A Social Media Card?

Social media has pulled advertisers and marketers into the eco-system of conversations. However, the audience has rejected their presence.

Now through an integrated innovative offering advertisers and marketers can both reach and add value to the conversations.

You Ask How?

Integrated technology aimed at the financial sector has created a huge opportunity to create the means to turn conversations into revenue.

The new technology enables consumers to access discounts from their favorite merchants by downloading coupons, rewards and even cash incentives directly to an affinity debit MasterCard or Visa. Besides discounts, coupons or cash incentives the technology also enables other “rewards” such as points for usage or blog post, direct cash contributions to others and basically any kind of reward you can imagine.  This technology will revolutionize “advertising, marketing and the entire rewards industry”.  Consider the following:

1. In 2008, 72 percent of consumers indicated they used a debit card in the past year. In 2007, that number was 65 percent. (Source: Javelin, “Credit Card Spending Declines” study, March 2009)
2. Debit card usage grew from 2007 to 2008, with 66 percent of consumers indicating they used a debit card in the month preceding the September 2008 survey, compared to 57 percent of consumers in 2007. (Source: Javelin, “Credit Card Spending Declines” study, March 2009)

The integrated technology provides valuable propositions for brands, merchants,affinity groups and consumers. The best scenarios for this new technology to create the most value are the following which insures its success:

1. A group, organization or common audience which has an affinity to people, interest, products and related rewards
2. The host has an existing audience of at least 25,000 people or businesses
3. The host has relations with sponsors, brands and existing advertisers
4. The host currently provides value as defined by the audience
5. The host has demographic information, emails, and related data relative to their audience
6. The host has members, whether paying or non-paying
7. The host currently provides value and desires to provide more value to their audience and to be a market leader

How Does It Work?

We’ve been discussing “conversational currency“ and even started a community on the subject here. This community is run by Dan Robles, author of Innovation Economy, who has been and continues to examine the how conversations and innovation drives currency.  This new technology is one example of the convergence of conversations with financial instruments aimed at transforming old processes into new value, conversational currency.  Think about the waste of pushing coupons, gift cards, membership cards, spam and the host of “cards” brands and merchants try to push onto consumers, see “How Many Cards Do You Need?”.  Now innovation will again disrupt entire markets who have been living in the legacy of old methods.

The illustration above provides a graphical overview of how this new technology works. Fundamentally instead of paper rewards now any and all rewards or loyalty programs offered by brands, merchants, associations, affinity groups and even individuals can now be handled on one card that can be used in over 35 million locations worldwide.  What you can offer “people” and be able to send or receive any kind of offer is only limited by your imagination. Additionally the technology also integrates “social media communications” thus enabling individuals to share the value they received with like minded friends, family and entire markets of consumers. The technology also enables brands and merchants to inform consumers, who opt in, of new value propositions which they have an affinity to ready to be loaded onto their card and used at local retail outlets.

Besides the value for card holders the illustrated “social media card” provides brands and merchants with real time data on the effectiveness of their offerings to an audience. Unlike old reward methods that produced 1%-3% ROI this new method produces 100% ROI!

Now What?

If you run an association, community or any kind of affinity group you can now create more value than expected to brands and merchants that have an affinity to your group and more importantly to fans and members of your association/group. The technology provides unique features and function all digitally and with seamless integration into web sites, blogs and social networks.

Think of sports, entertainment, associations, mommy bloggers, music, trade groups, niche publishers and magazines and any kind of market segment that has an established relationship with consumers who have affinity to certain merchandise and brands.  The opportunity is endless. This once and for all solves the issue of  Social Media ROI!

Want to know more?  Tom Nilsen, with Avidpath, manages market relations for this  platform. His profile is here and he can be reached here.  David Bullock, profit engineer and author of Barack 2.0, oversees the technology and can be reached here.

What say you? Social media just crossed the bridge into financial transaction that are measurable and valuable real time.

Tagged as: blog marketing, brand marketing, business disruption, business solutions, business transformation, Conversational Currency, conversational marketing, creative capital, innovation economy, jay deragon, social capital, Social Media, Social Media Card, social media roi