Gnip Expands Its Partnership With Klout, Becoming The Exclusive Provider Of Klout Topics

Social data provider Gnip has expanded its agreement with Klout, so Gnip customers who already include Klout Scores in their customer service, sales and engagement products can have access to more data.

For one thing, those customers can now include Klout Topics in addition to Klout Scores. In other words, the end user won’t be limited to seeing a single score reflecting social media influence, but also the specific topics that someone is influential about. That can be particularly important, for example, when figuring out how to prioritize customer service queries and fan outreach.

Here’s how Gnip’s Ian Cairns explained it in a Gnip blog post, describing the use case of a company that sells golf equipment and is trying to identify whom to respond to among the thousands of tweets about their products:

Klout Scores can help them identify the difference between my good friend Justin (not likely to drive much engagement) and Justin Bieber, whose Tweets regularly get retweeted 50,000-100,000 times. But while Justin Bieber may be a major influencer, his online influence doesn’t have much to do with golf, or really with sports in general. Using Klout Topics, the brand’s software can now quickly hone in on influencers with a Klout Score above a certain level and who are influential in relevant Topics like “Golf,” “PGA Tour,” “Masters Golf Tournament,” “Nike Golf,” “Sergio Garcia,” etc. These users probably won’t have millions of teenage girls ready to engage with them, but their audiences may be more likely to make buying decisions that affect the brand.

There are more than 7,000 Klout Topics total, Cairns said.

What I found most interesting about the announcement is the fact that Klout data is apparently quite popular among Gnip customers. The company says that more than half of its customers already get Klout scores alongside their Twitter data. In fact, in the press release announcing the expanded partnership, Klout’s vice president of business development and platform Matt Thomson gave Gnip credit for helping to spread Klout.

“Gnip has been an amazing distribution partner for Klout for the last three years,” Thomson said. “As an example, Klout scores are now displayed on the dashboards of the majority of major brands and a lot of that credit goes to the 60 billion Klout scores Gnip delivers each month to their customers.”

To extend the partnership, Gnip has also reached an enterprise licensing agreement with Klout, which will allow companies to store their data for more than the seven days allowed under Klout’s standard terms. Klout is also becoming part of the Plugged In to Gnip partner program.

Other data partnerships that Gnip has announced this year include deals with Foursquare, GetGlue and Estimize.