Gilt Picks Your Next Discount Amount Based On Your Klout Score


Flash sales website Gilt Groupe this week will dish out discounts solely determined by its members’ Klout scores, with rollbacks as high as 100% off apparel and home decor.

Gilt has partnered with Klout — which measures a social media user’s online influence from 0 to 100 on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Foursquare — to offer the unique discount on Klout’s Perks platform.

The discount begins Tuesday with people who have lower scores and opens up to others during the week:

  • March 6: 20% off for users with scores up to 20 (up to $50)
  • March 7: 40% off for users with scores between 21-40 (up to $50)
  • March 8: 60% off for users with scores between 41-60 (up to $75)
  • March 9: 80% off for users with scores between 61-80 (up to $100)
  • March 10: 100% for users off with scores between 81-100 (up to $100)

“Gilt is working with us in a way that brings significant value to our users, and has the foresight to see how important it is to connect to influencers at scale,” says Klout CEO Joe Fernandez.

Both companies, which worked on the deal for three months, are keen on tapping into new avenues.

This year alone, Klout has been busy toying with perks to bring real-world benefits to its scoring system and Perks platform, which is an integral part of the San Francisco-based startup’s business model. And a recent acquisition of another startup shows Klout is taking steps toward releasing the first offcial Klout mobile app.

Meanwhile, Gilt continues to market its expanded properties through partnerships, including its most recent venture with Niche Media founder Jason Binn to launch a shoppable luxury magazine called Du Jour. Gilt, which just a few months ago began shipping outside of the U.S., also unleashed an application programming interface (API) in February that allows outside developers to infuse Gilt data into their apps or platforms.

Gilt also teamed up with influencers of specific Klout topics to curate special 36-hour sales that start March 7.

A Gilt rep told Mashable that all of the curators’ picks will be represented in one sale, allowing Gilt members to learn about curators and products from several Gilt properties in one place.

“Klout has the ability to identify influencers and Gilt has the platform to connect those influencers with brands and an engaged shopper audience,” says Gilt Groupe President Andy Page.

SEE ALSO: U.S. Online Retail Sales to Hit $327 Billion by 2016? | Klout Confirms Mobile App


BONUS: What Else Does Klout Have in Store for 2012?


Looking ahead, Klout is still building scoring models for seven more services (YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress.com, Last.fm and Flickr) that have already been integrated onto Klout users’ dashboards. Klout also plans to add Quora, Yelp, Posterous, Livefyre, Disqus, bit.ly and BranchOut.

Klout likely will continue improving its Topics feature (see screenshots below) and Klout Perks platform. The Topics feature, which rolled out in September and lets you gain insights on top influencers and +K recipients for specific content areas, got a visual update in December with a “sashes” and an “Add a Topic” button.


Clickable Topics on Your Dashboard




On your Klout dashboard, you can click on a topic to open its Topic Page.

In December 2011, Klout rolled out sashes and an "Add a Topic" button. A blue sash goes to users with the most +Ks for any topic, while a gold sash is given to influencers based on Klout's algorithm. People who fall into both categories receive a blue-and-gold sash.

Click here to view this gallery.

Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, Pgiam

More About: fashion, gilt groupe, klout, online shopping, Social Media

For more Social Media coverage:


Who’s Tweeting About Black Friday? [INFOGRAPHIC]

As retailers prepare for post-Thanksgiving holiday shopping, consumers increasingly turn online to search for the best deals. Last year, according to the National Retail Federation, 212 million individuals spent an estimated $45 billion total on Black Friday. This year, social media has played a big role in Black Friday marketing, and buzz about when and where consumers are shopping is stronger than ever.

Black Friday is already trending on Twitter, and it’s no surprise, especially since most companies are expanding sales from Thursday night all the way up to Cyber Monday.

Social media analysts at Mashwork monitored more than 270,000 tweets between Sept. 26, 2011 and Nov. 17, 2011 and found out where shoppers will be spending their money this upcoming Black Friday (whether it’s online or in line), and what products they’re going after.

SEE ALSO: Top 10 Black Friday Deals on Social Media

What’s interesting, is that according to the study, more people will be buying for themselves during Black Friday this year than for others. However, the number of shoppers more likely to buy for others has increased from last year’s 26%.

