Last week Klout and Involver partnered together to do something very interesting on Facebook.
First, you should know what Klout is about. Klout is a tool that measures social influence across the web. The higher the Klout score, the higher the social influence, at least to according to the people at Klout.
Involver is a social media management system that allows brands to publish, monitor, measure and manage social media content across multiple social networks in one dashboard.
Now that the formal introductions are out of the way here is what they have done.
Klout and Involver have allowed brands to deliver specific content to fans with a specific Klout score. The greater your “Klout” score the more exclusive content from the brand will become available to you. In theory this seems like it could be a rather interesting way to deliver specific content to a fan with a larger social reach than other fans with a smaller social reach. While the two companies should be applauded for opening this proverbial door of social reach potential there are still some major fundamental problems with it.
Problem #1
The announcement of this partnership came with an example. If you visited the Audi USA Facebook page you were greeted with a message prompting you to “Get your Klout Score and download your Audi Le Mans desktop graphic.” Clicking on this image will prompt you to authorize access to your Klout Score and thus allow you to download the Le Mans graphic image. I wasn’t a fan of Audi before I authorized access and despite allowing Audi access to my Klout Score I wasn’t prompted to “like” the Audi page so I took my Le Mans graphic and ran. Since Audi doesn’t even gain a fan from me authorizing my Klout score there just doesn’t seem to be a lot of value here especially after just giving me an image to download.
Problem #2
Having a higher Klout score will give me access to “more exclusive” content. So if I am not constantly working on increasing my Klout Score am I not worth it to the brand to give me access to something exclusive? According to Involver “the Klout Coupon App is an innovated way to engage users while targeting your most valuable promotions to your most influential fans.” Again, I guess since I do not spend 12 hours a day tweeting and increasing my Klout score I am not worth receiving that special promotion. Cool kids only I guess.
Right now there just doesn’t seem to be much value to this interesting play from Involver and Klout but that doesn’t mean that there wont be. On one hand the brand really isn’t giving anything away of any value and on the other hand the brand makes itself seem like they will only cater to the really “popular kids.” There is a fine line here that needs to be balanced but I believe with a bit more thought and strategy surrounding it, things can be rather beneficial for both the brand and the fan. Kudos to Involver and Klout for opening this door of social influence now we just have to see if it makes sense for us to step through it.
10+ Years of SaaS 