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As UK group The Streets said “It was supposed to be so easy.” Give free flights to people with influence. But what should have been a simple campaign turned into one of the biggest localized social media clusterfucks. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start from the beginning.

Klout is the self described ‘Standard for Online and Internet Influence”. They analyze Twitter to determine how much influence you have and they do a good job at it. The ‘Klout Scores’ are reasonable in that not everyone is 100. Very few in fact break the 60 mark. It won’t feed your ego if you suck at Twitter – *cough Hubspot Twitter Grader*.

So that leads us to the promotion. Klout teams up with Virgin America Airlines to offer people with high Klout a free flight from their new destination (Toronto) to either Los Angeles or San Francisco (and from those two, to Toronto). Seems pretty cool right? Well it was to those who got it. Those who didn’t, felt slighted. They had good Klout scores why weren’t they considered?

This lead to Klout-sterfuck Part 1. Many people complained about it. How it was a popularity contest. How it was unfair. How the promotion was shallow because no one knew what they were basing their scores on. Lots of complaints.

I guess this is a good time to bring me back into the picture. I got an invitation. Here it is.

Having been invited to take part, I had no complaints (other than it was for one only, but that was no big deal). I told everyone I knew about it. How great this new company Klout was. How great Virgin America is to be involved in the social media arena and how smart it was to target people with high levels of influence.

Now read the line “For more information on travel dates, destinations, and booking just head here. But do it soon — this is a first come, first served basis and supplies are limited.” It’s important for the rest of the story. When I read this, I just assumed it was a standard thing. All flights are a first come, first served basis. There’s only X number of seats on a plane, once they are full, you can’t take that flight. What you can do, is book the next one though. We’ll come back to this later.

You’ll also read in that email about the invitation to the “Star-studded inaugural party” and how “You’re welcome to go even if you don’t go on the flight.” Well this turns out to be Kloutsterfuck Part 2.

Take a look at the time this email was sent (4:02PM). So when I got home that day from being out and about (around 6:00ish I believe), my invitation had already expired. Flies in the face of the first email that said I could go regardless. This was actually foreshadowing for what was to come. “Everyone can go, but only you can go,” should be Klout’s new motto.

I bit my tongue. I still had a free flight, sure I couldn’t go hang out with Russell Peters or Richard Branson now, but oh well, still a good company that’s giving me a free flight. So I won’t say anything bad about them.

So here we are… the last email correspondence I received from them last night at 12:38AM EST. (Sidenote: I’m told there’s another one sent 2 weeks ago, but if there was, I never received it. I don’t throw out anything in my email.) (Also, blue is my edit.)

And thus, we have Kloutsterfuck Part 3. At 12:38AM they announced that if you hadn’t booked your flight, too bad. What? So I talked up your company for what… 4 emails?

What kind of promotion is this? You give away free flights (that are redeemable until August 23rd I believe), and then randomly say “Sorry, not anymore.” Congratulation Klout, you’ve successfully made me hate Virgin America Airlines and in the process, severely hurt your companies image to many, many people.

Is there no one in marketing there? No one in PR? Because, from the way this whole thing was executed, it’s clearly apparent that no there isn’t.

So let me rant for a moment, and then Klout I will teach you some lessons.

If you have 100 free flights to give away, you don’t promise them to 1000 people and then say “Too fucking bad” to the rest. That’s called being deceitful. If you say Virgin America has asked you to ‘Give me a free flight’ which you clearly wrote in the first email, then you have a duty to in fact give me that flight. It’s like if I were to say to my followers ‘I’m giving away $1000 to everyone! But only one person gets it.” It’s BULLSHIT.

Okay let me put it into a better perspective. Everyone wants an iPad supposedly right? So let’s say the promotion is through Apple. Apple wants you to give 100 people an iPad. Would you tell 1000 people they had won an iPad? First off you wouldn’t, because you’d know it would be lying. Now let’s say I won the iPad and then went out of country for 2 weeks on business. When I get home I’d claim the device. When I did get home I find that I’m basically being told ‘Sorry we gave it away to someone else.’ Huh?

You abused my klout Klout. You used me to talk up your fucking website and to talk up Virgin America. You used all of us. And not in a good way like we initially thought (in giving us a free flight), you used us like Michael Vick uses dogs. To bark about you, be good pets and to fight among ourselves when your Kloutsterfucks came up. And we did! I defended your decision to limit invitations. I told people “Well, they likely can only have X seats, so they can’t give away more seats than they have.” Well this dog is fighting back!

Now, I’ve gotten my rant out of the way, it’s time to give you some things to learn from all your Kloutsterfucks. Oh yes, rather than let you drown in your mistake after mistake and PR fail after fail, I’m going to give you some things to take from this to be better in the future. As a promotional company, you’ve got a long way before I trust you again, as a analytic tool, I think you do a good job. So here we go.

1. Free. When you say someone’s won something free, you better be sure you have enough to give away. Do not give away more free things than you actually have.

2. Openness. You’re a company that is based on social media, yet you’re more secretive than Lebron’s decision on where to play next year. If you had 100 seats to give away, say that in your first email “We only have 100 seats to give away, but we’re handing out 200 codes.” Then people would have known to book quickly. It would be honest and if anyone missed out, they were unfortunately too slow.

3. PR. Apologize. You made some major mistakes through this Kloutsterfuck of a campaign. You owe those who you used/abused an apology. You grew your business from my good word and in the end left me angry. Accept you made some major mistakes, apologize for them.

4. Stick to your guns. If you gave the promotional code to only those who had the most klout - stick with it! Tell those who complain that it’s not personal, but that they need to continue to develop on Twitter. Sure it will make some of them angry, but then they don’t have the klout to hurt you. Haha. No but, they’ll understand if you give strict guidelines as to who wins, who doesn’t.

5. Handling Clients. Some have suggested that Virgin America were the guiding hand calling the shots behind the scenes. If this is the case, you need to learn to handle clients better. They are running their promotion through you, run it the way you want. Sure it’s exciting to have a big established company like Virgin be behind you, but look at the divisive reputation you’ve established as a result.

6. Communication. I follow 4,000 people on Twitter, everyone of your tweets aren’t going to get seen by my eyes unless you RT them atleast 10 times. You apparently tweeted (which I found out today) that flights were almost full at some point. Had I seen this, I’d have rushed the booking. While Twitter is a great communication tool, those WITH klout won’t see everything because we simply are engaged with too many others for you to be a standout. But this comes back to Openness about details.

7. Klout List. Based on each city, you should have a system that lists people in order from most klout to least. Then if you give away to the top 100, everyone can see who got it. Again, this is attached to openness.

8. Klout Offers. Moving forward, you shouldn’t gear all of your promotions to the top 100. You want to appeal to everyone. Have one offer for people with the most klout. Another for people in the middle, another with low klout. I understand that clients will want to get the most influential people, but giving a coffee or a meal to someone in the top 10 will actually have less impact than 20 low tier people who can’t stop raving about it – why? Because it’s special. They’ll keep talking about it long after the promotion is done.

9. LEARN. Beyond my suggestions, learn from your own. I’m sure things went on behind the scenes that you should learn from. You made a ton of mistakes publicly, which means you made a ton more privately. Learn!

I welcome all comments, questions, praise or hate. Maybe you think I’m completely wrong, I’d like to know.