From free dinners to weekends in Vegas, marketers are increasingly courting social media influencers and relying on tech companies like Klout to track them down. "A new generation of VIPs is
cultivating coolness through the world of social media," reports
The Wall Sreet Journal. "Klout ranks
people based on their influence in social-media circles." Along with rivals like PeerIndex and Twitalyzer, Klout feeds public social media data into what the newspaper calls "secret formulas," and
then generates scores that gauge users' influence. "Think of it as the credit score of friendship or, as PeerIndex calls it, the S&P of social relationships," WSJ explains. The companies aim to
provide benchmarks to help marketers, as well as regular Joe's, figure out whom to trust and invest in. As one might expect, the emergence of such ranking services has ignited a race among
social-media junkies who, "eager for perks and bragging rights, are working hard to game the system and boost their scores."
