Interesting post from David Armano today – a demonstration of how marketers are beginning to use Klout and other scoring engines such as PeerIndex to target ‘influential’ consumers.
We’re still quite far from marketing nirvana. For instance:
* His name is ‘David’ not ‘armano’
* He professes to have little to no interest in basketball
It seems likely that Nike simply decided to target some folks with very high Klout scores rather than along any more specific criteria, so it’s a bit of a stretch to say that this is truly ‘targeted’.
Sony seems to be running a similar campaign – there are undoubtedly others.
It’s clear that this type of targeting of ‘influentials’ is something we can expect to see much more of going forward.
Why was I being targeted by Nike basketball? I never talk about sports, don’t follow teams and am not all that involved in local sports sans whatever my boys are interested in doing which at the moment is tennis. So why did the e-mail proclaim that I had “serious basketball klout”?I don’t. What I do have is a larger than normal “social graph” that shows signs of life as measured by certain digital factors (and this is only Twitter and Facebook)
Klout’s scoring system is highly imperfect, BUT seeing the e-mail caught my attention because I realized that the future of tapping “influentials” will come down to targeting, and the quality of how well this gets executed. So when the next e-mail comes from something closer to my interests—I’ll know they are on to something. The future of harnessing influence will be highly targeted.
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