What Is Social Currency?

Hi, everyone. I feel terribly sorry for not posting articles for the last couple of days. I had to study for my final exam. Now that it's finally over, I will restart writing down articles about social media to strike up pleasant conversations with all of you. Enough with introduction. Let us start now.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Today's topic is social currency. Seems like the word "social" is becoming more popular prefix these days. I guess many of you are now wondering how a currency can be social. Taking a quick look at how this system works might offer us an insight to what social currency is.

 

Here are some examples of how social currency works. You and your friends dined at a nice, decent restaurant. On your way back home, you made some nice remarks about the restaurant and its dishes. Then here's comes a magic. The restaurant sends you a mobile coupon to your cell phone. Actually this is what is now happening around us.

Thanks to the advent of social networking services and location based services, businesses discovered new ways to promote their brands and manage their customers. Mr. Pizza, a famous pizza franchise, announced that if you leave comments like "I had a nice lunch with my friends at Mr. Pizza" through "I'm IN", a Korean version of Foursquare, you can receive discount coupons that worth 2000 won. Same is for GAP, a world-renowned American fashion brand. So these days, comments you make, photos you take, videos you post online can actually turn into a usable sum of money. Isn't this so cool?

 

To explain this situation, Silicon Valley had to coin the term "Social Currency." This is a huge opportunity for every business. Facebook is planning to commercialize this idea with their own invention called "Facebook Place" which will support all types of online transactions. There had been something similar to social currency before. However, they all failed because there were no SNS and LBS to support that idea. Now that Facebook's membership amounts to 0.6 billion and Foursquare is steering its way to victory, it is pretty obvious that the future of social currency is very bright and promising.