A report from the retail technology site StoreFront Backtalk (registration required for full story) suggests that Walmart's recent acquisition of a Facebook calendar application with 16 million users is part of a plan to drive more sales through social networks. The Social Calendar app and its file of 110 million birthdays and other events, acquired from Newput Corp., will give Walmart the ability to expand its efforts to dig deeper into the lives of customers—allowing customers to make purchases on Walmart.com directly from event reminders from the Web or their mobile device.
The buy plays into Walmart's other social media efforts, including a test program that gives customers in-store social recommendations on purchases and allows them to get products not in stock shipped straight to their home. Connecting social media data and Walmart's customer data would make it possible for the company to do even deeper behavior- and relationship-based marketing to customers, linking their Facebook presence with their location and buying habits.
"One of the original points of Social Calendar was, according to its site, 'recognizing that Facebook Wall is now where the action is on someone's birthday,'" StoreFront Backtalk editor-in-chief Evan Schuman reports. "A reminder of a friend's birthday…is a strong psychological gift moment. To then make a truly personalized recommendation at that same instant is going to have huge potential."
Walmart could also use the connections in Social Calendar to derive more information about the people that customers may be buying for—while still staying within the guidelines of Facebook's privacy policies. "Remember that Facebook is diluting privacy issues in a huge number of ways," Schuman wrote. "For example, if a search limited itself to publicly available Facebook pages, what type of legitimate privacy complaint could be made?"
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