Klout For Conferences: SponsorHub Starts Scoring Events’ Sponsorship Value

SponsorHub, an online marketplace for event sponsorships, is unveiling a new feature today that it’s calling the SponsorHub Score. The company says the score is, yes, “like Klout for events” — every event selling sponsorships on the site gets a rating between 0 and 100 that’s supposed to show the value it will provide to brand marketers.

Founder and CEO Robert Johnston says the SponsorHub Score reflects his larger vision for the company, namely that event sponsorships “should be purchased like any other form of media.” One of the keys to making that happen is providing measurements that help advertisers determine the effectiveness of their spending, so that they can say, “This is exactly why we paid $30K for the sponsorship.”

Johnston says that in determining how to score events, SponsorHub tried to look at things from the perspective of a chief marketing officer and figure out the value of a conference’s attendees to that CMO. So the SponsorHub Score is based on things like social influence, audience demographics (Johnston says there’s the company has “a little bit of a secret sauce” to capture this data from the SponsorHub site and from partners), pricing, and press and attendee testimonials.

SponsorHub Scores will visible on every SponsorHub event listing. Johnston says the company has already been sharing the score with some of its advertisers, and they seem pretty excited. But could there be some backlash on from event organizers? After all, if we stick to the Klout comparison, not everyone has been happy with their Klout score, or positive about the general concept.

Johnston says he isn’t too worried. For one thing, he says the events can post listings on SponsorHub are curated, so there shouldn’t be too many low-scoring, low-quality events on the site. He adds that for newer events, there could be an “aspirational” component, where they get a middling score in their first year and shoot to improve it in year two.

Things will probably get even more interesting with the really high-scoring events, Johnston adds, because they’ll now have more backup to charge their sponsors premium rates.