The concept of social rewards, the virtual social marketing new kid on the block has taken the industry by storm. At its core, the idea of social rewards is a tricked-out customer loyalty program infused with check-ins and e-points. Call it what you want but social rewards are a great way to get easy word-of-mouth street cred while rewarding your loyal customers.

The idea of rewarding loyal customers is not a new one. Casinos have been doing it since the mob rolled into Vegas and retailers joined the game soon after. The concept is simple — set up a system that allows you (the business owner) to track the visits and spending of visitors to your store or place of business. At established milestones, whether it be after a certain amount of visits or money spent, the customer is rewarded for their loyalty.l

My most memorable loyalty reward happened years ago when I lived in San Francisco and shopped at Safeway.  The store was close to my apartment with easy parking. By San Francisco standards, you can’t get any better. Needless to say, I was there often and always used my Safeway Club Card when checking out.

This particular day, after all my groceries were rung up, I swiped my Club Card and the machine made a weird beeping noise. The checker looked at the machine and said, “Oh! You won a DVD player.”  I just stared at him. “Really?” As I waited for a “just kidding” and looked around for Punked cameras, the kid walked back to customer service desk and came out with my brand new DVD player.

SAFEWAY IS AWESOME.

Since then, I’ve left the city and that DVD player died. R.I.P. What still remains? My loyalty to Safeway. I still shop there and use the same Club Card. This story took place years ago. (Obviously. Do people still use DVD players?) But, if at that time I was as strapped in to technology as I am now, I would have tweeted about Safeway until my beak was blue. My DVD glee would have instantly hit my all newsfeeds, my blog, my company’s blog — everywhere.

Enter: Social Rewards

The concept of social rewards takes the best of customer loyalty programs and hooks them up to the social web, allowing businesses to encourage existing consumers to return and spend while leveraging that into word-of-mouth marketing. This is an idea that works for businesses both on and offline. For an e-commerce site, social rewards are easily built into the shopping cart of check out process. For brick and mortar stores, mobile applications are a fun way to engage and reward loyal customers.

Over the last year, we’ve seen several companies adopt these practices. Tasti D-Lite has gained a lot of notoriety for building some ground breaking social rewards programs. Basically, the program allows you to earn points when you check in at a Tasti D-Lite. The points can be exchanged for rewards, more Tasti D-Lite. You may also opt of the rewards program to update your Facebook and Twitter feeds when you check-in. So simple. So genius.

I wish there was a Tasti D-Lite in California. Maybe I could win another DVD player.

Stay tuned for more blogs on social rewards and social commerce. As always, if you have questions on how you can incorporate social rewards into your business, don’t hesitate to call us.