Slideshare Hot on Facebook

Wow! I wonder how that happened?

"Fan clubs for merchants 06 13 " is being talked about on Facebook more than anything else on SlideShare right now.

So we've put it on the SlideShare homepage (in the "Hot on Facebook" section).
That's smoking hot! 

-The SlideShare Team

Why Fan Clubs are social by design, unlike traditional loyalty programs

Here is our new presentation on Fan Clubs. Discover how Fan Clubs can benefit your business. Free for merchants and their fans.

Fan clubs for merchants 06 13 from Aneace Haddad

Talking about payment brands at the Mobile Show Asia

If you are at the Mobile Show Asia at Marina Bay Sands today (Singapore), I will be giving a short talk titled "SoLoMo: Understanding how payment brands drive Social-Local-Mobile advertising."

Wednesday 24 April, 3:30pm, Basement 2, Hall D, Social Media Marketing Theatre.

Case study: Using Facebook as a free loyalty program fan club

Click here for a case study on how a Singapore restaurant is using their Facebook Page as a free loyalty program Fan Club.

Another example of better deals for fans

Social media driving payment preference at the POS

Merchants are reporting a 3-4 times increase in debit card usage after launching fan clubs sponsored by local debit card brand NETS.

A pizzeria saw debit card usage increase from 3.95% of total transactions to 18.54% the following month. Another restaurant saw debit card purchases increase from 10% to 35%, taking substantial business away from credit cards and cash.

Merchants are seeing an impact on brand awareness among friends of customers within weeks of launching fan clubs. People remember the merchant's brand more easily after seeing friends dine there. This produced an immediate increase in delivery orders for one restaurant, in spite of the fact that the merchant did not offer fan club incentives for delivery orders.

Tunnel vision and mobile payments

Slight shifts in perception have been occurring in the payment industry, opening the way for transformational changes in how we look at mobile. Focusing too much on the payment portion creates tunnel vision that can get you clobbered when you miss the important things happening outside this narrow focus.

A first shift in perception, the growing realisation that NFC is not the holy grail, reached a tipping point a few months ago. This opened the possibility to explore other ways of using a mobile phone to transact. Square and PayPal both announced a simple check-in function based on geolocation, and the iPhone 5 was announced this week, sans NFC, confirming everyone's suspicion that we need to look elsewhere for solutions.

A second shift, Square's coup with Starbucks, has brought a fresh focus on retailer driven solutions. Square will be processing all of Starbucks' credit and debit card transactions, and will modify its consumer app to fit Starbucks' existing mobile payment method. Suddenly, this news acts as a catalyst to get the industry to adopt a wider view of mobile payments. A cure to tunnel vision if you like.

Wikipedia defines tunnel vision as the loss of peripheral vision with retention of central vision, resulting in a constricted circular tunnel-like field of vision. This is exactly where we have been the last few years, waiting for carriers, phone manufacturers, banks, payment networks and merchants to all massively adopt NFC. Now we can step back and see the peripheral better.

Starbucks is the most successful mobile payment program in North America and most likely the rest of the developed world. All of the talk about Asians massively using their mobile phones to pay every day is a myth. There are things happening and some people using mobile, but it is minimal.

The Starbucks card now represents 25% of sales, with most of this happening through traditional plastic cards. Customers become card members to enjoy rewards, then some migrate to mobile payments for greater convenience. That is the direction of the customer acquisition flow. The rewards program drives mobile payments, so focusing on the overall program is the key. It doesn't happen in the other direction.

The focus on Starbucks is opening the peripheral vision a bit wider. Google has lots of graphics showing how its NFC phones can merge payments, coupons and loyalty cards all in one simple transaction. This requires such a deep integration into existing POS systems that the claims have always seemed farcical to me. 

Starbucks has already shown that there are simple, low cost ways to achieve the same thing. Starbucks shows that the focus should be on the retailer's entire rewards program, with mobile payments as a feature available to those customers that prefer using their mobile phone to pay. A holistic approach that takes in a much larger group of customers.

PayPal launches FanClub Exclusives web site

PayPal's FanClub Exclusives web site was launched yesterday in Singapore.

