Warning: the following blog post may contain sarcasm

Poor old Klout. It does come in for a bashing from the digital communications community from time to time. So much so that some notable people have opted out, frustrated with the way in which it attempts to gauge influence, by how it can be gamed and alarmed by the way in which it uses, and sells, personal data – there have even been questions about whether Klout is actually operating illegally.

Regardless of all that, however, people stick with it and it still seems to be gaining in popularity. So if you feel that your Klout score needs a boost in order to reflect your true level of guru-like ninja influence, I think I’ve stumbled across the secret for you: have a birthday.

I know it might not seem like the best way to demonstrate your awesome level of social media awesomeness, but at the end of the day Klout is the only proper way we can measure our social communications awesomeness, right? It is, after all, The Standard For Influence – it says so on the website. So it makes sense to do all we can to ensure our score is as guru-high as possible. After all, there’s no point in trying to sell your expert webinars and training courses on how to get an awesome Klout score if you can’t display your own awesome Klout score on your website.

So my recommendation is to make sure you have a birthday every couple of months and to pimp this around your networks as much as you can. The effect of this is fantastic, as the graph below demonstrates.

Last week I had a birthday. The day before my birthday, March 13th, I had a Klout score of 58.35, which is pretty awesome.

By March 15th, my score had jumped by an entire point, to 59.45, which is even more awesome.

The reason? On March 14th, loads of my Facebook friends posted birthday wishes on my wall, and loads of my Twitter followers sent me messages of congratulations. Mostly, I suspect, because of my guru-like status as a social media ninja. Either way though, Klout recognises that anyone who ever sends me any message about anything makes me more influential, no matter what the context of that message. And that’s a valuable learning for anyone who wants an awesome Klout score.

So in order to become more influential I’m devising a strategic plan of birthdays and anniversaries over the next year. Oh, and baby scans and births – they always get a huge reaction. This is my top recommendation for social media awesomeness for 2012. Let me know how you get on, or if you have any other tips on how to sell over-priced expert webinars about how to get an awesome Klout score.