It's almost Emmy time

The producers of House of Cards are getting creative in touting their cast for the upcoming Emmy awards. Here in Washington, DC, where the show is a hands down favorite of Hill staff, we love the yardsign idea.

The 65th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards will honor the best in primetime television programming airing from June 1, 2012 until May 31, 2013, so the 13 HOC episodes released by Netflix slide right in there. But will they consider it officially television? Well, it's being broadcast in Australia!

The awards ceremony, hosted by Neil Patrick Harris, will be held on September 22, 2013 at the Nokia Theatre in Downtown Los Angeles, California.  I'm pulling for Corey Stoll, who gave a riveting performance as Congressman Peter Russo - tragic, human, heartbreaking in his final scenes on screen.  Illuminating interview of Stoll at ET Online here. This was truly a breakout role for a terrific actor. 

An actor's Klout number: What does it mean?

I attended a SAG workshop a couple of weeks ago where a recent arrival from New York City was adamant that an actor’s Klout number was now checked by every casting person in NY and Los Angeles and that it was entering into the decision to hire.

I queried my agent about this and she said her talent in LA talked about it a lot. They told her it is a number that tells how well you are doing in the acting business. Famous actors have a large number;  new talent much, much smaller. Actors have to work their way up the ladder, they said - work hard, get great roles - to increase their numbers.

The SAG actress who insisted it was a big deal said she had 2,500 Twitter followers and a 28 Klout number, which she said was pretty good. Well I decided to run a test using my Twitter account, because I had until then seldom tweeted anything and had only 4 followers.

I started out with an 11 Klout number and within a week had manipulated it up to 31, simply by replying to tweets from large entertainment organizations and famous industry people in a way that encouraged them to retweet my comment to their own followers. So instead of just reaching out to my 4 followers, I was suddenly reaching out to director Ron Howard’s 650,000 followers, or FilmFestNews' 49,000 followers.

Basically, what I did was write every reply as a complete thought that repeated the basics of the original tweet and added information the author might think valuable.

Interestingly, the rise in my Klout number did not affect my IMDb rating, which actually dipped slightly during the same period. (My Twitter followers went up though; I now have 11!  Hah!)

Surely there must be more to this because, as my experience showed, an actor does not have to work hard and get great roles (not that I object to that!) to get their number up. On the other hand, every big name in the biz seems to be on Twitter, including people like Ron Howard, who you would think would have far more important things to do than post a tweet every hour! (Love ya, Ron!)

So I'm going to keep my number up.  At least until somebody figures out that this is not the best measure for box office.

Anyone have any more on this? Am I confusing this Klout number with a different Klout number? Please chime in.