Customers can discover discounts and offers from local merchants that are available by joining the merchant's fan club and paying with PayPal at the point of sale. Merchants tend to give bigger discounts to their fans because they want to get more "likes" and free word of mouth advertising on Facebook.

Merchant funded offers are the single biggest driver of payment preference. By powering the merchant's own fan club, PayPal can more easily get higher value discounts for PayPal users.

A glimpse of Taggo's single click fan club registration

Taggo makes it easy for shoppers to join fan clubs on the spot. Scan the QR code at the store, click like, and you're done. Then, at the counter, simply give your mobile number to the cashier. No cards, no coupons, no vouchers. And no special apps on your phone.

The registration site uses the cover photo from the fan page as the background graphic, so it is automatically white labeled for each fan club.

Apple's iOS Passbook

Passbook is a new iOS 6 feature that replaces all the multitude of wallet apps that store loyalty cards. The eticket feature is also cool, as it gets rid of the need to find the email that has the ticket in it.

It's not clear yet how companies build interfaces to this app, but I imagine there will be information on API's at some point. It doesn't look like people can simply scan their cards. It looks like businesses need to connect their card program to the app.

Apple would have done things a little different from everyone else, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

In any case, it is definitely a shot across the bow of companies developing wallet apps.

The future of loyalty is social

Interesting statistics in this article by SimpliFlying.

There are more airlines on Twitter (185 as of August 2011) than there are running loyalty programs (approximately 179).

62% of frequent flyers already like at least one airline on Facebook.

72% of frequent flyers say that they would join a social loyalty program.

More evidence of the move from loyalty programs to fan clubs.

Using Fan Clubs to increase premium card usage

Gold, Platinum and other premium cards by Visa and MasterCard generate higher interchange fees, which allows banks and payment brands to spend more on advertising. With Fan Clubs on Facebook linked to premium card brands, retailers can get more fans and free word of mouth advertising sponsored by banks and payment brands.

This is a mock-up of what a merchant Fan Club promotion might look like when powered by Visa. In this mock-up, customers that are fans of the merchant's Facebook Page enjoy an exclusive discount when they pay using a Visa premium card.

Each time a purchase is made, the customer's friends see a check-in wall post advertising the merchant and the payment brand. Paid Facebook advertising boosts visibility among friends.

The merchant funds the discount, mainly because it's to the merchant's own fans, and the payment brand funds the advertising costs on Facebook.

Merchants get lots of free word of mouth advertising, bundled in the payment fees they are already paying.

Cloud Wallet vs NFC - a Frost & Sullivan interview

Thanks to Jafiz at Frost & Sullivan for the opportunity to share my (arguably opinionated) view on NFC. Check out the interview here.

70% of Rocky’s Pizza customers are now fans of its freshly minted Facebook Page

Rocky’s Pizza launched their Facebook Page in March 2012, with a Fan Club offering a 20% discount to registered fans.

“70% of our customers now check-in as fans when they dine at our restaurant,” commented Marcus Liew of Rocky’s Pizza.

500 customers became fans in less than 3 months.

95% of these fans have registered their mobile number to become eligible for the Fan Club discount.

327 fans have checked-in to enjoy the discount.

The stories published by each check-in generated a total of 1.9 million story impressions, entirely among friends, and a total of 303 friends clicked on the check-in story to learn more about Rocky’s Pizza.

Fan Clubs on Facebook. Like loyalty programs, but better.

Check out Taggo's new website.

Payment Innovation - US versus Rest of World

If you live in the US, you know what this picture is.

87% of Americans use paper coupons on a regular basis. It is so common that they have a TV show about it called Extreme Couponing.

When US companies innovate in this space, they copy the paper coupon and make it digital. Virtually all of the mobile shopping applications today emulate paper coupons in one way or another. This is virtually the only paradigm that people seem to be aware of.

When American Express decided to go into social media, they launched Link Like Love. This is essentially a digital coupon clipping service. You Tweet about an offer you want, the "coupon" gets clipped and added to your card, and you get the discount when you shop.

