June 28th, 2010It’s all about incentives

While everyone these days is screaming “location, location, location”, WeReward is screaming about incentives. Their bet is that people want more than points and mayor-ships. They want cash to go along with their location based check-in’s.

Their service Sponsored Checkin™, encourages people to explore their neighborhoods and earn money for making purchases at local businesses. This allows people to earn cash while simultaneously unlocking badges and sharing experiences through their social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. Keep on doing what you do, only you can get paid to do so. For all of you out there who feel a tingling of your spider senses, your feelings are correct. Yes, these are the same folks who brought you the controversial “Sponsored Tweets” and “Pay Per Post” re-branded as Social Spark.

One of the big problems with WeReward is the amount of check-ins you would have to make, to make significant cash. It’s similar to playing Skee-ball until you have enough tickets to get the prize of your dreams, which never happens! You usually go home with a plastic ring or a superball and that may not be enough to get most people to really use this service continuously.

I know we all need cash these days, but what if you could tweak the service to help raise money for local charities, communities and small businesses. If the money isn’t significant enough, we should have the ability to team up with others, to raise money in groups, for causes that we all care about. If you could be incentivized by doing good for your community and the cash is an after thought then I think we would have a REAL winner.

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