Lotame builds recommendation into its profile targeting platform

Online identity and tracking platform Lotame announced a new product — a recommendation feature for users to suggest others to follow.

The description sounds like it’s built into some sort of recommendation engine, but it’s actually an extension of Lotame’s Identity Content Model (ICM), which connects your digital identity to your offline identity. In its new co-marketing offering with FICO, Lotame is now saying that I’m “targeted with suggested growth,” suggesting followers who will share similar interests.

At launch, the feature is integrated with Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Digg, Zillow, and Palantir.

“We realized that was a common space for folks to be, and we thought that was a natural space to try and integrate into my cart,” Lotame co-founder and CEO Louis Vecchio said.

That means, for example, if you’re on Instagram, one of your personal recommendations may be a user who is also an Instagrammer who uses the hashtag #Besketing. And then you get an e-mail from Lotame asking you to follow them and join their board of advisers. (We’ve reached out to other potential targets to see if they’re interested in the feature too.)

“I see as a real and unique value proposition that I need the help of my followers to advocate for me — to be my seeding agent, so to speak,” Vecchio said. “You need to do that because the public can be quite dismissive of real-world connections and [we realize] we’re really early days of the public distrust of these these big corporations.”

He added that I can’t be the first to “offer up this massive bucket of potential new followers to generate goodwill for them,” but the point is that when the audience for a good cause is larger than the funders, it can be harder to make it happen.

“Besketing” is a term adopted by tech circles, but Vecchio suggested that “Besketing is a good metaphor” for Lotame’s new strategy.

Plus, he added, “What’s great about the Besketing ethos is it’s a philosophy, a philosophy that has stood the test of time, that really doesn’t need the technology to be able to achieve those goals.”