It’s no wonder why most people have their eye on computers and tablets this holiday shopping season, since so many new products in the tablet industry have just recently rolled out. What’s noteworthy, however, is that because these products are so new — Amazon’s Kindle Fire, for instance — shoppers tend to discuss brands on social media that they are engaged and familiar with, such as the iPad 2.

Regardless, it will be interesting to see the kind of buzz on the actual day of shopping. Has social media played a role in your Black Friday plans?


Infographic provided by Mashwork.

More About: black friday, Holidays 2011, online shopping, shopping, Social Media, trending, Twitter

For more Social Media coverage:


6 Ways to Design Your Own Jewelry Online

jewelry image

Dave Sloan is CEO of Treehouse Logic, which offers a hosted design tool solution that enables customer co-creation. You can reach Dave at dave@treehouselogic.com and follow him on Twitter.

Why buy standard department store jewelry when you can customize your own pieces online for around the same price?

Jewelry is one of the hottest categories in the growing design-it-yourself market because it is extremely personal and highly configurable. Jewelry is the perfect fit for an online design tool that lets you mix and match colorful jewels and precious metals.

Each piece that you design is built to order and is likely a one-of-a-kind. Custom jewelry is a great way to express your individuality and style. Thanks to online shops that offer online design tools, you can start getting creative right away. Here are six sites worth checking out.


1. Gemkitty


gemkitty image

Gemkitty’s mission is to enable anyone to discover or design a unique piece of semi-precious gemstone jewelry. Using the online design tool, anyone can digitally design their own natural gemstone jewelry. Gemkitty offers custom earrings and necklaces, and just launched a cool “Blingomatic” quiz that helps guys pick out the perfect piece for their lady.


2. Blue Nile


bluenile image

Started in 1999, Blue Nile helps shoppers navigate the complexity of diamond selection. Using a set of filters for attributes like price, cut, carat, color, and clarity, Blue Nile helps you find the perfect match for your tastes and price range. The diamond itself is shown with helpful dimension diagrams and sample photos.


3. Gemvara


gemvara image

Gemvara aims to create a jewelry shopping experience that is superior to going to a brick-and-mortal jewelry store. Users choose from among a wide variety of template products (rings, necklaces, earrings) and customize stones and precious metals before checking out. Orders take three weeks to ship.


4. Brilliant Earth


brilliant earth image

Brilliant Earth focuses on the socially conscious consumer by sourcing conflict free diamonds from Canada. Similar to Blue Nile, consumer can create their own ring by filtering through thousands of gemstone and setting options. Brilliant Earth donates 5% of their profits to local communities that have been harmed by the diamond industry.


5. Charmed by Ingrid Anne


charmed image

Charmed by Ingrid Anne allows you to customize a necklace on a Facebook page without having to install a Facebook application. Being on Facebook itself makes it easy to post and share your creation. Select a necklace style and add three charms or gemstones to complete your necklace.


6. Delusha


delusha image

Delusha aims to appeal to the fashion diva in you. They set out to give you the creative tools to express yourself, your style, and your look. Select beads and jewels and drag and drop them onto a metal wire. The experience is like sitting at a craft table with bowls of beads. All Delusha pieces are handmade in Valencia, Spain.


Get Started


If designing from scratch sounds like a daunting task, all these sites offer a gallery of preset designs to help get you started. Many shoppers like to select design templates and then edit, rather than starting with a blank canvas. Additionally, visitors like to see what other shoppers have built in a customer gallery and what the jewelry vendor recommends in each product category.

Custom jewelry can be a great gift idea as well. Rather than struggling to pick out something at the mall, these online jewelry shops let you easily put together a thoughtful gift. Enjoy designing!


More Fashion Resources from Mashable:


- 3 Ways to Design Your Own Clothes Online
- Why Fashion’s Top Brands Are Flocking to Tumblr
- 7 Stellar Examples of Branded Content from the Fashion Industry
- Why the Fashion Industry Is Betting Big on Branded Online Content
- How the Fashion Industry Is Using Digital Tools to Increase ROI

More About: customization, design, fashion, gift guide, jewelry, List, Lists, online shopping, social media

For more Social Media coverage:


5 Ways Facebook’s Open Graph Will Impact E-commerce

Facebook MoneyMitchell Harper is co-founder of BigCommerce, a leading provider of shopping cart software used by more than 40,000 organizations worldwide. Mitchell has written and published over 300 articles relating to software development, marketing, business, social media and entrepreneurship.

