Big Shot on Twitter and Facebook? Now You Can Prove it with Klout.

You might have a bunch of followers, but do you have influence with them? You tweet 17 times a day, but does anyone care? Yeah, yeah, we heard you - you're a big shot, 'Mr. Social Media', but I think you just automated your follower list, have a bunch of Facebook friends you don't really know, and tweet from Guy Kawasaki's posts all day.

Does this conversation sound familiar? If it does, you a) need to get out more, b) you need to sign up for Klout.

Klout is a new site that lets you prove your social media mightiness through a ranking system that ranges from 0 to 100. I've been on it for a few weeks, and it's pretty cool. I'd like to move up a few points, but, hey, wouldn't we all.

Your rank doesn't just solely depend on the size of your follower list, but on the content itself - how many times you've been retweeted, and if your links have been clicked on...plus about 25 other variables. They started with just Twitter correlations, but this week, they've introduced Facebook data, as well, and AdAge reported that 'potentially, information from LinkedIn, MySpace, Digg and even YouTube' is in the works.

This is cool. If you're a company, this can be used in a number of ways. One, you can segment people based on their purchases and life (stage/style), and over lay their Klout ranking to tell you who is really worth influencing. If you have a loyalty program, this can be used to create a special segment of your highly ranked Klout members to influence them with exclusive rewards, experiences and points. 

Using this idea is Social Rewards: a new social media loyalty program that rewards users based on social actions, sales, and their level of influence. They use Klout to determine influence level and customers can be rewarded differently based on their Klout scores. As the CEO, Joseph Morin, said “The premise of Social Rewards is to take existing brand loyalty program members that have social media tendencies and reward them for their loyalty and word of mouth activities.” One company that is currently using Social Rewards is The Venetian.

Klout also offers partner promotions with companies, such as Virgin Airlines. As an example, you could qualify for a free flight if you had enough Klout and posted a review about the experience. Check it out. You could get some free stuff...if you have enough Klout. ~ p