Social Media Watch: Gaps and other places, the Queen of digital, Scvngr launch and outsourcing made even easier

Gaps in Gap Facebook Offer

Last Friday’s Facebook offer of 10,000 free pairs of jeans from Gap revealed the holes in the Places spaces. The FB promotion read: “Check-in at any Men’s & Women’s Gap using Facebook Places and you could win. Just show any Gap employee your check-in and you could score a free pair. If you’re too late don’t worry, we’ll let you shop with 40% off any regularly priced item.”  

So scores of people who were not at a Gap location went to FB and typed in: “Checking-in.”

As Matthew Ingram put it on gigaom.com: “The reality is that, in the short term at least, both retailers and services like Facebook and Foursquare are going to have to do a lot of educating and hand-holding for users, because most people have no idea what they are talking about when they say things like 'location sharing' or 'check in.'”

Queen “likes” Facebook

From across the pond comes news of the Queen – again – showing us what it looks like when Royalty goes full-on digital. Already a mobile phone owner, with a private email address, at 84 years of age, she just launched a Facebook page called "The British Monarchy."

The Queen already has a Flickr account replete with 600 photographs; a Royal Twitter account was launched in 2009; and a YouTube Royal Channel went live in 2007.

Featured will be all the latest Royal news, photographs, videos and speeches - and daily updates about the activities of the Queen and other members of the Royal Family.

As reported in the Telegraph: “While users will not be able to ‘poke’ the Queen or send her ‘friend requests’, they will be able to use the Facebook ‘likes’ application, represented by a ‘thumbs up’ sign, to register themselves as fans of the Queen.”

Enter the “Social Consumer”

The Journal of Consumer Research recently published a University of Minnesota study entitled “Got to Get You Into My Life: Do Brand Personalities Rub Off on Consumers?” The study focused on the ephemeral but undeniable link between brands and consumers.

Women in a mall were given either Victoria’s Secret bags or plain pink bags – to carry for an hour’s worth of shopping. As Brian Solis writes: “Those women who carried Victoria’s Secret bags felt more feminine, glamorous, and good-looking. On the contrary, those with the pink shopping bags felt indifferent.”

It’s the dawn of the “Social Consumer” according to Solis. “Brands must now define the pillars of character, mission, purpose, and persona in order to foster desired engagements and outcomes. No brand is an island and we must now build bridges in order to connect our value proposition to customers and the people who influence them.”

Scvngr Checks Into Big Apple

Scvngr just launched its $80-per-month local rewards program for over 50 New York City businesses. NYC restaurants, bars and clothing retailers can offer five rewards deals through Scvngr per month for that flat fee. The first 30 days are free – due to launch partner status – and then the monthly fee kicks in.

While deals on Facebook Places are free for small businesses, the extra cash for marketing benefits from other location-based platforms is an enticing wager.

Text for Jobs

As if outsourcing needed to be made any easier: A service called txteagle uses phone-based text messaging to connect companies the world over to jobseekers in the developing world.

Designed by Nathan Eagle of MIT, and Benjamin Olding of Harvard’s School of Engineering and UC Berkeley’s Department of Statistics, txteagle “helps companies increase productivity, reduce expenses and gain new insights by harnessing the power of a massive, low cost workforce in the developing world,” as reported on the dailycrowdsource.com.

Dell Buzz on Facebook

The Dell Buzz Room just launched on Facebook with content from OneSpot.

The app includes news, videos, tweets, and photos, and it covers categories including Environment, Education, Healthcare, Cloud Computing, Social Media, and Mobility.

According to Sarah Richardson of Dell, the company launched OneSpot to “incorporate the most popular industry and social content for customers in Facebook, where they are already spending time online. It’s a concerted effort to engage with fans beyond the first ‘like’ click.”

OneSpot has a solid track record in retail-customer connections, counting GolfSmith, Danskin and MovieGoods as clients.