I’ve been following two trends that make me very excited to be a Loyalty marketer. Developing high-value, enduring relationships with loyal customers/guests/shoppers/members isn’t new. But what were starting to see on forefront of smart marketing is simply awesome.

Trend One – Farm Cash for Fans.

I used to work at a company called MyPoints. It’s an amazing marketing engine that could change the behavior of hundreds of thousands of members by offering points in exchange for purchases, registrations, surveys, etc. Problem was, points are expensive. Basically it costs about ten dollars to reward a member with a ten dollar Starbucks card. And we mailed a lot of Starbucks (and Target, and Red Lobster and Macy’s and Amazon, etc. ) cards.

Last week players of Zynga’s amazingly popular game Farmville were offered Farm Cash for fanning Bing. Twenty Four hours later, 400,000 virtual farmers had taken the bait and signed on. In a flash, Bing surpassed Google in the hyper-followed ranking of “how many fans do you have on Facebook” stat.

And guess how much Farm Cash costs Zynga? A lot less than a $10 Starbucks card I’d guess.

Trend Two – Check In and Earn Points.

I’ve been watching for this one for some time. The very cool fro-yo shop Tasti D-Lite is now offering loyalty points when its members check in on Foursquare. Cool on so many levels: drives engagement, posts to Facebook – and more interestingly begins the process of geo-based permissioning for offers.

I strongly believe that location is the next frontier for right offer at the right time to the right person. However, geo-based targeting really does bump up against the marketing creepy factor. Loyalty programs bridge that gap by establishing a fundamental permission level for members and rewarding that additional permission with some type of gift or reward.

More to come on this one and we’ll make sure that we’re driving what happens next.