Today Kred, the influencer scoring tool launched by social analytics company PeopleBrowsr, announced the launch of Kred Story, which aims to visualize an individual’s social media presence and online influence. The tool displays users’ social media posts, influence score, online interactions, links, and photos on a dashboard, giving people a way to see a snapshot of their online activity, and helping brands identify influencers and trending content.
“What we want to do with the new release is tell the whole story behind a hashtag, behind an @ name,” Kred CEO Andrew Grill said in an interview. “The idea here is to go beyond the simple influence score, and actually find out what’s driven that interaction and what’s driven that influence.”
Grill said Kred Story is targeted at individuals and brands, since it helps individuals view a snapshot of their online activity and see how they look to a brand (aka which topics they’re influential about), and gives brands a way to find influencers, and to get analytics on who they’re reaching, and who is sharing their content. “This is almost a mirror to say what does Kred as a proxy think of my brand, and am I hitting the right people,” he said about Kred’s current tool. “It gives them analytics they haven’t had access to before, and it presents it in a way that’s really easy to understand.”
Existing Kred users can sign in to start using Kred Story now (it acts as the default dashboard when users sign in), and new users can request an invite. Once a user signs in with Twitter or Facebook they can explore their dashboard, which includes information on their Kred score, daily interactions, geographical and topical areas of influence, and commonly used hashtags. Users can also see a list of their latest shared content and the number of interactions those posts sparked, from Retweets to comments. Users can click on any dashboard section to dive deeper into their interactions or influence, and view analytics.
Users can also search for any Twitter @ name to see their interactions, or search a hashtag to get a snapshot of the total number of Tweets and Retweets about that topic, top Kred influencers on that topic, and the latest updates. Grill said it can be used by event organizers to track all the updates on a certain hashtag, or by companies looking to find influencers around a certain topic. Since PeopleBrowsr has access to Twitter’s data firehose, brands and users can also see up to 1,200 days of historic data.
So far in 2012 Kred has been beefing up its solutions for companies who are looking to find and target influencers. Earlier this year the company launched Kred Rewards, which allows brands to offer promotions, discounts or free products to influencers. The first campaigns led by clients popchips and SOL REPUBLIC will start running soon. In May 2012 PeopleBrowsr also launched their API, which helps companies find influencers based on a wide range of criteria.
Competitor Klout has been running its Klout Perks program since 2010, and has run campaigns with Disney, Microsoft and HBO, totalling over 350 campaigns for 300 brands. Last week Klout also introduced an update to its scoring system, aimed at giving users more transparency around how their score is calculated. Part of the update was Klout Moments, which aims to show users which of their posts drives action on a visual dashboard, similar to Kred Story. The company is rolling out the Moments feature to all users over the next few weeks; it’s only available for select users right now.
As for how Kred is differentiating from Klout, which is the best known influence measurement tool on the market, Grill said it’s all about transparency, and showing users how they arrive at their influence score. “Kred Story will give people more safety in the number, while our competitor changes things and people aren’t sure why the number has changed,” he said. “We don’t want to be the same as the others, we want to be out there leading the pack. We still seem to be the only company that’s really pushing the transparency button and showing what we’re doing.”
Grill said the next iteration of Kred Story will include more analytics, and the ability to move panels around on the dashboard. He said they’ve also had interest from brands who want to feed it into their customer service tool, so they could give call centre agents access to a customer’s Kred data. While Kred Story is a good attempt to keep users on the site and flesh out their solutions for brands, they will need more than a transparent scoring system to set themselves apart from Klout, and to win over the brands and individuals who already use that competing scoring system.
