Do Your Leads Have a Social Score?

It is becoming obvious that how we look at leads is evolving. Whether you are using a basic lead scoring system, or perhaps a sophisticated lead management program to score, age and route your leads to your sales team; leads are no longer just names. They are assets that have a dynamic value tied to who they are, what they are looking to purchase, and the interactions they have completed with your company.

I predict the next trend in lead management is to apply a social score to show the influence each prospect has within their social communities. The benefits are obvious. By identifying key influencers and providing them value, they will be sure to share their news broadly and with great impact.  This can also maximize a sales representatives’ time by focusing on those prospects that are energetic trendsetters.

The technology to enable this is starting to surface. I will introduce a few social scoring tools. I do find that each of these tools has promise, but there comes the concern over how these tools are collecting the social data from consumers.

Klout:  www.klout.com
Klout defines the Klout Score as the measurement of a person’s overall online influence.  Their scoring system range is 1-100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. They use over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplication Probability, and Network Score.

I am intrigued with Klout as they are one of the first to attempt to attribute value to one’s overall online influence.  I am labeled an Explorer based on my score; someone who is actively engaged in the social web and trying new networks.  I would tend to agree this is a good definition of who I am online. I am always willing to try something new, but rarely do I go too deep and use any one platform extensively.

Flowtown: www.flowtown.com
Flowtown is a tool that I was very excited to try. It had the key integration to our CRM system, Salesforce, and it promoted some of the key features that I have been looking for, including an overall social scoring model and the ability to target prospects based on their social activities.

I envision the scenario where I upload a list of attendees to a trade show we are attending next month. Within minutes, I can see who the key influencers are who are attending the show. I can then create a campaign to target them and request they follow our Twitter campaign we will be running throughout the show. 

Unfortunately, last week Flowtown reached the decision to stop using email addresses to discover social networks and attributes. It is truly amazing to see how fast things change in technology. Due to struggles in working with the big networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as privacy issues relating to scraping public information together into one database, they have chosen to change their business model and again focus on their core mission, which is making social simple for small businesses.

I think it is time for a social media opt-in/opt-out model that would allow users to set their preferences across all of their social networks. This would allow privacy concerns to be addressed, while enabling technology to adapt to a standard. I believe that you will see a groundswell of support for best practices that will be transparent and allow customers to opt-out. Some will argue that this data is in the public domain and thus can be tracked and used. I believe that this view is simplistic and in the long run, counterproductive.

I remember, back in 1999 while working in circulation of a large B2B publishing company, I started collecting email addresses via subscription forms. Marketing immediately wanted to take those emails and sell them as an additional revenue source, even though there had been no standards set with how we as a company would use the email addresses provided. I believe we will see a similar process in regulation and standards around consumers’ social presence as well.

While I see the promise and potential of tying a social score to a prospect, I am realistic in understanding that, today, there isn’t one tool that will capture the entire social online presence of each person.

If you have had success in this area, I would love to hear your comments.