Starbucks Wants You To Tweet-Gift A Pal Some Joe
- by Steve Smith @popeyesm, October 29, 2013
The gifting side
of m-commerce may take off well before proximity payments themselves. In fact, one of the few big success stories in m-payment -- Starbucks -- is using Twitter as a channel for mobile gifting.
Announced by company head of the mobile effort, Chief Digital Officer Adam Brotman, this “tweet-a-coffee” model allows a user to send a $5.00 Starbucks Card eGift to a friend.Users have to link their own Starbucks gift card or credit card and relevant permissions to their Twitter account. But once this is done, Starbucks will read your tweets using the @tweetacoffee handle and credit the gift to anyone you mention under their Twitter handle. The tweet can be personalized with a message as well. The recipient of the tweet will receive an email message from Starbucks with the $5 gift card that can be redeemed from their smartphone.
To encourage the new model, Starbucks was also giving $5 gift eCards to the first 100,000 customers who tweet a coffee to a friend.
Person-to-person payments are being seen by some m-payment players as an entryway for consumers to become accustomed to mobile commerce models. Square recently launched a Square Cash product that transfers money between parties via email.
Credit where credit is due; kudos to the Starbucks' marketing department with this one. What a great and simple way to leverage Twitter. And yes, I have already sent a coffee to a colleague some 4000 miles away - and at $5 for a "thank you," it's something I'll use again - which is, after all, what the folks at SBUX want ;)
Cool. I like that the gift card doesn't match the price of a coffee, so the recipient has to waste part of the value and buy something cheap, or spend their own money and buy something more expensive. Even more Kudos, Starbucks marketer dudes!