Bragging rights aside, what can marketers do with Klout scores
Klout score may be about ego for bloggers, but the company’s founder concedes his social media measurement service faces challenges articulating its value to brands and the marketing community.
Joe Fernandez, the founder and CEO of Klout–the influence discovery tool that has bloggers, tweeters and all social communicators buzzing about their Klout scores–was in Toronto Tuesday at Mesh Marketing explaining the company’s origins and objectives. He said brands are moving away from measuring how many followers they have and are now looking for real engagement, and he believes influencers drive a lot of that.
“What we’re doing now is very important and not just a novelty,” he said. “The goal for Klout is to help individuals understand their influence and help them leverage that, basically against brands.
“Down the road, the people who aren’t creating content will start trusting a metric. I hope it’s Klout,” he said. Klout measures, through Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels, a person’s ability to drive activity and engagement by measuring things such as numbers of followers and how often those followers spread a Klout user’s content.
However, Fernandez said Klout could do a better job helping businesses understand how to use its service. To that end, he shared case studies with Mesh attendees.
Hotels in Las Vegas, for example, use Klout in their reservation systems. When a guest checks in, the reservation system uses Klout to determine how influential the guest is. “Our message to those businesses is, you should give every customer the best service possible, but when a ‘whale’ walks in who has network value and can bring customers to you or turn them away, you should be aware of that and give them extra attention.”
With respect to qualifying what a person’s Klout number equates to, he acknowledged there is no simple answer. “We do a really bad job of putting that in any kind of context,” said Fernandez. “And that’s been our biggest failing, and it’s where we’re putting the most effort right now.”
Fernandez told Marketing that when he started Klout, he didn’t foresee the incredible personal attachment people would forge with their scores, and the degree of backlash he would personally receive when the company altered its algorithm last month–in many cases lowering users’ scores.
“We saw people trying to be insincere with activities to increase their score,” he said. “The integrity of the score is everything to us. It hurts that our most passionate users felt the brunt of that score change, but our job is to measure how influential people are and we’re going to keep pushing the envelope there.”
The origins of Klout date back to late 2007, with Fernandez shut in for three months with his jaw wired shut after a surgery, he suggests it was a combination of pain killers and his data engineering background that led him to come up with the idea. Personally active in social media, he realized that TV and radio are measured, but now people are broadcasters, so they should be measured as well.
Does Klout have what it takes to become “the” social media trust metric? Post your thoughts in our comment section.
