Love it or hate it, Klout and the social-scoring trend are hot. And there’s a lot that’s still unknown about the company that Fast Company just recognized as one of the most innovative in the world.
While researching and writing my book on Klout, I had exclusive access to the inner workings of the company and its customers. Here are 10 things I learned about it that you probably didn’t know.
1. Klout Founder and CEO Joe Fernandez studied English at Oxford University but never received a college degree, although he had more than enough credits to graduate. His first startup was making skate boards, a life-long interest.
2. When Klout went live in December, 2008, Fernandez manually calculated each Klout score.
3. The only person with a perfect 100 Klout score is Justin Bieber. Several celebrities have lobbied for higher Klout scores, including Britney Spears.
4. When Joe Fernandez first pitched his idea for Klout to the startup accelerator panel at South by Southwest in 2009, the idea was rejected because it was not business worthy. One of the panelists, Nova Spivack, later became the first investor in the company.
5. Klout has different influence calculations based on which social media platform you are active on. It also accounts for international differences in communication patterns.
6. A Klout influencer who receives a perk (a gift from a brand) creates an average of thirty pieces of content about that gift. About 80% of the companies who participate in a Klout influencer program sign up for a second one.
7. When Klout received its first round of funding, the first check went to the owner of the Klout.com domain name. Up until then the company was only found on Klout.net.
8. With tens of billions of hits to its API in a month, Klout has at least 50 times more traffic than its nearest competitor, PeerIndex.
9. Giving somebody a +K is a nice gesture, but it has no effect on a Klout score.
10. Klout’s first office in San Francisco was in the same building as Twitter.
Mark Schaefer teaches marketing at Rutgers University, blogs at {grow}, and is the author of the new book, Return On Influence: The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social Scoring and Influence Marketing.
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