American Express announced an innovative social media integration with Twitter this week, enabling US cardmembers to turn customized Twitter hashtags into savings via sync.americanexpress.com. Promoted with the tagline “Sync. Tweet. Save.” the social marketing promotion is the most direct use of Twitter to date by a brand that creates a real utility for customers: couponless savings loaded directly to their synced cards and automatically delivered in a credit statement.

“With Twitter, we’ve really hit the trifecta. We have a great platform in Twitter,” said Ed Gilligan, Vice Chairman, American Express. “We know our cardmembers are engaged in Twitter. We’ve been working with them to think about how can we help them move from conversations to commerce. To turn a tweet into a transaction.”

Brands trying out Amex Sync include Best Buy, McDonald’s, Whole Foods Market, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Century 21, The Cheesecake Factory, Dell, FedEx Office, FTD, Gulf, H&M, Seamless.com, Sports Authority, Ticketmaster, Virgin America and Zappos. They'll be closely watching the analytics on this test, with the Amex Synch API offering also supplying reports to merchants about customer spending, online and offline.

And if they're in Austin for SXSW on March 12th, they can celebrate at a concert featuring Jay-Z.Continue reading...

This year's Valentine's Day flower-ordering rush didn't bring any bouquets for the brands. On the second biggest day of the year for sending flowers, after Mother’s Day, disappointed U.S. customers took to Facebook and Twitter in droves to voice their outrage at 1-800-Flowers, FTD and ProFlowers. No wonder a website call FlowerComplaint.com exists.

But a lesser known story occurred when Chez Bloom, a florist in Minneapolis, MN checked-in online at about 4 P.M. on Valentine’s Day. Chez Bloom's Twitter account posting a few tweets complaining about the incorrect information, but there's no doubt the misinformation impacted sales. Call it the war of the roses.

Owner Laura Chase told brandchannel, “It was a very busy and successful day, too busy to check online, until late afternoon when I went looking for any reviews of our deliveries. I Googled Chez Bloom and up came this screen shot." (Take a closer look below.)

"I Googled all the other local shops I could think of – and same thing appeared," Chase continued. "It’s a good thing I took a screen shot because by 5PM it was taken down. I nearly fell off my chair. They also had TV ads saying local florists were sold out, and showing a deceptive ad with a kit that had to be assembled. It’s beyond despicable. We were not sold out. We’d like to know how many others were treated this way. It’s maybe a class action lawsuit.”

We called ProFlowers and spoke with Jen Caroll, Director PR and Corporate Communications.Continue reading...

Valentine's Day is the one time of the year you want to say it with flowers — and not to apologize.

Yet FTD and 1-800-Flowers both spent Valentine's Day on virtual bended knee, apologizing to the thousands of customers each brand managed to irk on what should have been their biggest sales day of the year.

1-800-Flowers, which launched the first Facebook store in 2009, somehow managed to not deliver thousands of floral arrangements that were ordered online, and is now vowing to make it up the intended recipients and the purchases. A character named Tina Flowers on its Facebook page is reaching out to disgruntled customers to make up for the mishap.

And FTD found itself in the doghouse this Valentine's Day after partnering with a brand recovering from its own PR disaster — Groupon.Continue reading...

United Parcel Service has just launched "UPS Direct to Door," a program that brings samples and offers from select brands to recipients of UPS residential shipments. According to UPS, the offers—for example, an invite to Zappos.com’s VIP club—are packaged in a custom-designed UPS Direct to Door Pak. Then they're delivered to residents in test ZIP codes in five US cities, as regular deliveries are being made. Each Direct to Door Pak can contain about twelve offers and samples.

According to Marketing Daily, focus group research conducted by UPS revealed that offers delivered via traditional direct mail marketing went unnoticed. "The focus group attendees said they would feel differently about it if a sample package were delivered by hand by a familiar person." What better person to do that than the UPS driver, someone the customer trusts and is familiar with?Continue reading...