Is There Room for a Klout for Professionals?

The 3-year-old Klout has already become the industry standard for measuring social media reach and influence, but the company no longer has that market to itself.

The Sarasota, Fla.-based PROskore is testing the waters for a sort of Klout for professionals, though PROskore CEO Bill Jura would likely recoil at the comparison. Jura says that the main difference between PROskore and Klout is that his company takes into account more than just social media.

That is one component of a PROSkore, but others include your background and your engagement on PROSkores network. The hope is that recruiters and businesspeople will ! look at your PROskore as a quick measure of your networking prowess and your skill at your chosen profession. Jura says, however, that scores measured on a one to 100 scale should be taken in context.

Someone could live in a remote city and 20 would be pretty good, he says, referring to the PROskore. Jura says that for people in big cities anything above a 50 or 60 is doing pretty well.

But how does PROskore get those numbers? Partially by filling in details about their business and profession, but PROskore also culls data from Twitter, Facebook, Klout and LinkedIn, though the score is weighted to give the latter more influence.

Jura evolved PROskore from Fast Pitch!, a network for small businesspeople that had been around for five years. Eyeing an opportunity, he rejiggered the site to provide rankings and launched it earlier this month.

Garth Holsinger, VP of global sales and business development at Klout, says hes not worried about the competition. Im actually kind of intrigued, he told Mashable, there are copycats out there, but we consider ourselves the standard. Holsinger says Klout has eight Ph.Ds working on the companys scoring and he considers Klout to be in a good position as long as the science is sound.