After watching Mark Zuckerberg’s recent keynote at the FacebookFacebookFacebook F8 developers conference, it is clear that Facebook is looking to become the standard in social personalization for everything you do online. And the new social features and direction that they announced will undoubtedly have an impact on the broader world of e-commerce.

For example, their new “Like” button is already visible on over 50,000 websites, and they’re providing an API-based way to access what they’re calling a user’s “Open Graph,” which is a list of everything he or she has “liked” across the entire web — music, books, restaurants, food and more.


The Facebook Standard


Now here’s the fun part: Using Facebook’s API, a website can take your interests and use them to personalize your browsing experience. Better still, they don’t even have to prompt you to login to your Facebook account, thanks to the new auto-authentication feature which already lets sites like YelpYelpYelp, IMDb and PandoraPandoraPandora pull in your Open Graph data.

Until a few weeks ago, it may have sounded crazy to think that Facebook would become the standard when it comes to website personalization. But as each day goes by, it’s looking like that’s exactly what will happen.

Although there’s been concern about privacy, in my opinion, personalization will end up boosting the online shopping experience for consumers, and will provide some powerful opportunities for savvy e-commerce companies.


What This Means for E-commerce


Here are my five predictions for how that will happen.

1. Amazon won’t be the only online store with sophisticated personalization. Considering anyone (with permission) can pull your Open Graph via Facebook’s API, this information can be used to personalize an online store based on your past purchases, likes, and preferences quite easily. For example, our company is already working on a way to personalize the “Featured Products” area on the home page of our merchant’s stores based on their visitor’s “likes” from Facebook.

2. Facebook will start driving more traffic to some online stores than Google. With tighter Facebook integration comes more sharing by shoppers. For example, if you login to your favorite online store using Facebook, that website can automatically post to your wall when you order, write a review, or “like” a product. According to Nielsen, 90% of people trust recommendations from people they know, and Facebook’s “like” button is the perfect way to recommend a product to a friend.

3. Google will adopt Facebook’s Open Graph protocol. When you’ve got more users than anyone else, and you make your platform open, as is the case with Facebook’s new announcements, your competitors (such as GoogleGoogleGoogle and MySpaceMySpaceMySpace) will follow your lead sooner or later. I predict that Google’s search results (including product search) will soon start displaying recommendations based on data available about you in the Open Graph protocol. For example, if you search for “comedy movie” and you’ve “liked” Austin Powers, Swingers, The Love Guru, Wayne’s World and Liar Liar on IMDb, then Google will be able to use your Open Graph data as well as their own personalization algorithms to display search results that are unique to you.

4. The Open Graph is laying the foundation for wider adoption of Facebook Credits. Imagine if you could buy at any online website using Facebook Credits. Similar to how PayPal works now, you wouldn’t have to share your credit card details, and could simply use credits to pay for anything and everything you buy online. Companies like PayPal should be worried about this. While Facebook Credits are only really popular with virtual goods now, it’s only a matter of time before they provide an open platform which developers can use to facilitate payments via Facebook.

5. E-commerce conversion rates will increase. Imagine if you were looking to buy a t-shirt online and right next to the “Add to Cart” button you saw that four of your friends (along with their names and photos) had already bought the same t-shirt. This kind of marketing is priceless — it brings instant social trust to that website. If you assume the average Facebook user has 200 friends, this type of social trust factor could be huge, and Facebook’s new recommendation and “like” tools will play a huge role.

What do you think Facebook’s new social tools mean for e-commerce? I’d love to see your comments below.



For more social media coverage, follow Mashable Social Media on TwitterTwitterTwitter or become a fan on Facebook




More Facebook resources from Mashable:


- What Facebook’s Open Graph Means for Your Business
- How Facebook Can Become a Money Making Machine
- 5 Reasons Google and Search Won’t Dominate The Next Decade
- HOW TO: Disable Facebook’s “Instant Personalization” [PRIVACY]
- Facebook Open Graph: What it Means for Privacy


5 Ways Facebook’s Open Graph Will Impact E-commerce

Facebook MoneyMitchell Harper is co-founder of BigCommerce, a leading provider of shopping cart software used by more than 40,000 organizations worldwide. Mitchell has written and published over 300 articles relating to software development, marketing, business, social media and entrepreneurship.