People in most other parts of the world know what coupons are of course, but very few of them know how pervasive couponing is in the US. Hardly anybody outside the US spends hours each week clipping through paper coupons before going grocery shopping. You don't see Sunday newspapers filled with 20 pages of coupons. On the other hand, there are marketing techniques in Asia and other parts of the world that work very well, and that US businesses are not aware of. Innovation in mobile payments has so far neglected these.

Take the picture on the right, of credit card offers in front of a restaurant in Singapore. When people across Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and some parts of Europe see this picture, they know immediately what it is. Most people have enjoyed a discount simply by paying with one bank's credit card versus another.

Taggo comes from this angle. Our Fan Clubs service uses this paradigm instead of the coupon paradigm. One benefit is that retailers outside the US understand it very clearly, better than the coupon clipping paradigm. Another benefit is that it results in a solution that is much more simple and elegant than what is currently coming out of US payment innovation. Of course, I do expect that it would work very well in the US as well.

Young people and the underbanked (or both): The real market for mobile wallets?

Anybody involved in mobile wallets needs to become really clear about the issues raised in this article, "Why Mobile Wallets Are Bogus."

I do believe that there is lots of future in mobile wallets, but the industry is generally focusing on trying to fix something that's not broken.

The writer describes how Kenya is the largest market for mobile wallets, where half of Kenya’s population uses M-Pesa, the mobile payments partnership between Vodaphone and Safaricom. Why? Because in Kenya, where most people are poor or unbanked (or both), "paying for goods with phones actually has a value proposition for users, and not for marketers".

The theme is very close to what I was describing yesterday, on how mobile payments could help people deal more easily with inflation. See Inflation, the next big opportunity in payments?

.

Inflation: the next big opportunity in payments?

I used to think that the success of my last startup, Welcome Real-time, was due to our software quality, thought leadership, patents, etc. While all this was true, something else was going on.

In 2000, we launched a major loyalty program for a bank in Turkey, Akbank. This was one of our first large projects with real-time cash back at the point of sale. Banks in other countries saw what was happening in Turkey and quickly followed with their own deployments using our software. Welcome signed up banks in 30 countries around the world and grew from 30 people to 130.

However, it gradually became apparent that other banks didn't seem to get as good results as the banks in Turkey. What was different?

Inflation.

The Turkish Lira was crashing.

People were buying lots of stuff on credit and racking up and redeeming cash back instantly, a unique feature of our system. They were locking in value before the currency depreciated further, converting cash and credit into hard commodities like groceries, appliances and other things they could stock up on.

That was a decade ago. How about today? What type of business would benefit from global systemic inflation if and when that hits? A decade ago we didn't have smart phones. Very few of us had friends on social media. What kind of solution will thrive this time around?

Stocking up is the traditional way of converting cash into commodities. But you have to store everything somewhere and exchange the actual physical goods with friends and family members when they need something you have.

Mobile phones can help do all of this in a much more convenient way.

Retailer top-up cards let people prepay things like coffees and sandwiches, storing dollars on their account. Customers get a discount and retailers get cash flow. Most point of sale systems support the feature, and most retailers could easily use it if they want to.

Imagine storing lattes, sandwiches or Carrefour Bucks instead of dollars. Pay $50 now to load 10 lattes to your account. Next month you may need to pay $55, so better load the value now and lock in those lattes.

Smart phones make it easy for customers to manage dozens of these accounts. Social media makes it easy to share and exchange value with friends and family, without needing to store and exchange physical goods.

Payment brands have a key role to play in creating a safe and secure environment, not just for each payment transaction but also to have the insurance in place in case a merchant goes out of business.

Like barter, but nothing like your ancestor's idea of barter.

.

Payment wallets are limited by the wallet metaphor

When you pay with a one-click checkout process on Amazon or purchase songs on iTunes, nowhere are you asked anything about your "wallet". All you did was leave your card details with these retailers to simplify the checkout process. Customers would be confused to hear about an iTunes "wallet".

The payment industry needed a name for the thing, and came up with "wallet".

It's very funny how our brains work. As soon as we gave it this name, we started thinking about emulating leather wallets and instantly began moving towards irrelevance.

What would have happened if we had called it "opening a tab" or some other such thing?

I have a similar issue with the word "loyalty program", a metaphor for volume based discounts. In every single conference on loyalty, people get caught up debating the concept. You can almost always hear someone say, "If you want loyalty, get a dog" or some other similar remark.

