Capital One and Klout (a look into a current promotion)

A look into a recent Capital One promotion using Klout, which highlights an important reality about Klout: marketers need Klout as a metric of influence and a way to allocate dollars, resources, and promotional rewards more than they need it to be 100% accurate.

Capital One recently sent me an interesting offer via email to earn bonus cash back via Klout, an offer that I simply had to highlight. Rewards cardholders that received this offer and verify their Klout score with Capital One get a special limited time bonus cashback (applies to purchases made from Dec 12 to Dec 18, full terms and conditions here). The extra cashback is determined by your Klout score: the higher the score, the higher the return, up to 10%.

Here’s the offer:

Capital One and Klout

Once you’ve filled out the details and verified your Klout score by connecting via Facebook and Twitter, Capital One tells you your Klout score and what your bonus cashback will be:

Score

And, of course there’s a built-in easy way to share the offer, which is very relevant because Capital One is also offering bonus rewards based on the number of people you refer that enroll into the promotion:

And interestingly enough, they even used a custom short URL for the shares (captl1.co).

Yet another example of why even if Klout isn’t an effective measure of influence, if people think it’s relevant and companies are able to understand and use it easily, then they’ll use it. Marketers need Klout as a metric of influence and a way to allocate dollars, resources, and promotional rewards more than they need it to be 100% accurate.

Kudos to all my Capital One friends for pulling this promotion off. Would be very curious to see how it performs.

*Disclosure: I’m a former Capital One employee and used to work on card management offers and digital innovation, so I have a little knowledge into how their operations test and run promotions. But I had no part in this promotion.

*Seems my Klout score dropped a bit in the recent algorithm changes. Oh well.