For The Marketing Store’s 25th anniversary event we highlighted a number of trends for the future. One was “Data as currency”. We said: “We are seeing the creation of a new value exchange between consumer and retailer and data will be considered a valuable currency.” If you’re interested in the detail of these trends, or any of the other content from the event, you may contact the team at TMS.

This trend isn’t one that’s going away any time soon. It may end up being the foundation of “marketing” efforts for the foreseeable future. It’s important for brands and organisations to calculate the value of that personal data to them.

Guinness understand. I came home from work last week to find a parcel from them containing 6 Guinness goblets. Empty ones but I’m not complaining. A letter in the package thanked me for entering a promotion that I’d forgotten about. They explained that they’d calculated my influence score and that I’d qualified for a set of free glasses. The actual promotion, to win a flight on the Guinness private jet for a night in Dublin (see screen grab below), would see winners announced over the course of the next couple of months.

If I’d had a night on the town in Dublin, a flight back to London on a private jet before dawn is probably the last thing I’d feel like doing. Still, the prize isn’t really relevant. The promotion entry mechanic is related to our trend.

PeerIndex hosted the promotion. Klout do something similar and no doubt all the services attempting to quantify influence will at some point. PeerIndex had emailed me to tell me there were “perks” I could claim because of my influence score. Influence scores, if you didn’t know, are typically unreliable measures of an individual’s behaviour in digital social networks (how active, how often endorsed, network size and composition, etc). I have no doubt they’ll improve in time but at their current level of sophistication there’s something almost crass about them.

Still, to claim the perk I had to login to PeerIndex using social graph credentials (either Twitter of Facebook), browse the available perks and claim one by clicking on it. Done. Naturally, one is encouraged to share the fact that you’ve entered the promotion across your network. I didn’t – but I am writing this, aren’t I.

In many respects this isn’t that different from a typical promotion where a website is used to capture personal data. The interesting feature here is the level of targeting and the value exchange for that data. Guinness have decided to give away something comparatively valuable in terms of production and delivery costs. For free. No purchase necessary. PeerIndex gives them the ability to restrict who receives tangible rewards based on how influential they are.

When thinking about “data as currency” and new value exchanges, it’s worth remembering that the exchange should have value for both sides of the equation.

Image credit: Nick Gentry

currency data influence promotion