So much energy goes into the metaphors that we choose. The metaphors truly structure the way we think, making it very difficult to think outside the box.

This is a great opportunity for innovators looking for stress lines where they can create disruption. When you see lots of people blindly following a metaphor, go back to the original idea and find pain points that are not being addressed. They are there. Nobody else will be looking for them, because they will all be busy replicating things like leather wallets in the sky.

70%-80% of customers using Taggo at Singapore F&B's

First, the owner of Soho Coffee told me that 80% of his customers were checking in as fans every day, using Taggo's Fan Clubs platform for retailers. Then Rocky's Pizza told me that around 70% of his customers were checking in every day.

Both of these restaurants have been giving 20% discounts to their fans, as an ongoing loyalty program. Their results show that customers love getting a great deal (obviously) and more importantly, that customers are comfortable joining fan clubs on Facebook and giving their mobile numbers to the cashier.

From NFC to cloud wallets: what pains are we solving?

Now that it's clear that NFC is not making much progress, all of a sudden the industry is moving in another direction. Cloud based wallets.

These have been around a long time of course, with PayPal, Amazon, and iTunes. But up until very recently, the payments industry has been enamored with NFC and Google Wallet as the new way to pay.

Things have shifted. Visa recently launched V.me and MasterCard launched PayPass Wallet.

They all accept multiple cards from various banks and payment networks, and they all want to include other wallet type objects like private label retailer cards, coupons, and even rewards currencies like airline miles. A bit too complex right now.

It's not clear yet what pain they solve.

Watching demos, you can see a customer pull out their phone, tap to go into the wallet, swipe through several cards to choose one with contactless functionality, then hold the phone up to a reader at the point of sale. Instead of fumbling through his wallet, the customer fumbles around with his phone.

I get the need for connections with multiple card issuers and the need for branding by each of these issuers. But these are issuer and payment network pains. They are not consumer pains.

The modern payment brands like Visa and MasterCard came about in the 1960's to solve a real pain for customers, who needed to be able to use their cards across a large number of retailers, not just retailers that had special agreements with the customer's bank.

How will cloud based wallets solve real pains for customers?

Social media patent wars brewing

Facebook owns 56 patents and has just bought 750 patents from IBM in preparation for a battle against Yahoo, owner of an arsenal of over 1,000 patents. And yet I still run into entrepreneurs that believe that patents are not needed.

PayPal is smart to dump NFC

Finally, some pragmatic news coming out of the NFC world.

This article describes why PayPal is ditching NFC technology in favor of other options that are more mainstream and more easily adopted by customers and merchants alike.

NFC is so clearly a technology in search of a solution. It would have fallen off the radar years ago if it weren't for Google. When talking to analysts in favor of NFC, one of their main reasons for why it will be a success is that Google is so smart and has so much money that NFC is bound to be successful. Right. The same company that offered US$6 billion to buy Groupon.

People make stupid mistakes when they have too much cash to burn. That's Google's main problem. Throw cash at stuff and see what sticks. NFC is not sticking.

Good riddance. Ditching NFC will release energy from inefficient projects and help the payment industry focus on solutions that are truly useful and valuable to customers and merchants.

Christmas at Taggo

Hohoho!

Santa just delivered a great Christmas present to Taggo. Our first patent has been granted!

.

Sticky Fan Club

Sticky Candy in Singapore has launched a Fan Club for fans of their handmade rock candy. Their fan page already has over 100,000 fans. They were looking for a way to recognize fans at the point of sale to offer special discounts and benefits.

Sticky candy is very popular, so they hardly ever need to give discounts. Unlike thousands of other businesses in Singapore, they haven't needed to tie-up with a credit card company, and they haven't had to resort to profit destruction services like Groupon. Yet they now offer discounts exclusive to fans.

The place is packed. Here is a picture from this afternoon.



These people are registering through Taggo's fan club platform. Customers scan the QR code and register their mobile number. Then they give their mobile number to the cashier when they pay.



Now, the next step is for the fan club to be sponsored by a financial institution.

.

