Venetian & Palazzo Now Rewarding For Being Social

Venetian and Palazzo hooked up with a company called Social Rewards to reward active tweeters that mention their casinos. They follow Tropicana with this program and are rewarding people that tweet select messages with prizes from the casino.

Here’s some corporate gibberish from the CEO of Social Rewards.

“The premise of Social Rewards is to take existing brand loyalty program members that have social media tendencies and reward them for their loyalty and word of mouth activities with program points that can be redeemed for tangible goods and services,” said Joseph Morin, CEO of Social Rewards. “Our system is also designed to easily create customized programs for companies that do not already have an existing loyalty program.”

With Venetian and Palazzo following Tropicana’s lead with Social Rewards you can expect other casinos to hop on board with Social Rewards. As we often see most hotels in Vegas copy marketing techniques that work for others and make it their own. This won’t be any different.

The navigation isn’t entirely obvious, but it is intuitive enough if you want to spend a few minutes clicking around. Here’s a breakdown of how it all works:

Offers
You earn points by tweeting out deals for Venetian and Palazzo and can find the offers by clicking on “Special Deals” (left toolbar, beneath klout score).

Plenty of people share discounts on twitter for things they like and I don’t see this that much different. I will retweet discounts and offers when I see good offers for things I like. The real drawback here is the necessary compliance/disclosure info added to the message. It makes the offers look kind of cheesy.

In addition to receiving points for each tweet you can also earn points when people book an offer you tweet. Right now there are currently only 5 offers to tweet to gain points as the idea is just launching. It will be up to Venetian and Palazzo to add more offers to tweet and rewards to redeem.

Rewards
There are no descriptions on how to obtain prizes on the main page. You have to click “Redeem” (also on the left toolbar, beneath klout score). I’m told this will be changed in version two of social rewards. Bad UI is lame.

I’d really like to see a larger variety of rewards. I’m not a dessert person. If you’re hooking me up at a steakhouse (CUT) I’d like a dollar discount or even an appetizer or drink.

While I’m thinking about it the desert offers are 3-4 times as many points as a beer. On a dollar to dollar cost basis you’re better off accumulating a lot of expensive beers and buying a desert for $10-$15.

Back to the poor UI, there’s no obvious incentive to return to the site right now either. i.e. “Come back in 2 days to earn more points to get rewards.” Again, I’m happy to see that Social Rewards is working on a better UI for version 2.

I earned a free beer with 5 tweets. 40 more tweets and I can get a nice buzz. Fortunately you can earn multiple rewards. If you read ECG often you I prefer Grey Goose to beer and I like to drink in bunches.

Redeeming for Rewards
Rewards are redeemed at the casino concierge desk after they are claimed online. It seems fairly easy and gives the casino a way to double check and protect themselves from people stealing awards.

Wrapping up
I love the idea of something that’s kind of a social scavenger hunt and am very curious to see how this program progresses. This is something many do already, so the added incentive seems nice. It will be interesting to see how people take to being “rewarded” for something that’s usually an “act of kindness.”

Where this idea may lose steam is that the hotels/casinos need to balance this in their marketing mix. I need a reminder about this often to participate, but if the reminders come too often I’ll be turned off. I’m not sure that they can do that.

I spoke with CEO, Joseph Morin and I learned a few other cool things.

There’s an app on the way. A lot of people use twitter on their mobile devices and while the site is mobile friendly, there’s an app coming to make this easy to do. There is also an amazing back-end that allows the casino’s to track their ROI (return on investment), which is difficult for most in social media campaigns and that there are protections so that people can’t game the system.