Facebook RFID tracking- Coca Cola Amusement Park

Recently, Facebook bought the offline world very much online with some amazing new technology. Is this the future of marketing? Some 650 kids who attended the Coco Cola Amusement Park in Israel wore an electronic bracelet (RFID) that stored all of their facebook information.

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is the use of an object (typically referred to as an RFID tag) applied to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification and tracking using radio waves. Some tags can be read from several meters away and beyond the line of sight of the reader.

As they enjoyed and played on the rides, there was a ‘check in’ point at each part of the park, including the snack shop where they could ‘LIKE’ that ride or purchase. facebook reported 35000 updates each day although the park was only holding 650 teenagers at a time.

The interesting this about this experiment is the endless opportunities to take this i to the offline business world. Imagine if shops could insatll this technology and as you browse your favourite clothing store, you could ‘like’ various items, letting the shop owners see what is popular. Now you could argue that they can tell this already by sales figures, but what if an item was marked as ‘LIKED’ but not selling. Could this indicate that it may be purchased if it was cheaper, or maybe wrong size/color etc?

What about a restaurant or Bar? Menu items could be liked etc and specials created accordingly. It would also open up the possibilities for highly targeted promotions for individual items.

The mind boggles at how this technology can be used. My guess is that the wrist band will disappear and be replaced with an Iphone app…. hmmm there’s an idea.

I would love to hear what other uses this RFID could be used for in the marketing world…