Do You Have Social Media Kred?
How does Klout make money? By hitting up vendors, of course. Brands pay Klout to offer Klout Perks to Klout users in an effort to get these “influencers” to talk nicely about specific products. As a Klout user, I’m told there are no strings attached to this Klout swag and just like the material world, the people with the most Klout, get the biggest Perks — we’re told this can be a great gift like airline tickets or computer gear. Personally, all I’ve gotten so far are some free business cards from Moo, a book and early access to Bottlenose. If I want to start talking about beauty products, I can get some swag in that category too. Both Klout and Kred designate a person’s influence within certain categories. Mine include printing (surprise) advertising, technology and smartphones. I’ve no idea why I’m considered a smartphone influencer—must be all that talk about QR codes and apps.
Kred measures individual’s influence in two parts: Influence on a scale of one to 1000 and Outreach Level, on a scale of one to 12. With Kred, you get points based on your level of engagement, so retweets, replies and mentions add up, and, unlike the more elusive Klout Score, Kred shows how each and every point is earned through the Activity Statement. Did you get a mention from another Twitter account? You’ve earned 10 points. Someone retweeted one of your tweets? That will earn you another 10 points. Reviewing your Kred activity can be a real motivator to interact more with others, and on the face of it, that would be the goal of the service.
Of course, Kred exists to make money too. The service was launched in September 2011 by social analytics company PeopleBrowsr, and is integrated into that company’s social-analytics platform, Playground. Because of this analytics backbone, Kred is poised to offer business clients a whole lot of data based on Kred user data. Kred Playground offers insights to business users such as influencer discovery, custom filtering, and community search and post effect. Kred primarily measures Twitter engagement, so looks at a less broad spectrum of user engagement, but is staged to offer brands more well-developed analytics of the engagement it does measure.
