In an effort to help “The 99%”, American Express teamed up with Foursquare to promote Small Business Saturday for 2011. This is the second year AMEX has run this promotion that it seems to really be growing in popularity. With more than 2.75M Likes on their Facebook Fan Page,
The Event
Small Business Saturday is becoming an annual tradition where consumers support local businesses by going to participating stores and buying goods and services with their American Express card. The local business wins by getting a lot of free marketing via American Express, Foursquare and Facebook to promote where to go. American Express did a pretty slick Foursquare integration by synchronizing my AMEX card to my check in and purchases as you can see from the screenshot of my iPhone.
In my case it was convenient that I had to get a pizza today for lunch as I had some friends coming over. My local pizza place happen to be part of the promotion, but I only discovered this when I checked-in to the place. Since my order was over $25, I was basically getting the pizza for free? As I checked my American Express account online, I noticed that the transaction has yet to appear.
Conclusion
I really have to give kudos to American Express. They are really understanding how to leverage their brand, social media and commerce from beginning to end. Making it slick and easy to sync my Amex to Foursquare was simple. While some might view it was “big brother” by knowing more about me, but having done work in financial services before, to me, this has the hidden veil of being another layer of fraud protection by utilizing a secondary LBS transaction. Very clever.
