Redefining Social Media Marketing 1

Joe Fernandez, CEO & Co-founder, Klout

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Marketing via social media can be really frustrating, especially for big brands that get tons of mentions across various platforms. Within the past few years, many new startups have tried to solve this problem, endeavoring to create a metric for measuring influence online. Klout, a San Francisco-based startup, is leading the way in standardizing social influence with what it calls a user’s “Klout Score.”

Virgin America, The Huffington Post and Las Vegas’ Palms Hotel have all used Klout scores to divvy out benefits to influential consumers.

CEO and Co-founder Joe Fernandez first thought of the idea for Klout while recovering from jaw surgery in late 2007. With his jaw wired shut for three months, he turned to Twitter as his primary means of communication, finding that his network trusted him and his opinions. Fernandez told Mashable that during that period he “became obsessed with the idea of finding these signals of influence across the social web and measuring them.”

Klout is redefining the way marketers think about their audiences, “making brands recognize the power and impact of individual people,” explained Fernandez. He explained Klout’s process in a language that marketers understand:

“The idea of the funnel is core to most marketers. Rather than targeting as many people as possible and hoping the message makes it down the funnel to the few that convert, Klout is able to target the few key influencers who have authority around a given topic and allow them to tell the story. The message is then amplified up through the network to reach a large engaged audience that trusts the message sender. We’ve basically flipped the funnel upside down.”

Fernandez says that he’s most excited that “influencers are getting the recognition they deserve from brands. Brands are realizing that influencers are key stakeholders and relationships with them need to be tightly managed and respected. These are not normal customers but partners that in the future marketers will devote significant resources to building relationships with.”