After watching Mark Zuckerberg’s recent keynote at the FacebookFacebookFacebook F8 developers conference, it is clear that Facebook is looking to become the standard in social personalization for everything you do online. And the new social features and direction that they announced will undoubtedly have an impact on the broader world of e-commerce.

For example, their new “Like” button is already visible on over 50,000 websites, and they’re providing an API-based way to access what they’re calling a user’s “Open Graph,” which is a list of everything he or she has “liked” across the entire web — music, books, restaurants, food and more.


The Facebook Standard


Now here’s the fun part: Using Facebook’s API, a website can take your interests and use them to personalize your browsing experience. Better still, they don’t even have to prompt you to login to your Facebook account, thanks to the new auto-authentication feature which already lets sites like YelpYelpYelp, IMDb and PandoraPandoraPandora pull in your Open Graph data.

Until a few weeks ago, it may have sounded crazy to think that Facebook would become the standard when it comes to website personalization. But as each day goes by, it’s looking like that’s exactly what will happen.

Although there’s been concern about privacy, in my opinion, personalization will end up boosting the online shopping experience for consumers, and will provide some powerful opportunities for savvy e-commerce companies.


What This Means for E-commerce


Here are my five predictions for how that will happen.

1. Amazon won’t be the only online store with sophisticated personalization. Considering anyone (with permission) can pull your Open Graph via Facebook’s API, this information can be used to personalize an online store based on your past purchases, likes, and preferences quite easily. For example, our company is already working on a way to personalize the “Featured Products” area on the home page of our merchant’s stores based on their visitor’s “likes” from Facebook.

2. Facebook will start driving more traffic to some online stores than Google. With tighter Facebook integration comes more sharing by shoppers. For example, if you login to your favorite online store using Facebook, that website can automatically post to your wall when you order, write a review, or “like” a product. According to Nielsen, 90% of people trust recommendations from people they know, and Facebook’s “like” button is the perfect way to recommend a product to a friend.

3. Google will adopt Facebook’s Open Graph protocol. When you’ve got more users than anyone else, and you make your platform open, as is the case with Facebook’s new announcements, your competitors (such as GoogleGoogleGoogle and MySpaceMySpaceMySpace) will follow your lead sooner or later. I predict that Google’s search results (including product search) will soon start displaying recommendations based on data available about you in the Open Graph protocol. For example, if you search for “comedy movie” and you’ve “liked” Austin Powers, Swingers, The Love Guru, Wayne’s World and Liar Liar on IMDb, then Google will be able to use your Open Graph data as well as their own personalization algorithms to display search results that are unique to you.

4. The Open Graph is laying the foundation for wider adoption of Facebook Credits. Imagine if you could buy at any online website using Facebook Credits. Similar to how PayPal works now, you wouldn’t have to share your credit card details, and could simply use credits to pay for anything and everything you buy online. Companies like PayPal should be worried about this. While Facebook Credits are only really popular with virtual goods now, it’s only a matter of time before they provide an open platform which developers can use to facilitate payments via Facebook.

5. E-commerce conversion rates will increase. Imagine if you were looking to buy a t-shirt online and right next to the “Add to Cart” button you saw that four of your friends (along with their names and photos) had already bought the same t-shirt. This kind of marketing is priceless — it brings instant social trust to that website. If you assume the average Facebook user has 200 friends, this type of social trust factor could be huge, and Facebook’s new recommendation and “like” tools will play a huge role.

What do you think Facebook’s new social tools mean for e-commerce? I’d love to see your comments below.



For more social media coverage, follow Mashable Social Media on TwitterTwitterTwitter or become a fan on Facebook




More Facebook resources from Mashable:


- What Facebook’s Open Graph Means for Your Business
- How Facebook Can Become a Money Making Machine
- 5 Reasons Google and Search Won’t Dominate The Next Decade
- HOW TO: Disable Facebook’s “Instant Personalization” [PRIVACY]
- Facebook Open Graph: What it Means for Privacy