Social Reward Scheme for Check-Ins

Ok, first of all, a hat-tip to Elle, who's original blog post on this got me thinking....

So, we have Facebook Places, which is about to get pretty huge I should imagine. In America they also have FourSquare and GoWalla. All of which allow you to check into venues. What's beginning to happen now is that organisations are able to offer deals based on your check-ins. Lovely.

But what if I want to be a good citizen – am I allowed to exchange this? This “gift” for want of a better word? If I go to Starbucks (ok, I'm a Costa boy, but same difference) and I get an offer of a free coffee, I should be able to pass that onto someone else, right? It's just a voucher at the end of the day...

So what I'm imagining is a marketplace of sorts. I go to Starbucks a certain number of times and because I'm a good Social Media pawn, I check-in lots and get an offer of free coffee. But....I'm also a society conscious SM pawn, so I want something good to come of my latte addiction. I add my “free” coffee to the marketplace. Could be an auction, could be set price, doesn't really matter. Someone else buys this voucher and gets their “free” coffee. Obviously the price would be less than the cost of buying the coffee directly.

So far, so blah. But, imagine the coffee is £1. The website takes a processing cut...whatever it needs to operate, etc. The rest goes to a charity – choice of the original SM pawn. Maybe some sort of link in with JustGiving?

I honestly can't see a problem here. The SM pawn gets to feel that they're doing some good, and all they need to do is check-in to a location they're already visiting. The buyer of the voucher gets some cheap coffee/sandwich/fluffy elephant – woohoo! The advertising organisation...well they potentially actually benefit even more. The original customer is a repeat customer and will keep coming back for the vouchers so they can donate more to charity. The new customer? Well they might not have come in before – there's potential there for a brand spanking new customer. They were already giving the voucher away, so that's a sunk cost...

So now you need to give people an incentive to give their vouchers away (and for others to buy them). Well, you could give away badges. Meh. Boring. Done it. But what about a leaderboard, not of everyone in the country. Not of everyone for that store, but your own personal leaderboard. Just you and your friends group? That's something I'd be interested in seeing. I don't give two hoots if Steve from Grimsby has donated £15,000 somehow, but if my mate Carl is doing better than me, I'm suddenly an interested man.

I don't know if this is something someone is already working on, or maybe there's a good reason it's not possible, but seems like an interesting experiment....