Twitter and Foursquare the new virtual currency. Are you game?

Tastirewards

Tasti-D-lite recently announced a social media rewards program that earns consumers points for updating their twitter and foursquare accounts each time they peruse a location at the New York City-based chain. As Mashable’s Jennifer Van Grove reports, this initiative is the first of its kind to directly link customers’ social media behavior with their physical shopping habits and actually put a monetary value on the abundant free publicity driven by social media. The immediate impact of this program on social media marketing, Van Grove says, is threefold:

1. It enables a measureable association between social media and sales figures

2. It will motivate other stores and venues to implement similar programs, which will create competition for social media loyalty, adding value to social media presence beyond influence

3. Location-based social media marketing will become more commonplace. Since sharing your location is an order to collect rewards for social media use, people will become more accustomed to disclosing.

In a subsequent article, Van Grove explored how campus-wide initiatives have been established at several innovative institutions of higher education. The increased value of the social media-savvy consumer will likely soon expand into other industries—we predict that rewards for entertainment and tourism check-ins are imminent.

Beyond social media efforts, what does this mean for a digital agency? In the near future, anyone in digital marketing will have to evaluate the effects of the integration of geolocation and increased offline activity associated with social media rewards on several levels of strategic planning:

• Website/microsite design
• SEO
• user experience strategy
• performance
• analytics

At Geary, how will this influence our results-based digital strategy? We’ll get closer to our clients and our resources.

• More collaboration with client to tie in on-site/location based aspects of a digital campaign
• More collaboration with 3^rd party developers (mobile apps)
• More emphasis and measurement of visual/mobile searches (google goggles, for example)