Social discrimination, or how brands choose with whom to interact

It’s a given (or better: a generalization) that 20% of an advertiser’s clients make up for 80% of his turnover. This insight has given birth to real in-depth Customer Relationship Marketing Programs. We give better offers and communicate more intensively with our top customers. That seems logical.

This hierarchy in customer status is also translated into customer service. Did you ever wonder why you had to give your customer number before entering a callcenter of a big brand? Customer service: if you are a customer with great value for the advertiser, you can be helped quicker, by better skilled staff. That’s reality.

But… how can an advertiser use the same principles when it comes to Social Media? How do you know if it’s a good customer that’s twittering about you?

There’s actually no way of knowing… but that’s not the most important. When looking at social media, you’d rather look at influence. If somebody is of great influence to a large part of the population… you’d better make a good impression.  And that’s where services like klout come in handy.

If you are into Social Media, you must know https://klout.com. If not, it’s a tool that allows you to measure the impact your tweets and shares have on your network (and outside your network) and the thool translates it into a score. The higher the score, the more influene you have (# likes on facebook, retweets, comments, …). Klout even has an API that lets you display Klout-scores on Twitter-accounts.

So, if you are a conversation manager for your brand, it’s more important to adequately serve highly influential individuals the same way as you serve your high impact customers, while keeping an eye on low influential stories that could spin out of control if retweeted too much.

And that is how social discrimination can be introduced to Social Media. So, whenever you say that Social Media shifts power to the people… this may appear to be not completely true in the near futre.