by Ed Martin, VP Engineering
I’m always looking for interesting ways we can deliver reward functionality to our clients. Here’s one I ran across on SFGate: Cell phones find niche in retail coupon market. Since everyone has a cel phone, sending a text message with a coupon code to a cel phone seems like a no-brainer. The customer could just look up the code in his phone and apply the discount at point of sale. This would work for brick and mortar, catalog, as well as on-line.

by Ed Martin|VP, Engineering

One of the things I like about living in Northern California is the easy access to the variety of wineries and related events, mostly concerts and outdoor events. Many of my favorite wineries have web sites where I can purchase tickets to these events. I happily log into the web site, see that the site is secure, and merrily enter my personal info and credit card to get my tickets.

After my experience with one winery web site (and I’m not going to mention which one), I’m questioning whether or not I should trust them or others with my personal data. On that website, I noticed that on the page where I entered in my data (including my credit card), it wasn’t using SSL, i.e. no little padlock meaning an insecure transmission. I thought, this was clearly a mistake. I wasn’t about to enter any data this way, so I called the winery directly.

The agent on the phone, though courteous, was completely oblivious to my security concerns. He first informed me that although the forms page was not using SSL, the page it posted to did (The obvious question was how do I, as a visitor to the site, know that the form post is secure??) Ok, the winery clearly hired a sub-par web consultant to build their pages. I can live with that. However, what was even more frightening was I later found out my personal data was collected on a spreadsheet and emailed to one of their vendors as an attachment!

Unfortunately, this isn’t an isolated incident. I’ve seen similar behavior in some past clients I’ve worked with, where we’ve received “sample” or “test” data that contained real customer personal information. Even worse, we’ve received the files over email, unencrypted. I’ve since informed those clients of the risks, and they’ve since done a better job with their data protection.

The problem is clearly one of education. Data security is something that many companies don’t seem to take enough action to enforce. All you have to do is read the news weekly to find there’s some personal data breach by yet another company. As I’ve demonstrated above, it’s not enough any more to just have a secure web site. What’s done with the data after it’s collected will matter to the consumer as well.

At Loyalty Lab we’ve taken the extra step of becoming Visa CISP (Cardholder Information Security Program) certified. The Visa CISP, if you’ve not heard of it before, is a set of best security practices that any company handling credit card data should follow. It follows the PCI (Payment Card Industry) best practices, and consists of 12 major requirements, broken down into the following categories:

• Build and Maintain a Secure Network
• Protect Cardholder Data
• Maintain a Vulnerability Management Program
• Implement Strong Access Control Measures
• Regularly Monitor and Test Networks
• Maintain an Information Security Policy

In order to receive the certification, you must pass a security audit every year to ensure your company is meeting the PCI security requirements.

Having worked the last 10 years in a variety of marketing systems, I’ve dealt with a myriad of security controls to ensure the protection of private consumer data. The Visa CISP program is the best I’ve encountered. As a consumer, you should be looking for sites that are Visa CISP certified to know your data is safe. As a merchant, any personal consumer data should only be exchanged with a partner who is Visa CISP certified.

by Joshua Tretakoff | VP, Client Services

One of the more interesting facets of providing software as a service in loyalty is the assumptions many companies make when designing their programs. For instance, one of the first things companies do is hire a “team” to run the program. The team usually consists of an executive to run day to day operations, a marketing analyst, a part time data integration jockey, and a customer service manager. These are all great positions and people…and should be all you need.

After the team gets settled, they start doing a lot of ad hoc work. Should we send a special email this week? Maybe a double points offer? In the end, each customer touchpoint is individually discussed among the team, and a promotion is launched. Next week, the process starts over again.

SaaS makes this process a thing of the past. Imagine the team sitting down for a day, and actually making a list of the key interaction points in a customer’s lifecycle. From the first communication, to the time when a customer has not interacted with you in a few months, to when that customer becomes one of your best. Then, imagine mapping each of those interaction points to a specially crafted communication or promotion, specific to that customer. Finally, imagine the system automatically checking every customer, every day, to find the new people who should have that special communication and sending it, without the team needing to discuss.

SaaS allows for just this, and the smartest clients looking to maximize their loyalty efforts with a minimum of wasted human cycles are already taking advantage of it. The question remains: why wouldn’t you?

Widgets are now increasingly everywhere…….even the most conservative IT pros will need to heed the widget-tsunami and widgetize their sites.

‘Widgets’ May Snag More Ads

By VAUHINI VARA
June 13, 2007; Page B4

New data on viewing photos, videos and music on the Web may have an impact on the way advertisers and social networking sites perceive firms that help create this content.

Nearly 177.8 million people world-wide viewed Web content in April made with online tools from companies that let people post photos, videos and music on other Web sites, according to data that Web-tracking firm comScore Inc. plans to release today.

The comScore data is among the first to measure the reach of companies such as Slide Inc., RockYou Inc. and PictureTrail Inc., which create applications known as widgets that consumers can use to produce videos, photo slideshows and music playlists. These individual pieces of content can then be posted on blogs and social-networking sites such as MySpace, a unit of News Corp., and Facebook. So far, Slide and other widget makers have earned money mostly by selling ads on their own sites, but have found it difficult to generate revenue from the content created using their services and displayed on other sites.

