It doesn’t appear to be available online yet, but the latest issue of Inc has a piece on how to get people on Twitter to follow your business. One of the companies profiled was Tasti D-Lite, which sells, I don’t know, desserts or something. OK, I do know. In the course of writing this post I’ve learned nearly everything there is to know about the company, because fact checking is awesome. But that doesn’t matter right now.
What matters is that they spent $10K to upgrade their point-of-sale system to incorporate Twitter and other social networks into their loyalty program.
Based on the article, this was going to be a different kind of post. See if you can guess why:
“To get points for tweeting, a customer submits his Twitter username and password. Then every time he buys something at a store, he swipes a loyalty card at the register. Tasti D-Lite’s point-of-sale system automatically logs in to his Twitter account and sends a tweet informing his followers of the purchase.”
Thankfully, it looks (from the description anyway) that they’re using Twitter’s OAuth integration instead of actually collecting usernames and passwords, so I don’t have to write an article called something like “security schmecurity – people will do anything for ice cream.”
Instead, we’re starting to see early examples of physical/virtual integration, and it’s kind of exciting, if not early (a Twitter search today for Tasti D-Lite suggests that well under a dozen people participated in the past week.)
Lately I’m of a mind that Facebook got people online, Twitter got them more comfortable with telling the whole world a little bit about themselves, and FourSquare made it OK to track their every movement. The interesting part is that people new to these services find themselves mentally blocked for updates, so the ability to automatically say they’ve bought ice cream is actually a potential value-add as opposed to a minor sellout of their individual identities – it’s really no different from “I’m at Starbucks.”
At the moment, of course, the Facebook – Twitter – FourSquare – Tasti D-Lite (et. al.) funnel is pretty narrow. For it to grow there’s going to have to be large scale investment in point-of-sale systems, and I can only hope that someone will step in and make something that’s open and extensible to make room for the next generation of players instead of yet another exclusivity play. Credit card terminal makers, are you paying attention?
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