Fans get bigger discounts

At the Charlie Brown Cafe in Singapore, on Orchard Road, customers that pay with a credit card from a local bank (UOB) get one free main dish for two purchased. But fans get one free dish for one purchased. Couples are fine! No need to be a threesome, unless you want to of course. Soon, the fan benefits sign will be sponsored by a financial institution, showing the full value of linking social media to payments.

Why do fans get bigger discounts? Because merchants get word of mouth advertising on Facebook.

Measuring engaged and active fans

"Do the majority of the brands using Taggo aim for engagement over fan growth?"

Yes, that's probably an accurate assessment. Right now, the companies that are showing the most interest in Taggo are those that want more interaction and engagement with fans, especially with fans that actually shop in their stores. As this activity matures, brands will become more interested in measuring active fans versus the total fan base.

I don't think the metrics will become exactly like those used by the credit card or telco industries, but some of the metrics should be very similar.

We track the number of new fans generated during a Taggo campaign, but I have to admit that I'm paying less and less attention to that number. I'm watching numbers like check-ins by fans and friend activity such as clicks on posts generated by Taggo, and comments and likes on those posts. All a learning process :)

4 decades of paper money - what next?

If you've been wondering why gold is soaring, check out this article in Forbes, "Nixon's Colossal Monetary Error: The Verdict 40 Years Later".

What I'm curious about is how a trend back towards hard (real) money will impact payments businesses.

The 10 Biggest Lies of B-School

Interesting observations in this article in Forbes.

"Ten years ago, everyone at my school wanted to be a dot com entrepreneur. That didn’t work out so well and most students later went back to being investment bankers or management consultants."

Today from what I can see, the focus is on location based couponing and Groupon clones.

Using social media to surprise and delight your customers

‎So what, who cares, why me? The right answers can determine your success

An e-booklet, soon to be published on Amazon.
Write to me for an advance copy, free.
Feedback appreciated :)

Coaching startups in the art of the pitch

Singapore's Echelon 2011 event is coming up in June. The organizers expect over 1,000 delegates and 50 startups. I was asked to help coach the finalists as they prepare their big pitch to potential investors.

Here is a short chat on the theme of "So what, who cares, why me?" and "Vitamins, painkiller, cocaine", with Koh Jitsiong (Manager at the NUS Enterprise incubator, Garag3 and operations chief at e27), Gabriel Yang (Event management guru at e27 - don't you love his title?) and yours truly.



And that's not all folks!!! Get an exclusive discount for Echelon 2011 if you attend Echelon Satellite events in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia or Hong Kong. All the information is at http://echelon.e27.sg

"Credit card of the future" co-innovation project

eYeka is a new form of R&D catalyzer that relies on a very large network of creative people competing to come up with great new concepts for brands. Briefs are prepared by eYeka and submitted to a global community of 130,000 creative individuals in 76 countries. The process is appealing to me. It cuts through the internal barriers that companies have when they try to think about innovation.

The payment industry has a very strong cultural bias towards incremental improvements. When you combine that with so many dramatic external changes happening at the same time (mobile phone capabilities, merchant discontent, social media growth, etc.), there is a potential for highly disruptive innovation that could be delivered in unconventional and unexpected ways.

eYeka launched a campaign last year to get fresh insights and ideas for the credit card of the future. They received 100 entries that you can browse through on the site. The actual details of each entry are locked out to mere mortals like us, as the ideas are now the confidential property of the company that sponsored the work. Still, you can get a pretty good understanding from glancing through the titles and pictures of the submitted creations.

There are lots of entries related to the form factor, with mobile phones, touch screen plastic cards, and biometrics. The predominance of form related entries is a testament to how old the current plastic card is. Other entries see the credit card of the future as an ID device to access services as well as your house or your car. Intriguing titles like "credit/membership", "preferred store coupon alerts" and "all in one card" hint at a device that can collect together many different private label payment services, with built-in access to coupons and other promotions. And there is connectivity all over the place. Internet of course, but also built-in GPS and close proximity radio frequencies.

I met up with Alexandre Olmedo, co-founder of eYeka and CEO of the company's Asia-Pacific activities.

Aneace: I'm using the term crowd-sourced innovation, but it looks like you prefer co-innovation. What term should I use?

