StorefrontBacktalk: Should Retailers Favor Customers With High Social Influence?
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from StorefrontBacktalk, a site tracking retail technology, e-commerce and mobile commerce.
American Airlines last week announced that it was going to offer people who have a high social influence free access to its airport lounges. Under the program, passengers with a Klout Score of 55 or higher qualify for a one-day pass to American Airlines' Admirals Club at nearly 40 worldwide lounge locations.
Klout comes up with each user's social influence ratings through a proprietary algorithm that weighs follower count, tweet engagement and other social outreach measures. The lounge perk is given regardless of whether the passenger is booked on an American Airlines flight.
On the plus side, this is one of the first major programs to offer shoppers a concrete item of value (people pay a lot to join airline clubs) in exchange for having a high social influence number.
The downside is that Klout simply counts up the Twitter followers and Facebook friends (and other social media stats) and looks at forwarded Tweets. The logical step would be determining actual purchasing clout, for example, how many dollars of purchases that shopper's Tweets generated.
But this American Airlines program is the first step on setting up special benefits for a small group of people who at least have a lot of followers.
The intriguing part of the American Airlines promotion is that it can deliver three things. First, it will bring more people into the American Airlines club, which will encourage those people to fly American. Secondly, American Airlines customers are incentivized to use Klout. Third, it will encourage them to do anything they can to inflate — artificially or otherwise — their social numbers.
From a retailer's perspective, someone with a million Twitter followers is a great low cost way to publicize your products. If you're confident in the quality of your merchandise, getting the people with the largest numbers in with the incentive of discounts or better return rules or longer hours (the one-time Costco trick of letting corporate card holders come in an hour earlier than anyone else) is a nice way to potentially get more of the word out.
Then there is the chain effect on social influence. Maybe Customer 104 only has 200 followers, but you've determined that many of those followers are huge influencers. The deeper you dive into the data, the more potential it has. But if the system you're relying on just counts numbers, the ROI on these kinds of social-to-in-store programs is going to be really dicey.