalist ever” — unless, I suppose, I wrote that in my LinkedIn profile.)

Here’s how Klout explains the feature in a company blog post:

Search is one of the most common ways that information about you is discovered by other people. Snapshots on Bing enable anyone who signs up to verify and manage how they appear in Bing search results, based on their public social network profiles. You’ll now be able to easily share your professional accomplishments and highlights, as well as your most influential moments on Instagram and Twitter, when people search for you on Bing.

A company spokesperson told me that Snapshots should start showing up in Bing immediately.

By the way, you may have seen Business Insider’s story last month about the departure of COO Emil Michael and Klout’s broader struggle to find a business model. Shortly afterwards, CEO Joe Fernandez offered additional perspective in a blog post in which he admitted that it’s been a tough year: “The transition from interesting technology (or if you want to take the negative view, silly ego novelty) to real business has been painful.”