Thursday, August 23, 2012

BuzzFeed - Latest: Young, Cool...and Into Online Influence Metrics?

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thumbnail Young, Cool...and Into Online Influence Metrics?
Aug 24th 2012, 01:32

Meet #YungKloutGang, an otherwise typical group of friends who are really proud of their social media game.

The faces of YungKloutGang.

Last Saturday, slightly hungover, I spent the afternoon texting with a friend about a show that we had missed the previous night. He sent me a link to a particularly gripping account of the event, Riff Raff's San Francisco debut, from someone named @BoyTweetsWorldX, whose exploits on acid were rendered entirely in all caps.

On his bio and across dozens of tweets was a strange hashtag — #YungKloutGang. Something about "Yung" paired with "Klout" made me laugh — it didn't make any sense. Why would kids care about Klout, a site that attempts to quantify the power someone has on Twitter or Facebook through a complicated algorithm that seems, frankly, useless?

So I went about untangling the #YKG web.

It turned out to be a group of eight — originally, four — friends, all in their early 20s, all into music, going out and, most especially, the Internet. In some ways, they aren't unique at all: There are thousands of kids like them on Twitter, Facebook, FormSpring and the like, revealing way more about their lives than they probably should. They're not particularly famous, nor are they promoting anything in particular, besides, generally, themselves. But there is something fascinating about how this group has seized upon a kind of niche stature that is tied to what Klout claims to measure — the amount one can influence, impact or capture an audience online. They're friends in the real world, but they don't see a distinction between social status online and off-, and they've seized on Klout to create their particular collective identity in the way that teenagers (and adults) have been doing since the beginning of civilization. It strikes me as the kind of thing that more and more kids will probably do as they grow up using the kind of tools that older people see as the domain of geeks and public figures and those with a specific personal interest in promoting themselves.

A typical night with #YungKloutGang, going to the club, casually taking acid and tweeting about it for hours.

Brittney Scott (@B666S), 20, first met Lina Abascal (@linalovesit) and Chhavi “Chippy Nonstop” Nanda (@chippy_nonstop) late last year, but she had already been introduced to them online — she started following them on Twitter a month earlier and thought they were "really funny." In fact, she thought the whole crew of seven childhood friends from San Francisco got her sensibility: hypersocial, into hip-hop and dance music and not afraid of being obnoxious.

"We're mostly like tight because of the internet," she said. "We mostly don't live near each other. But it was cool to meet people as interested in the Internet as much as I am."

And indeed, this group — who christened themselves over brunch this past spring — is really into the Internet.

"The name is kind of a joke," Scott said, before explaining that it also kind of isn't. (Abascal said that they had considered and rejected the name InsaneKloutPosse as well.) #YungKloutGang now has its own fan Tumblr, and Scott says she's been recognized out at clubs and parties thanks to her Twitter avatar. She also got her job, at an L.A. boutique, from someone who noticed her online presence. In fact, all of the #YKG derive some kind of professional frisson from being prominent on Twitter. Bradley Exum (@MPHDmusic) does marketing; Demian Becerra (@theholymountain) works as a photographer; Erin Bates (@celebates) and Abascal have degrees in journalism; and Chippy, perhaps the most well-known of the group with over 6,000 followers, raps.

"I've said publicly on Twitter that if I didn't have the Internet, i'd have no friends, no job, no boyfriend, no life," said Abascal, who was trying on clothes at American Apparel while we spoke, "I've hooked up with boys who've DM'ed me their numbers. I think it's funny."

"I am basically on the Internet all the time," Scott said, blithely. "I love the internet."

There can be drawbacks, too. Jasper Abellera, BoyTweetsWorld, working as an assistant to a stylist, almost got fired when his employer saw videos of him doing drugs online. That didn't stop him from continuing to post about drugs and alcohol, although he changed his Twitter handle (it used to be his name) and doesn't use his picture as his avatar.

The KloutGang isn't trying to sell anything — they're not trying as a group to get jobs DJing or modeling or even getting paid to be glamorous in a time-honored Lower East Side kind of way. But in general, what they're doing is a good career move. Skills in social media are highly sought after now. As Forbes notes more than 1.5% of all job postings contain the term.


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