Klout-Brand Equation

Yes, it's indeed Klout and not Cloud. In the recent times Cloud computing has got lot of attention. But, I am not referring to that. It's KLOUT..... check it out. 

Here’s a bit about a company called Klout.  

Klout is a San Francisco based company that provides social media analytics that measures a users influence across their social network. The analysis is done on data collected from sites such as Twitter and Facebook  and measures the size of a person's network, the content created, and how other people interact with that content.  

Here’s how they do it :  

 Klout measures influence by using data points from Twitter, such as: following count, follower count, retweets, list memberships, how many spam/dead accounts are following you, how influential the people that retweet you are, and unique mentions. This information is blended with Facebook data such as comment, likes, and the number of friends in your network to come up with a "Klout Score" that measures a user's online influence.

What’s new:

Now a klout score will determine your access level to different brands on facebook pages. This could get you some perks that is of course if you have sufficient klout score. A company called Involver has teamed up with klout and developed an application, through which brands can tailor facebook experiences for different users depending on their klout scores. To quote a senior VP of Involver “We’ve taken Klout’s core business and brought it into our platform. The first application is a simple coupon-esque experience. A brand will be able to bring an application out of their Page, configure to deliver content to people above and below certain Klout scores, and then input whatever that content is”

The content can take various formats, like an extended trailer, more engaging pages, special discount offer. In fact the possibilities seem limitless. Now brands can maneuver into the right target audience. This will allow brands to access fans who really matter, and conversely people who are fans of brands will have to work hard to get there. The first brand to integrate this application is Audi USA. Starting from 22.06.2011.

There is a term called “like-gating” aka “fan-gating”, something all facebook users have experienced it sometime or the other. It’s simple, unless you ‘like’ a certain page, you won’t get to see the contents of the fan page. One can sense a paradigm shift to ‘klout-gating’.

My personal views:

This might be a game changer. Brands can customize by personalizing the facebook pages to different users based on their Klout score. Which simply means users with higher score gets better offers. Effectively brands can transform each user into brand ambassadors. Thus, this will get the consumers to play a bigger role with more involvement, after all who doesn’t want to be pampered a bit.

This can challenge the management 20-80-20 formula. Which means 20% of consumers account for 80% of a company’s revenues, and the other 80% percent of consumers account for 20% of a company’s revenues. If this venture of Klout catches on, thousands of brand fanatics will perhaps increase their activity on facebook, befriend more, to get a better klout score. Clearly the winners would be the brands who take it up. Not to forget increased activity on facebook will lead to bigger revenue for facebook too, as other companies would like to capitalize on this big traffic by strategically placing their ads. This brings branding at a greater level. Competition between brands has become competition between consumers too. I think it’s brilliant! Here's the link if you want to check out Klout