Audi’s Facebook Campaign with Klout – better for Klout than it is for Audi

Here’s the campaign: http://www.facebook.com/audi.
Here’s the post on TechCrunch

Let’s start with the basics: Klout is a tool that helps to measure someone’s social media influence score – or essentially – it’s an algorithm that calculates your score based on your # of friends, how influential you are, what kinds of conversations you have, how often you get ReTweeted, etc. The algorithm itself is not public, but it’s something that brand managers and social media folks are starting to pay attention to. Theoretically you want to increase your brand’s social media influencer score. and theoretically, you want to target your most-influential followers / fans / users and activate them, and empower them to market on your behalf. so figuring out which of your fans really are the key-influencers is obviously important to a brand like Audi.

Here’s the problem. Klout measures what’s publicly available on the intertubes. which is fine if we’re talking about Twitter. But most of Facebook is closed-off, and only visible if you’re my friend, OR, if you are an app that’s been installed on my profile. So, as brands move away from Twitter, and toward Facebook, as their social media vehicle of choice, Klout has to find a way to stay relevant.

So, naturally, build a Klout app, so that you can analyze my Facebook interactions, and give me a score that includes that data, and, also, so you can mine my friends’ information, and start to fill-in-the-blanks that were missing because it was all hidden behind Facebook’s garden-wall.

Now, this campaign that Audi’s doing is practically useless. Come here, click this button and install this Facebook app, and we’ll give you a free wallpaper. I really, really wonder where money is changing hands here. Audi has retained Involver as the social marketing agency, so I suppose they’re getting paid for this “campaign.” Involver is theoretically partnering with Klout, but I would take a hard look at that partnership if I were Audi. Klout, on the other hand, is making-out like a bandit, staying-relevant, thanks to Audi, which has 3 Million Facebook fans, a small percentage of whom will now install the Klout app.

In any case, smart move on Klout’s part. And now that Audi has this data about who their key-influencers are, it’ll be interesting to see if they actually do something good with that data.