To Help Companies Understand Who Their Influencers Are, Klout Launches Brand Pages
For at least the past few years, people have become fascinated with the measurement of influence. Just how you can easily determine whether someone is influential about a particular topic? Is it quantitative? If so, how can someone make money trying to figure it out? If someone could help companies determine someone’s influence, then that might stand to make a few bucks as a result.
Enter Klout, the market leader in influence measurement. This startup has helped pave the way into creating a business out of a vague concept most people probably had and found an appeal to both businesses and individuals. Of course, determining one’s Klout score doesn’t come without any criticism. But even when faced with public backlash about how vague it seemed, Klout still managed to persevere and grow into a sound business—they ran their race without compromising their integrity or standards—knowing what they wanted to accomplish.
Led by founders Joe Fernandez and Binh Tran, Klout has made major strides in growing the business and developing new ways for the company to build. From introducing perks to their +K program, Klout has found ways to get people involved in helping to determine just who is influential.
One of the thoughts I had when thinking about Klout is that it’s not about the score that really determines influence. It’s what the influencer has done to merit that status—posting photos on Flickr, talking about photography, etc. This is why Klout introduced their +K program: to let people share what topics an individual is credible about. For businesses, this helps answer the missing piece of the puzzle: what does a score of 64 really mean?
Klout’s efforts have not gone unnoticed. Over 5,000 companies are interested in leveraging their influence metric and have tapped into the service’s API feed, which has received over 12 billion calls in just over two years! So what’s next? Set up brand pages—and that’s exactly what Klout has done.
Announced today, Klout rolled out brand pages as a new way to empower all influencers. Currently in beta, these pages serve as a display case where influencers can be recognized and have “a direct impact on the brands they care about most.” As TechCrunch noted, prior to today, brand pages were simple profiles. Now they provide a dynamic list of top influencers for each brand, monitor conversations, and offer special perks.
The first participant is Red Bull. According to product manager David Temple, Red Bull will offer perks to top influencers on their brand page leaderboard.
“If you’re one of Red Bull’s top advocates, they’ll keep you informed with a subscription to The Red Bulletin and send you a 4‑Pack of Red Bull Total Zero. The very top influencers will get merchandise or a VIP Red Bull experience, like a behind‑the‑scenes look at the X‑Games.”
Beyond a real‑time leaderboard, Klout plans to expand scoring models to platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, WordPress, and Blogger. This would allow brand pages to act as influencer dashboards, showing:
- Influencers tied to the brand
- Topics they dominate for that brand
- Highly discussed media (photos, videos, tweets)
Users could then give +K to top content, similar to Facebook “likes.”
Currently, tweets are displayed on the Red Bull brand page, but future iterations could highlight other media and list trending topics. Clicking a topic would surface the influencers most associated with it, making outreach easier for brands.
Klout brand pages may help answer critics who claim influence can’t be reduced to a single score. When used correctly, they give brands a powerful tool to identify and engage true influencers.
About the Author
Ken Yeung – Editor‑in‑Chief of Bub.blicio.us and interactive producer in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area. Passionate about tech, marketing, and photography; has contributed to Mashable, TechCrunch, SXSW, and more.