The data from comScore could begin to change that by showing advertisers how widely distributed the content is, says Max Levchin, chief executive of Slide, which lets people make Web slideshows, among other applications. To use Slide, consumers first upload photos to the Slide site. Slide turns the photos into a slideshow that can be customized with special effects. Users can then automatically place that slideshow on an outside site, such as MySpace, by clicking a few buttons or copying and pasting a piece of code. According to comScore, Slide is the top provider of widgets, seen by 117.1 million Web users in April.

Content such as slideshows posted on other sites has “emerged more as a form of self-expression, but now that we have data that talk about how big the audience really is, I think that will really begin to spark the advertising,” says Linda Boland Abraham, the comScore executive vice president who spearheaded the study. To put the data into perspective, 105 million people visited MySpace in April and 38.8 million visited Facebook.

One big hurdle: These widget makers depend largely on MySpace and Facebook for their audience, and those two sites have so far been reluctant to let third-party companies include ads on their content in “profile” pages, where people post personal details, leave messages for friends and display photos.

MySpace doesn’t allow widget makers to sell items or advertise via content posted on MySpace. Closely held Facebook Inc., Palo Alto, Calif., lets widget companies run ads in certain areas of Facebook, but prevents them from embedding ads in Facebook users’ profile pages. Some social-networking firms are warming to the idea of allowing third parties to advertise via content on their sites. Bebo Inc., a San Francisco-based social-networking company that has many users in England, plans to start including ads with widgets displayed on profile pages and elsewhere.

by Matt Howland | CTO

Is SAAS old hat to you, already reaping the benefits? Looking for the next opportunity to concentrate on your core business and shed overhead? Well the next step may just be infrastructure as a service. Amazon has built an interesting offering around this, their two core products Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) allow for on demand consumption of core computing resources. Both of these services are in their early stages, where SAAS was a couple years ago, but the adoption among tech savvy small companies has been phenomenal (5 billion objects stored in S3). Some are even running their entire business off of it, smugmug.com.

Between SAAS offerings and now IAS you have the tools to build a feature rich technology strategy within your budget, in a fraction of the time you’d expect.

by Matt Howland | CTO

For the past five years we’ve heard the same thing, next year is going to be the year of the mobile “device”. Widespread use of mobile applications, targeted location based messaging, sms based payments, and the list goes on. While there has been progress, the short answer is no. The real answer is we are getting really, really, close. Text messaging has emerged to be a killer “protocol” and applications utilizing SMS like Goggle, Twitter, PayPal mobile payments are making some inroads, and seem to be on the way to opening up the space.

Twitter, in particular opens up some interesting ways to communicate (their growth curve is quite interesting as well). With an open API it allows applications to quickly become “mobile enabled”. Twitter’s primary use case is simply to provide a method to post quick messages to multiple people, via multiple communication channels (IM, SMS, Email). They really have done a terrific job of separating the delivery method from the message content, allowing the end user to choose the way they wish to receive the message. The Twitter application exposes the idea of “following” your friends, whereby you’re notified when they post messages, send you personal message, etc. This easily could carry over to loyalty programs, allowing your customers to “follow” your brand.

While we’re not quite there, it is time to start paying attention to how you can identify and reward your best customers via that device in their pocket.

by Matt Howland | Director of Engineering

If you haven’t already, it’s time to start paying attention to the other side of the web, the hidden part that has grown up over the last few years.  Typically we think of the web as the pages we browse and view on a daily basis.  But the things are getting more and more interesting in what you can’t see.  The countless APIs, integrated widgets, and aggregated information are quickly changing the way information is shared.  Just take one look at the new Yahoo Pipes service, and you’ll see the how easily the web can become an incredibly powerful platform.

How does this relate to your loyalty solution?  Simple, what we do here is seek to identify and reward your best customers, the definition of a “best” customer is quickly evolving.  Not only can it be defined by traditional metrics such as RFM, but also softer qualities such as word of mouth, circle of influence, etc.  Traditionally these softer metrics have been much harder to quantify and reward, but this is quickly changing thanks to the open interchange of information, and combination of different services.

It’s time to start thinking about how you can leverage the underlying flow of information.

by Michael Greenberg | VP, Marketing

We do a fair amount of email marketing here at Loyalty Lab in additional to loyalty program management.  One trend we’re seeing accelerate is the role of spam traps in inbox delivery.  These are usually abandoned email accounts that ISPs and commercial filters use to spot spam.  The big problem is that these may have been completely legitimate, opt-ed in addresses at one point – and now they are your worst nightmare.

As a result, addresses that have not been active for 6 months are potentially hurting your email reputation, which in turn hurts your delivery.  Email should really only go to those customers who have interacted with you within the last 6 months or are new to your file.

What does this mean?  Your “list” will get much smaller.  You will have to focus on engaging your customers more aggressively.  You will have to ensure your messages are more relevant.  In other words, you need to move beyond batch and blast messaging and use triggered and relationship-driven messages.

The key takeaway is that this transition cannot be delayed much longer.  The spam trap networks are already in place and taking a larger role in email delivery.  It’s time to respond.