Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Frozen dessert chain Tasti D-Lite is getting creative with incentivizing customers to post nice thoughts on social networking sited to promote the chain: coupons. “Participants who register their loyalty programme ‘TreatCards’ online are given the option of allowing Tasti D-Lite to send an alert on their behalf, whenever points are earned or redeemed,” according to this wonderful Reuters piece. When the customer “swipes his card at the store’s point-of-sale system, his Twitter or Foursquare followers immediately get an update that reads: ‘I just scored 5 TastiRewards points at Tasti D-Lite Columbus, Circle, NYC! myTasti.com.’ The customer is then awarded points for the message, which he can later redeem for treats.”

Meanwhile, a few stores in the Subway chain are seeing whether online food orders via SMS are more accurate and more profitable. During the trial, one manager found that the “text ordering service alleviated all phone-in orders. Doing so improved operations because his employees no longer had to leave the sandwich counter to answer the phone,” said a story about the trial in QSRWeb. “He said he also found that order accuracy improved since customers were sending the orders in directly.”