Top-Up a Friend on the Meteor Facebook Store

Meteor, the Irish mobile communications provider from Eircom has been running a Facebook top-up store for pre-pay phone users since November 2010 (thanks to digital marketing consultant Krishna De for the heads-up).

One nice touch is that users can top-up each other’s phones in random acts of altruism.  Unfortunately, the Meteor top-up a friend feature only works if both parties have installed the Meteor top-up Facebook app.  If this could be streamlined to be a Facebook app to SMS voucher solution, then it could be really slick.

We think Facebook stores need more of these social features to justify their existence by making better use of Facebook’s social piping.  Where, for instance, are the “Friends Stores” (Estée Lauder, Amazon, Levi’s…) on Facebook that personalise and socialise the shopping experience?

Equally as important, where are are the fan-stores that give Facebook fans priority access/early access to new phones and services, with a view to activating fan advocacy? For example instead of lame product catalogues linking through to standard e-commerce site pages, a fan-store could offer fans priority access/early access to new phones and services if they agree to post a video review to Facebook.  A simple “if you like it tell others, if you don’t tell us” app could mitigate negative review risk whilst helping the brand learn from its fans and helping other consumers make smarter decisions.

A nice touch from Meteor is that their Facebook store does reward fans with extra talk-time for using the top-up store, but it could go further with such fan-exclusives.

For Telefónica’s O2, which has just launched a similar f-commerce initiative, a Priority Facebook fan-store is crying out to be implemented to fit with their 02 Priority initiative