Recently, one of my tweep grab my attention by linking this post which is talking about the way The Huffington Post integrates Klout in its articles to highlight who are the influencers talking about this topic. You surely know what is Klout and you have maybe tried to see what is your Klout score in order to know if you're influential or not but maybe you didn't notice that Klout is going mainstream in a way we couldn't imagine months ago. Let me explain...
In the past, some agencies, like Buzz Paradise, BzzAgent, Tidal Labs or even HouseParty have tried to detect and identify influencers to get them talking about brands and generate Word of Mouth. To achieve this goal, these agencies try to send products to influentials bloggers or invite them to special events. In other words, these companies have tried to use some old PR technics on bloggers.
Some of these tries were succesful but the buzz has never been huge and those technics have rapidly shown their limits. Indeed, there has been many debates, like you surely know, on the fact that bloggers were paid/bought to talk about brands and this caused some credibility issues for them. Moreover, there has been many more debates about sponsored articles too which ends in legal disputes in some cases. Last but not least, there has been a big problem in measuring the real impact of these actions because nobody could tell at that time who was really influential.
These agencies were in a kind of dead-end street because brands and companies didn't want these kinds of debates (They have enough problems to manage their own crisis) and so they began to refocus their core strategies on other issues such as e-reputation or even real e-PR. Anyway, these moves have highlighted the necessity and the will for brands and companies to drive the conversation with influencers.
What is interesting in Klout's Move is that the process is really different. What is so different ? The main difference is that Klout has take into account one of the major concern of every marketing exec involved in online actions, I mean ROI and measure of the influence of influencers. And so they first began to measure activity and impact, on twitter, and then on Facebook, and now on Linkedin (which will be integrate in their algorythm in a few weeks), to know precisely who is a real influencer. Now, they are able to talk to brands and companies with real metrics using the same technics as the above-mentioned agencies. Great idea !!!
The second great idea is that they focus on the ego of influencers by giving them self-esteem rewards. Consider yourself as a blogger for a few moments, maybe you already are one, and imagine what will be the impact for you to be highlighted on The Huff Post because you have retweeted or commented the post !!! You will surely be really pleased. This way, Klout is now able to drive conversation in a new way because the influencer is first rewarded for his work and its content quality.
Finally, they are now able to offer some premium invites or products to real influencers as you can see if you have a look at this operation for Virgin or this other one for the launch of «Tangled», the coming Disney's movie. This way, they are now able to fight competitors such as Foursquare or Facebook Places, which have a different approach, by offering brands and companies a new way to measure impact which is more focused on quality than in quantity.
I don't know who will win this influence battle but I'm curious about the next steps. And you ???
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