There is no doubt that people love loyalty programs and retailers love the fact that you come back time and time again spending hundreds to earn a free item or small value perk. However when was the last time you actually wanted to take the time to dig through your wallet for your loyalty card? How many of those little tags can one person actually carry on their keys? Basically the loyalty program was getting stale. Sure there were iPhone apps that stored your card and let you present it virtually but that doesn’t do much to advance these loyalty programs in a way that made them work for the new ‘connected’ and ‘social’ customer. So I was impressed earlier this month when Mashable reported on a story where Tasti D-Lite (a frozen yogurt chain) announced that they were rolling out a new program (called TastiRewards if you care) that incentivised customers that linked both Twitter and Foursquare to the store’s loyalty program. It’s an incredibly simple concept when you think about it and the idea of loyalty combined with location services and social networking has a ton of potential if Foursquare (or others) help build out the business and make it simple for retailers to get on board. It’s this last point about integrating and showing value (versus simply signing them up to get numbers) to retailers that I think Foursquare will need to concentrate its efforts in order to make loyalty programs a decent size revenue stream. Continue Reading…