Alexandre: We prefer the word co-innovation because we find differences between crowd-sourcing and co-creation. The term crowd-sourcing implies launching a brief into a crowd and hoping something good will come back. Co-creation for us is more about getting the right ideas from the right people within a proper process.

Aneace: How did you come up with the idea?

Alexandre: We worked with the client closely to understand what they wanted to achieve. And when we realized that what they wanted was to revolutionize credit cards instead of just an incremental improvement, we knew that eYeka was a perfect fit for this project. The idea thus given birth was to engage eYeka's creators to imagine the credit card of the future.

Aneace: Can you briefly describe the process?

Alexandre: Once we knew what was needed, we crafted the brief for the creators, inspiring them to imagine what a credit card of the future would be like. Along the way, we would assist the creators with any questions that they might have. At the end of the exercise, all the entries were looked at in detail and analyzed carefully. If we have any doubts about the entry, we will get back to the creators. Analysis required us to look at the main themes and ideas suggested and group them together to understand what the creators wanted to see most, and how they want their credit cards to work for them.

A comprehensive report was then put together with recommendations for the client. This was then taken to a workshop where the stakeholders could discuss the recommendations and further testing with a representative sample of the target audience.

Aneace: How can banks benefit?

Alexandre: Banks benefit because traditional innovation/research tends to be more conservative, focusing on small incremental changes. This is because they talk to average consumers for their market research, who are good at telling banks whether they would buy something or not, but have more difficulties expressing what they want. Often we see changes to just the rewards scheme, or the interest rate, or partner discounts. But through a partner such as eYeka, we can deliver revolutionary ideas from a community of creative consumers whose ideas are more avant garde. These creative consumers are like creative directors in agencies. They have the ability to deliver breakthrough innovation, and we have 130,000 of them worldwide. These creators will express needs that the general population may have, but will have difficulty articulating. However when they see the creators' ideas, they can say "Yes, I always wanted that!". This allows banks to get fresh ideas for new product or services that are hard to invent through traditional market research methods.

Aneace: What surprised you most in the results of your work on the credit card of the future?

Alexandre: What surprises us and the clients always is the level of entries that we receive, not just from an executional perspective but from the ideas perspective. The most common reactions are: "Wow, who would have thought of that?" and we know that we are on the right track.

Digital Life magazine uses Taggo to give special deals to fans

It's the final countdown to the IT Show in Singapore, where Digital Life magazine is offering exclusive deals for fans. All you need to do is link your EZ-Link card with the Digital Life fan page on Facebook.

Check out the deals here.

If you're feeling guilty about buying that new Dell laptop ($50 discount for fans) then all you have to do is say that it's part of doing research on this cool new way to link Facebook to the real world!

Taggo wins 2011 Asia Pacific Frost & Sullivan Enabling Technology Award

Toot toot ... yes, blowing my horn again :)

Singapore, 22 February 2011. Taggo, the world’s only provider of online fan recognition solutions in the physical world, today announced it was conferred the 2011 Asia Pacific Frost & Sullivan Enabling Technology Award. The Award is presented annually to a company that has demonstrated excellence in developing a technology that can benefit or revolutionize the industry. Taggo won the award specifically in the area of Retail Visibility through Social Media.

“This Award magnifies the industry’s need to go the next step to recongise fans of its social networking platforms in the physical world,” said Aneace Haddad, CEO and Founder of Taggo. “Banks and retailers can now recognise online fans to provide for fan benefits at the point sale thus extending their online experience of their targeted audience into the real world.”

Taggo’s patent pending technology brings social media marketing to the point of sale. Customers click “like” on their bank’s or retailer’s Facebook page, and register their credit or debit cards to get exclusive fan benefits when they shop. Whenever a customer enjoys a discount or other fan benefit, Taggo automatically posts a message on the customer’s wall saying that they “like” the bank and the merchant.

Taggo helps banks and retailers attract new customers, engage and communicate with more people, and create opportunities for recommendations and referrals in popular social networks.

For additional information, please contact:

Aaron Koh
Social Media/PR
aaron@taggo.me
+65 9489 4557

http://www.taggo.me
http://www.facebook.com/taggo.me