Socially Rewarding: Kred launches Open Perks

Social rewards, or perks are nothing new - share this coupon with a friend, get 10% off. Refer a friend and £50 off your broadband subscription. More recently sites like Klout and PeerIndex have taken social rewards into the influence space. Based on your "score" pick up some free business cards, $50 to spend on Air B And B, get a free trial of some website (I've been offered all three of these through Klout - and have redeemed none of them by the way).

Earlier this year a friend and colleague - Andrew Grill, Australian business man extraordinaire launched Kred, offering a different perspective on the social influence scene - each user scored not just on "influencer" - i.e. how much people respect / talk about / tweet you, but also Outreach - how much you share and interact with the community.

Now Kred joins the ranks of Klout et al with a "perks" scheme of its own - Open Perks. Talking to Andrew he explained "Open Perks is different, because as a brand you get the data, and you can use that to build real relationships with influencers, rather than just giving them stuff".

So this begs a question right? Giving people stuff based on a "score" that has been generated by an algorithm based on your twitterings of cat pictures, coffee cups and check ins to the same 3 places each week (again - all me!) - does it really reflect true influence?

I suppose the difficulty is that based on those three things you would assume I am influential about cats, coffee and church, and maybe on two accounts that's true - however my cat still is a much a mystery to me as the scores that go into any of these systems.

For more on Kred Open Perks, check out the little video I shot with Andrew at the #solisuk event - arranged by the lovely @GabrielleNYC - apologies for bad lighting and camerawork!