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With so many new interactive activities taking place on Facebook, it seems that one more company has caught onto the social media frenzy and is taking advantage of new ways to interact with your social network. A Swedish Social Gifting service, Wrapp just debuted in the U.S. that will allow Facebook users to purchase gift cards for those in their social network. Wrapp currently has partnerships with more than 25 retailers. Some of those retailers include:

Fab
Gap
The Wall Street Journal
H & M

Wrapp launched in Sweden in November, and has since added Norway and the U.K. Wrapp also has established satellite offices in Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, Turkey, France, Taiwan, and Australia.

How to Wrapp

To get started with Wrapp users need to either install the Android or iPhone app or head to the Wrapp website. Once Wrapp is integrated with your Facebook account, birthdays and other occasions will be twice as easy to take care of with just a few clicks. Even better, Wrapps algorithm will match social profiles of targeted friends with their available partners as well as the users demographics. You can then purchase one of their preselected gift cards or add onto the amount manually. With Wrapps integration with Facebook, news feeds will also be posted when the cards are gifted, as well as when they are redeemed by the cards receivers. Physical gift cards are not always necessary. On the mobile apps for smartphones and tablets, they can actually be redeemed through the bar codes that display on the Wrapp site after confirmation that the location accepts that gift card. Codes can also be used while shopping online.

According to Wrapp, over 1.4 million gift cards have been sent out via their service in the last four months. Chief Executive Officer Hjalmar Winbladh adds,

“Wrapp is the ultimate win, win, win app. You and I get to give our friends free gift cards to great retailers. The cards we give are stored in our friends’ phones so they’re always with them when they want to buy something they really want. And the merchants get a proven customer-acquisition and retention platform built on Wrapp’s friend-to-friend marketing for conducting performance-based campaigns.”

Wrapp combines three very hot industries in gift cards, social networking, and mobile shopping.
Author:

@BasilPuglisi is the Executive Director and Publisher for Digital Brand Marketing Education (dbmei.com). Basil C. Puglisi is also the President of Puglisi Consulting Group, Inc. A Digital Brand Marketing Consultancy that manages professional and personal branding for Fortune 500 CEOs, Hedge Fund Managers and Small Business Owners.

Sources:

Those who organize events know that the success of the event depends on many things, least of them the weather. The amount of options and the connections the attendees create in an event will dictate if they will join you next time or not. In other words “What would I get out of it?”

Even in our connected and social media rich world, business is still done face to face. The biggest hurdles business people have to overcome are psychological; how to introduce themselves to strangers, how to portray themselves without seeming cocky and how to make the most of the time in the event.

Pathable.com is a new program that aims to create a virtual gathering place before the start of the event. It is a private online community which aims to facilitate introductions and highlight common interests. They provide an interactive space for the attendees to gather and share information.

When one registers an event, all the attendees are asked to fill a profile. Those profiles are personalized with photos and links to other sites and all other web representations in social media; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and more.

This has the potential of introducing the attendees to each other before the event starts. People can see who they would like to meet personally at the event and start a conversation beforehand. The program even makes it easier to spot them; people with common interests are highlighted.

Starting a discussion in forums is encouraged, and because people can converse, they can also set meeting to take place during the event. The software enables mailing schedules that will appear on all the chosen attendees’ schedules at the same time.

A personalized conference calendar is available for each attendee, so they can easily build their own schedules as well. The program enables attendees to save space for private meetings and has a diagram of the conference, including all the booths and private rooms to make navigating the event very easy.

Event sponsors can create their own pages and sponsorship tools that target specific channels. They can participate in the conversation and communicate with the attendees in a non-intrusive way. It provides another place for targeted advertisement.

All those features are available in a mobile app for iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Windows and Android as well. Easy to use and quick to respond.

Author:

Sources:

http://www.pathable.com/tour/

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pathable

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/profitable-growing-pathable-raises-cash-events-social