The most recent example comes by way of an outfit called Unmetric that sent me a “full report” that shows the Dallas Cowboys have the most Twitter and Facebook followers while the Chicago Bears are the “most engaged” on social media. This feat of research also included a nifty infographic with bar charts and more:

Unmetric, of course, is far from the only company cooking up rankings from online media. There’s Klout to rank people like Biebs and Obama as well as rivals like PeekYou which offers more rarified fare like the rank of the Supreme Court justices:

At this rate, it won’t be long until a company comes along to offer multi-media rankings for the neighborhood cats.

All of this raises the question of whether there is anything useful about all these studies and metrics. Does it matter that Bears fans are more “engaged” than Giants fans? Is it helpful to know that Clarence Thomas ranks #3 for web presence even though he’s regarded as sub-par jurist?

According to PeekYou CEO Michael Hussey, the point of the company is to “explore the web from a people perspective” and to show their media influence.

While some of these stats are no doubt useful to marketers, it remains to be seen if media/social media rankings will grow into a useful science or if they’re just a fad to feed our insatiable craving for rankings.

Matt Thomson, Klout’s VP of platform, says that a number of major companies—airlines, big-box retailers, hospitality brands—are discussing how best to use Klout scores. Soon, he predicts, people with formidable Klout will board planes earlier, get free access to VIP airport lounges, stay in better hotel rooms, and receive deep discounts from retail stores and flash-sale outlets. ‘We say to brands that these are the people they should pay attention to most,’ Thomson says. ‘How they want to do it is up to them.’

Also, the only person with a perfect-100 Klout score is Justin Bieber.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user [kossy@finedays]

Simon & Schuster’s Scribner division is releasing Stephen King’s e-single, “Mile 81,” on social influence calculator site Klout (which recently partnered with Spotify) as a free download for a week before the e-single officially goes on sale for $2.99 on September 1. The e-single is bundled with the first chapter of King’s upcoming book 11/22/63, which will be released in November.

This is Klout’s first partnership with a publisher. “We expect to see more publishers looking to release their works to Klout influencers first,” the company’s marketing manager, Megan Berry, told me.

“Mile 81″ is being offered as a Klout Perk to “a select number of Klout influencers.” At the moment, it is not showing up on my own Klout Perks page. Either I’m not influential enough or not deemed right for this perk: As Klout explains in a blog post, “Our goal is to provide Perks to the people who are in the best position to speak intelligently about a product to an engaged and interested audience.”

According to Klout, I am an influencer in “publishing,” “Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) Kindle,” and “e-books.” However, the Klout Perks currently offered to me include discounts on rock climbing and free anti-hangover energy drinks. It seems as if the e-single would be a better fit, but apparently not. I may never find out why that old station wagon is killing people.

“Foursquare adds another dimension to our concept of influence: local,” says Klout on its official blog. It says its “science team” has found that over two-thirds of Foursquare users post tips, and “80% of active users have ‘done’ [acted on] tips.” The company positions its addition of Foursquare as a way to reach out to users who “may not use Twitter or Facebook that much, but have a rich and engaged network on Foursquare.” That doesn’t make that much sense to me–Foursquare is still pretty niche-y, and it seems that the early-ish adopters using it probably still use Facebook and Twitter more.

That explanation works better for YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG), though. Klout has quietly added the option to allow users to link their YouTube accounts to their Klout accounts, although YouTube accounts aren’t yet figured into influence calculations, the company told me. But YouTube really is an area where non-Twitter or Foursquare hounds may have those “rich and engaged networks” that Klout wants to tap into.

In addition to Foursquare and YouTube, Klout connects to users’ Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) accounts. And according to the “Connected Networks” page on my profile, Google+ and Facebook Pages will be added soon.

Right now, if you want a free Spotify membership, you can go here and sign up for Klout by connecting your Twitter or Facebook account. At first, based on my experience (I’ve had a Klout account for a couple years) and some informal office experimentation (among my coworkers who hadn’t previously used Klout), it appeared that anyone who signed up could also get a code for a Spotify account. But when I checked Klout’s Twitter page, I saw a tweet to someone who’d complained about not getting an invite: “You have to have a score of 20, keep working on your score and you just might get lucky!“

Indeed, when I created a brand-new test Twitter account and then tried to link Klout to that account and get a Spotify invite, I received the following message:

Ouch! That’s pretty much a “you’re not cool enough for Spotify, but your more popular acquaintances might be!”

Anyway, I don’t know how many Twitter followers or Facebook friends you need to get a Klout score higher than 20, but it doesn’t appear to be too onerous if you’re using a real account instead of a newly created test one. In general, based on the experience in my office and with a few friends, it seems that most people who are already at least somewhat active on Twitter and Facebook are able to get Spotify invites when they sign up with Klout–suggesting that Klout’s partnership with Spotify was essentially designed to pull in new members and get attention. The threshold for being an “influencer” is low.

Yesterday Klout ran out of Spotify invites within a few hours–after giving away 15,000 to 20,000 of them, Klout CEO Joe Fernandez told VentureBeat. Fernandez also said to CNET that Klout had planned on thirty times its regular amount of traffic yesterday, but demand was greater than either Klout or Spotify had expected and “things just kind of started falling over.” Today, though, the promo is up and running again–and appears to still be going strong at the time of this writing. Everything went smoothly on my end, but a peek at Klout’s Twitter page suggests that the process isn’t working perfectly for everyone who’s tried to sign up.

At any rate, I’ve reached out to Klout to ask how many people signed up today and yesterday and how many Spotify invites were distributed–and I also asked how many Klout users have a score of 20 that would unlock Spotify access. I’ll update this post if I hear back. And now, I suppose, I’ll go give my new Spotify account a try.