Sad news for those who like free stuff – Klout Perks, the swag offered by social media scoring platform Klout, has quietly shut down. Lithium Technologies, the company that bought Klout more than a year ago, confirmed it ended the Perks program in a statement to TechCrunch today.
“Klout’s real strengths lie in its algorithm and wealth of social data,” wrote Lithium’s VP of communications Eric Channing Brown. “Perks is not core to this, and so we have decided to invest more in other areas of Klout’s data assets and on further integrating Klout into the Lithium product portfolio.”
Josh Butler, the head of Klout’s sales team, which serviced the Perks program, recently announced in an email to friends (and which has been obtained by TechCrunch) that he made the move to SocialRank, a social media platform that claims to locate your most engaged Twitter followers.
Hey Friends,
I usually don’t send these type of emails but I have some exciting news.
The last five years working at Klout and running Klout Perks has been some of the most enjoyable years of my career. Happy to announce I’m on to a new adventure and recently joined an NYC startup called SocialRank as their SVP of Revenue and Sales.
If you haven’t heard of them before, SocialRank has an amazing product that pulls in all of your followers from Twitter and Instagram and lets you filter and sort them by location, bio keywords, interests, influence, engagement and more at a very granular level. Sort of like a Hootsuite or Buffer but for audience.
I’ll be working on two products – SocialRank Market Intelligence, the ability to run any Twitter or Instagram account like it is your own and a new product released recently called SocialRank Engage (an evolution of Klout Perks in terms of transparency and authenticity).
I’m getting situated but would love to catch up with everyone. If you are doing anything with influencer marketing let’s talk…the SocialRank platform is next level.
If you need to reach anyone at Klout, feel free to hit me up. You can reach me at my new SR email – Josh@SocialRank.com.
Thanks,
Josh
According to Butler’s LinkedIn profile, he’s been at SocialRank for two months now.
Plenty of social media accounts still reference the Perks program as if it is still running. Take this one from a couple hours ago today:
However, the Klout Perks Twitter account last tweeted on August 10 and we’ve been told Klout is DM’ing influencers with details about their perks for now.
For those worried about not getting a recent perk, Lithium said it intends to honor those last remaining commitments.
“For customers with whom we have outstanding commitments, we will honor those commitments until the end date on those contracts,” Brown told TechCrunch.
He also mentioned that, though the program is over, some of the campaigns are still going on. “Some existing Perks campaigns do continue to run, and we have the account teams in place to support them until they are completed.”
However, a source told TechCrunch that both the New York and San Francisco Klout Perks sales teams and account managers associated with the program are now gone. We were also told the whole Perks team of 10-20 has also been laid off.
Klout made some tweaks to the platform since the Lithium acquisition, adding branded content and personalization, according to your score and social media activity. Brown told us that a big focus for Klout is now on “personalized experiences” for brand customers, rather than simple rewards for your social media score.
“This will continue to be a focus area, as will maintaining and refining the Klout score, adding support for additional social networks (we just added YouTube), and building new capabilities into Klout. Also, Klout will continue to offer its wealth of data – we have over 700 million social profiles analyzed – to third parties via partnerships,” Brown said.
Additional reporting: Sarah Perez