Jun 28

Kred Announces Kred Rewards, Works with Past Klout Clients

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Early this week Kred announced that they are offering a similar program to Klout Perks called Kred Rewards. It’s no surprise, really.  Klout was the first to make it big in this space leaving the rest to play catch up. Peer Index, a UK company was the next followed finally by Kred as the last of the “big three” to offer products, samples and offers to influencers on behalf of marketers.

According to the Kred Blog, the company has five clients lined up for launch including SOL Republic, popchips, Zinio Networks, AVG Technologies and .CO Internet.

What I find most interesting about this announcement is that two of those clients have also run Klout Perks in the past.  A couple of questions then pop into my head. First – how will these two brand’s Peer Perks differ from the ones they ran with Klout? Second – what is the current user base of Kred vs. Klout leading to more questions of scalability? I imagine Klout has exponentially higher number of registered users but Kred has to start somewhere so I’m not hating on them. My gut says they’ve been contacting current/past Klout clients in an effort to drum up business. Cheers to that… very Glengary Glen Ross of them.

One thing is for sure, I’ll be on the lookout to see how the program rolls out paying particularly close attention to the popchips and Zinio perks, both of which have worked with Klout.

I’d keep going, but America’s Got Talent is About to Start.

Best,

Garth Knutson

4 COMMENTS |

REPLY HERE
  • http://londoncalling.co/ Andrew Grill

    Garth, thanks for mentioning the Kred Rewards program on the blog here.

    For us, it is not about catch-up. Our clients were the ones that were adamant that we launch a rewards program. Since October last year, we’ve been under the radar providing a collaborative and transparent approach to influencer marketing with some key clients. They love what Kred delivers them – real time and transparent access to the list of influencers in a collaborative way.

    They also told us they wanted the opportunity to be able to review the list of potential reward participants before we pushed the go button on a campaign.

    The feedback has been that brands want to be closely involved with the selection of influencers and felt that Kred had a more targeted and reliable influencer selection process using our platform.

    In terms of numbers, as more and more people are coming across Kred, and the rewards we provide – we are seeing real growth in our member numbers – so sign up!

    You will see some new partners coming on board very soon that are very well known, showing that the Kred approach is resonating with brands who want to maximise their influencer marketing dollars.

    Andrew Grill
    CEO, Kred
    @andrewgrill

    • http://twitter.com/gknutson Garth Knutson

      Thanks for your comment, Andrew. I signed up for Kred months and months ago so that’s one more for your user base and am excited to see how this plays out. I’m particularly interested in how you make the rewards available to users as it sounds like you might be giving the clients the ability to remove individuals from their list of rewards recipients? I might be reading into this a bit so please correct me if I’m wrong. If it is the case, this certainly gives more control to the client, but could potentially set them up for “why not me?” backlash from angry users/influencers down the road. Good luck. I’ll be watching!
      Garth

      • http://londoncalling.co/ Andrew Grill

        Garth,

        Good questions.

        Clients have been telling us that they want some sort of involvement and control (read plain awareness) of who’s getting one of their rewards. Until now, other “black box” platforms have sometimes sent rewards to people who were 1) actively gaming the system to get a free reward and 2) had no interest/connection in the reward.

        In the case of 1) those that would have otherwise been eligible for a reward and missed out will be pleased – as will the brand as those with influence in the right areas are receiving the reward.

        In the case of 2) those receiving the reward will be delighted because it is relevant to them.

        I’ve heard some horror stories of people who received a reward with no interest in the brand/category. That’s wasteful and lazy marketing. Brands can’t afford a hit and miss approach when it comes to influencer marketing.

        The beauty of Kred is that you can see each and every interaction through our live activity statement – as we receive tweets in real time via the twitter firehose so update Kred scores every 1/2 second.

        That means we can easily see if someone is deserving of the reward or is just tweeting for a freebie and has no real connection with the brand or community.

        We think there will be fewer “why not me?” instances with Kred Rewards as those who really deserve a reward will receive one.

        Brands have been demanding more transparency in the calculation of influence scores. Kred is the only platform that publishes our scoring rules at http://lc.tl/kr and also shows each and every action and the raw and normalised points generated for every Kred profile (all 120 million of them) at http://kred.com

        We think our approach is much fairer to reward recipients all round, and it also ensures that brands get to the right influencers, not just those with the “highest score”, rather those with the most influence in a particular community.

        The current myopic focus on the highest influencer sore has got to stop. A high score does not always mean that someone has influence in the category relevant to the brand/community. With Kred, we show which communities you actually influence.

        Andrew Grill
        Kred CEO
        @andrewgrill

      • http://twitter.com/gknutson Garth Knutson

        [Disqus is jacked...not populating correctly, so pasting Andrew's reply below] Submitted on 2012/06/28 at 8:10 pm | In reply to Garth Knutson.

        Garth,

        Good questions.

        Clients have been telling us that they want some sort of involvement and control (read plain awareness) of who’s getting one of their rewards. Until now, other “black box” platforms have sometimes sent rewards to people who were 1) actively gaming the system to get a free reward and 2) had no interest/connection in the reward.

        In the case of 1) those that would have otherwise been eligible for a reward and missed out will be pleased – as will the brand as those with influence in the right areas are receiving the reward.

        In the case of 2) those receiving the reward will be delighted because it is relevant to them.

        I’ve heard some horror stories of people who received a reward with no interest in the brand/category. That’s wasteful and lazy marketing. Brands can’t afford a hit and miss approach when it comes to influencer marketing.

        The beauty of Kred is that you can see each and every interaction through our live activity statement – as we receive tweets in real time via the twitter firehose so update Kred scores every 1/2 second.

        That means we can easily see if someone is deserving of the reward or is just tweeting for a freebie and has no real connection with the brand or community.

        We think there will be fewer “why not me?” instances with Kred Rewards as those who really deserve a reward will receive one.

        Brands have been demanding more transparency in the calculation of influence scores. Kred is the only platform that publishes our scoring rules at http://lc.tl/kr and also shows each and every action and the raw and normalised points generated for every Kred profile (all 120 million of them) at http://kred.com

        We think our approach is much fairer to reward recipients all round, and it also ensures that brands get to the right influencers, not just those with the “highest score”, rather those with the most influence in a particular community.

        The current myopic focus on the highest influencer sore has got to stop. A high score does not always mean that someone has influence in the category relevant to the brand/community. With Kred, we show which communities you actually influence.

        Andrew Grill
        Kred CEO
        @andrewgrill