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American Express announced it will let people buy things by tweeting. It’s an awkward, unfamiliar system Amex has constructed, in partnership with Twitter, but maybe the two companies are on to something.
Amex Sync on Twitter lets people use tweets to purchase a narrow selection of goods, including the Kindle Fire tablet and the Xbox 360 videogame console. The mechanism is cumbersome: First you connect your Amex card to your Twitter account. Then you initiate a purchase by obtaining a special hashtag from an American Express Twitter account. Once you’ve tweeted a hashtag to make the purchase, you must finalize your purchase by replying to a confirmation tweet from Amex, and you must do so within 15 minutes.
Amex Sync can also be used to get discounts from regular stores, but that’s a whole other complicated thing.
This is a fairly crazy way to buy things, but it does have a certain appeal to folks who like to thoroughly document their spending habits. You know the ones: They film themselves “unboxing” consumer electronics items, or they upload mirror pics of their new outfits to Pinterest, or they tell all their Facebook friends about the Kickstarter pledge they just made. If that sort of sharing is your thing, then you might be just the sort to buy jewelry through a convoluted process that involves informing all your followers that you’ve decided to take advantage of, say, #AmexBaubleBarOffer.
And if Twitter can make this sort of conspicuous consumption pay off, the spectacularly unprofitable microblogging platform will have a real revenue stream on its hands. It would hardly be the first social network to try and disrupt Amazon’s business; Facebook, among many others, is also trying to use social media magic to ring up sales. After buying “gifting” startup Karma in May, Facebook launched a gift store in September, focused on products costing less than $50. The idea is that Facebook can easily detect when people are celebrating birthdays or getting married and nudge friends into buying them things.
The results have been less than spectacular: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg went out of his way last month to warn Wall Street analysts not to expect significant revenue from Facebook Gifts anytime soon. It’s hard to imagine Twitter gaining any more traction with this odd Amex scheme. But it’s equally hard to imagine social commerce is some kid of fad that will fizzle out. People – Americans in particular – are just too in love with showing off their purchases and with soliciting and giving advice on buying. Someone will eventually figure out how best to exploit those tendencies online. Until then, we’re in for lots of awkward experimentation.
