Involver, a social marketing platform, has partnered with Klout to create a Facebook app that unlocks special content based on someone’s Klout score. Basically, if a brand uses this app on its Facebook page it can detect if you have a high Klout score and serve you up special content based on the level of your influence. What’s a Klout score you ask? It’s a number that represents how influential you are on a social network – how many friends/fans, how often do people engage with your content.Audi is the first brand to test this out, but no doubt other brands will follow, offering up rewards (coupons, special branded content, rewards) to those who matter most. Is this dangerous? Perhaps a little. I may be a hardcore fan of your product but I may not have a ton of followers on Twitter. On the other hand, if you’re trying to get the word out on a new product rewarding those with social influence could a great strategy.
Until Klout, and some of the other listening platforms, companies had to really dig to identify influencers. Now companies will know who “matters” more within seconds. I predict this will either tick off the loyalist (those who don’t spend a ton of time online but still love your brand/product) and/or make everyone work a little harder on producing good content and treating their followers well in order to pump up their Klout score so they can reap benefits.
Klout is a cool tool, but I also think you still need to pay attention to who is loyal to you and reward those folks as well. If we were to go all ”high school” on this topic – there should be a nice balance between the cool kids and your best friends. They’re both important in their own ways.