We are big believers in Klout! I was lucky enough to participate in the Series B financing. Since that time, through the hard work of Joe Fernandez and team, Klout has experienced explosive growth. With that backdrop, I am thrilled to announce Venrock’s participation in the Series C Financing. 

Klout measures consumer influence across social media. As social platforms continue to grow, it becomes increasingly important to have a standard system for identifying and measuring influence. Klout is this global standard.

The Social Media category continues to fragment with new platforms showing explosive growth. These platforms are quickly becoming real media channels with scale.  As with any media channel, businesses need to understand the nature of the channel, the mix and makeup of the audience, who matters in that audience, and how to reach that audience at scale.  In a broad sense, I like to think about Klout as the Nielsen of social media. Klout enables advertisers to determine where and whom to target to help gauge the efficacy of advertising. Any consumer-facing company that uses a CRM product will want Klout to enhance their customer outreach. Any application can use Klout to better understand their consumers by using influence scores and categories.

Klout uses the data it collects across different social media sites to identify influencers and segment them according to influence category.  Externally, consumers have a single Klout score that measures their general influence online, but behind the scenes these users are segmented according to an incredible array of categories.  Klout currently analyzes a variety of sites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, Last.fm, Google+ and Flickr, with many more on the way. Advertisers and businesses can access influence data via an API to run targeted campaigns with consumers in different categories of interest. 

The imprimatur Klout has achieved with brands and agencies is remarkable. The company has achieved a high level of recognition and has emerged as the standard for influence. As the web is rebuilt around people rather than pages, Klout has become the next critical layer of the analytics and measurement stack.