5 Reasons Why Klout Perks Is a Great Marketing Tool

For those of you who've been here before, you'd recall my doubts and bashing (just a little) of this new social media metric system. But now I am reassured and actually finding myself quite happy with Klout.

Everyone loves to know how well they're doing quantified; whether it be a grade on an exam, business revenue reports, and more, people like to see the results and changes from their efforts. Many may not agree that social media, due to its "social" aspect, should be quantified, as it can never be properly quantified; however, just as psychology or sociology can be quantified through both qualitative and quantitative data, so can social media! You may say that there are a thousand variables and aspects to be taken account of and still it wouldn't be accurate... that's the same as psychology or psychiatry! (Or natural sciences for that matter... but we will not dive into the philosophy of "how we know what we know" right now.)

PERKS!
One of the super cool things happen to be Klout Perks. It is so far the most innovative and effective marketing tool I've seen this year. Here's why:

1. It puts the list of specific target audience straight in your palms
- Since it ranks users in terms of influential scores, topics of influence, social style and etc., Klout can pull up the very specific audience your company wants to target. It gives you how influential an individual is, the topics they are influential about, where they live, and many more. Whether it be mommy bloggers in the field of Food who are influential about #restaurants or #vegan, or students studying in the Boston area influential about #basketball, you name it, they can pull up a list for you.

2. Free Stuff
- Who doesn't like free stuff? Enough said.

3. Not only free, but COOL free stuff.

The Klout perks give out a variety of free things (and events!) ranging from free movie premiers, HP laptops, popchips and a bunch of cool things people would want to get for free!

4. They help cultivate EVANGELISTS!
- Since they help companies give free stuff out to the RIGHT people who are interested, they help companies empower evangelists. For example, a mommy blogger who has been given a free premier to KungFu Panda 2 would be ecstatic! She would bring her family, perhaps her friends' families, enjoy her time here, and tweet about it!

5. Brings themselves business
- Because it has cool free stuff, it helps attract more users = more companies to partner with = more free stuff = the awesome self-sustaining vicious cycle!


Any other reasons why you think Klout Perks are super cool? Do let me know :).

How Legit is Klout score?

For those of you who aren't familiar with Klout scores:

It's an emerging tool to measure users' social media influence on Twitter and Facebook through algorithms which scores you between 1 to 100. Not only does it give you your total number of Retweets, @Mentions, and Followers (they take away the spam ones apparently,) they indicate your influence topics and areas and show you others who are also influential in the topic.

Personally, I check it once or twice a month just as a reference. Although it works with "real mathematics," I think the measure of influence is questionable.

Social media as emerging journalism:

Influence may be seen through how people respond to your call to actions, (in most cases it's your retweets and conversations), but how about the influence by agenda setting? Users can provide insightful news that people don't generally need to discuss about or retweet.

I understand that this does however come into clash with the term "social media," since social media is about interaction. But as most of you may have read in various blog posts, there have been ongoing debates on social media as a new type of journalism, mini-blogging, and etc. If we take into account this type of social media interaction,
how then, can you really measure influence? 

My question boils down to this:

Are Klout scores completely bogus, or do they mean something?

Wait, what exactly do they measure?

Klout uses more than 25 variables to create a score for True Reach, Amplification, and Network and comes up with a final score of Klout influence.

It provides a general content analysis which shows you your influential topics.

It indicates that my influential topics are:
Net
Colorado
California
social media
public relations
#internchat

Personally, the only topics that correlate above are public relations, and social media. I don't tweet at all about #internchat, Colorado, or California (I'm in BOSTON!...).

Mini poll on twitter:

I recently asked quite a few influential tweeters (i.e. Klout score of 65 and above, usually with more than 1,000 followers) about what they think of Klout scores. There are answers in every part of the continuum - that they are reliable, an okay reference, and completely bogus. Now what?

Does this mean it's legit?

"Klout announced early Monday that it has closed an $8.5-million funding round from Silicon Valley powerhouse Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers, and is adding Kleiner partner Bing Gordon to its board of directors."

"Companies using Klout’s API include Radian 6, About.Me, ExactTarget, The Huffington Post, Seesmic, Gnip, Gist and StockTwits. Currently Klout is doing more then 500 million API calls per month and is adding more than 5 API partners per day. For some perspective, Twitter sees more than 6 billion API calls per day." (from techcrunch.)

Some interesting fall backs on Klout from industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang (Web Strategy):

1. Consumers will game the system –reducing validity of metric. Expect many people to start gaming the Klout systems, in fact I see some ‘influential types’ tweeting over 200 times a day to try to hopefully raise their Klout scores, which just ends up annoying their followers.
2. Klout is not representative of a customers real influence. Currently, as I understand it, Klout only siphons in content from Twitter and Facebook if the user allows for FB connect.
3. Without sentiment of the influencer –the gauge is incomplete. Klout lacks sentiment analysis, so true opinions of what’s being said about the person may be ill-informed, see Kenneth Cole example above.
4. Relying on this single metric alone is dangerous. as Frank Eliason of Citi (formerly Comcast Cares) indicates the “sleeping comcast technician” was uploaded by someone who had practically zero prior online influence.

There are obviously pros and cons to the Klout score as with any analytics, my guess is until Klout uses it's funding to work on a more accurate portrayal of influence (it just revamped it's site to beta by the way!) keep using it as a reference or ego boost, but don't take it too far as to rely on it as your sole source of measuring social media achievement.