Marissa and I are pleased to discuss our latest investment (and our first one as a team). We are excited to join with fellow firms Kleiner Perkins and IVP in investing in the internet’s standard for measuring influence, Klout. As the internet moves from pages to people, Joe Fernandez‘s vision of the need for “Pagerank for People” is spot on. Klout’s algorithms score the actual influence of people as they share on the social web. They attempt to measure your influence by observing interactions on the social web. As we all work to build and manage our online identity and profile, Klout helps measure our reach and topics of influence.
In every other mass media, measurement provides a benefit to the advertisers who subsidize that media. Large companies have emerged based on, frankly, less than perfect measurements systems. In TV and radio, panel-based inference measurement somehow have passed as a legitimate way for advertisers to make decisions on where to spend billions in advertising. These incumbent measurement firms became standards for measurement within their domains. Klout has the benefit of being able to measure actual data, not inferred data. They aim to score the entire social web. They currently have scored more than 300 million users and are scoring and re-scoring a mind-boggling amount every day. With more than one billion people on the social web today, they are by no means complete. Nor are their algorithms perfected. Just as Google changes their PageRank algorithms hundreds of times a year, Klout will evolve their data science as the social web changes to provide the most accurate influence scoring on the web.
Klout has the distinction of being one of the few companies whose monetization plans actually benefit its users. Using Klout to identify influencers in particular topics, brands offer new products or special “Klout Perks” to you in the hope that you will like them and share your point of view with friends and followers. This relationship, unlike interrupt-driven advertising, benefits both parties. Klout has worked with more than 100 brands like Starbucks, Audi, Spotify and Microsoft and has hundreds more lined up to do the same. Joe speaks infectuously about his plans for taking Klout to “the real world”. He imagines restaurants knowing your Klout score when you call to reserve a table, airlines printing your Klout score on your boarding pass, and of course call centers knowing your Klout score when you call to complain. Already hotels are using your Klout score when you check in to decide upgrade policies.
Aside from this exciting vision and stellar progress, two other themes draw us to Klout. One, we hold a passion around seeing the relationship between a brand and a customers changed. We believe that the social web requires brands to respect us more. To take our point of view more seriously. To adopt policies consistent with good service and fair treatment. No human should have to sit on a plane for seven hours on the tarmac, of course. But also, utility companies should be held accountable for poor service, cable companies should be held accountable when we stay home from work for a day and the repair crew never shows up. Banks should be called out for imposing hidden fees in the dark of the night. And finally, our governments and elected officials should hear from more of us more often. In this age of declining influence of traditional media, Klout enables our individual voices to be more influencial with instutions who hold power. That is exciting to us.
And finally, Klout supports our view that we are shifting from an attention economy to a data economy. The last ten years of digital media on the web have been built on attention. Those web properties that amassed our attention (generally by stealing our eyeballs away from traditional media) and reached scale have been rewarded with great businesses. Yahoo! got our attention with email. Google got our attention with great search. Facebook gets our attention with photo sharing. We believe the next ten years will be built around data, and in particular, social data. We have invested in M6D for its leadership in social ad targeting. We invested in Singly for its leadership in building a social data locker and app platform. And now we are investors in Klout for its leadership in social influence measurement. We salute Joe and his team for amazing progress so far, and are pleased to be along for the ride.
