I had the fun of buying Amex‘s $25 gift card for $15 the other day on Amex Sync, the new Amex Twitter Store. All I had to do was sync my Amex account to Amex’s Twitter Store page, joing the ranks of 621,000 + other people, and I was all set. The card was delivered via UPS three days later.

The program is similar to other “sync” programs that Amex has been running on Facebook (“Like, Link. Love,” FourSquare and Xbox. In fact, it replaces “Like, Link, Love.” And the offers will keep coming. Sixteen merchants have been initially signed up. Today’s offer on Twitter was a Kindle HD Fire deal for $149, or $50 less than you’d pay on Amazon. The offers are a mix of credit for purchases and at home deliveries. Another offer was $25 off $150 spent at Eastern Mountain Sports.

On Twitter, there was a little learning curve involved. While there is a very clear video on YouTube, now seen 1.2 Million times, there isn’t room for a lot of instructions on Twitter itself. When I didn’t get a confirm for a half an hour or so, I assumed it wasn’t going through., and tried to retweet it (like a lot of people).

But in the end, it was there; it was a fun, social experience shared with a lot of people; and it was definitely a new way of buying things. In fact, it was the most fun I’ve had on Twitter since WineTwits annual virtual tasting.

Is it a winning model for Amex? On its face, the economics of it are hard to figure (as it is with Small Business Saturday, which gives you $25 off any purchase made at an SMB).

Amex won’t say how many gift cards they made available, but they did sell out within a few hours. If they sold 200,000, that was $2 million (plus shipping). 500,000 would have cost it $5 Million. If we keep buying items through the Twitter store, though, that’s a low customer acquisition cost.

Amex also gets a viral effect going from everyone tweeting the deal. There is also a certain gamification element of waiting for the confirm and then doing it within the 15 minute time frame.

Is it a winning model for Twitter? Most probably. It is likely to be getting a commission on sales – its first non-advertising revenue.

Is it a winning model for merchants? Potentially, it could be huge.

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American Express executive Leslie Berland described how the company is using its unique relationship with merchants to help national brands and local small business leverage social media. Berland delivered the opening keynote address here at ILM East in Boston.

“We want to be where our card-members are and where our merchants are. Merchants are hungry to get into this space,” Berland said. “They want to monetize this opportunity, to get the education, and to be part of the innovation.”

She gave several examples of how American Express is doing with social platforms like Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter.

AmEx’s first big initiative around small business and social media was Small Business Saturday, a campaign AmEx launched two years ago “to start a movement to get people to think about SMBs and drive business to SMBs,” as Berland explains it.

The idea was to make Small Business Saturday akin to Black Friday, Cyber Monday and other milestone shopping days. “We knew had to root it in Facebook,” Berland said.

After it was launched on Facebook, the program attracted 1 million fans within three weeks. The offer was spend $25 and get $25 back. The result was a 27 percent increased in SMB spend vs the prior year.

“When we bring technology, brand and our merchant network together with Facebook, it is very powerful,” Berland said.

AmEx recently announced a deal with Foursquare (at SXSW) that delivers a cash back discount to card-holders who pre-synch their cards and check in at participating stores. Berland showed a video that illustrated how the system worked, with two AmEx staffers checking in at an H&M store in New York, hitting load to card on an offer to get $10 back on the card with a $75 purchase. The beauty of this process is there is no training required for store staff, and no awkward coupon presentation by the consumer.

Another AmEx social promotion called “Link, Like, Love” leverages cardmembers’ Facebook social graph. AmEx built an app in Facebook whereby it delivers offer and deals relevant to things you and your friends. “If I like dogs on Facebook, then a Petco offer appears,” Berland explained.

Finally, Berland talked about “Sych, Tweet and Save” on Twitter. It works about how it sounds. The cardmember registered with the promotion, tweets to a special hashtag and has an offer delivered to their card, all without leaving the Twitter platform.

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“AOL has a huge bet on local and Patch in particular,” said Mark Josephson, senior vice president of revenue at AOL Local during our afternoon session at ILM East. Patch hyperlocal sites reach 865 communities that Josephson describes as “under served” by traditional media.  Patch’s business model operates at local, regional and national levels. At the local level, Josephson says Patch’s 17,000 bloggers, 1000 editors and 300-person sales teams are engaged with the community and main street businesses. In addition, AOL works with several agencies at the regional level. “We have a bias towards local and regional advertisers,” Josephson said.

At the national level, Patch has partnered with big brands to generate buzz and sales for SMBs. For example, Patch partnered with national brand American Express for Small Business Saturday. AmEx underwrote ads for local advertising. Patch made nearly 100,000 sales calls to get small businesses online with Patch and to partner with AmEx.

Josephson shrugged off questions of profitability, high-level departures, budget strains and speculation of layoffs. “Our growth metrics are strong,” Josephson said. We’ll keep our eyes are on the numbers of both people and profits as we head into Q2 2012.

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Cardholders will link their AMEX accounts to Facebook’s “Link-Like-Love” application. They will then be able to access special AMEX deals specifically recommended based on their social graph, including their likes and check-ins and those of their friends. Once chosen, deals will link directly to cards for seamless point-of-sale redemption by consumers and easier real-time visibility for merchants.

“Closing the loop” on deals transactions has been a persistent “last mile” problem. That’s expressly why we see credit cards, banks and other financial institutions aggressively migrating into the space — combining their payment systems and purchase data for a complete solution.

Facebook benefits through close alignment with AMEX by accessing its wide reach with businesses (big and small). It’s also a compelling experiment by the social media giant to move closer to consumer credit cards to more seamlessly layer commerce onto the platform.

Lexi Reese, Facebook’s director of local sales, defended the seminal role of the social graph in sourcing quality offers during a keynote address at Deals 3D. Among the data she cited: Sharing deals triples purchase probability; “liking” them raises that to 10x. Also, “well-curated deals sell better at higher price points,” and inherently social categories (restaurants, entertainment, fitness, recreation) perform best.

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Ease of transaction, rewards and “exclusives” will be key to the next generation of deals, and the credit card companies are determined to play a major role. MasterCard is working with NextJump for a special rewards programs, and has a number of other initiatives in the space (which key execs will discuss at our Deals 3D conference next month). CitiGroup branded MasterCard, similarly, is partnering with Google to offer deals over mobile phones. Groupon is also said to be working on a credit card arrangement.

Now, American Express is revving up “Serve,” its erstwhile PayPal killer. Serve is an online and mobile commerce platform that enables consumers to preload cash on the card and eliminates the need to print out coupons, among other things. A key part of the platform will be local deals, which will be promoted on AOL’s Patch.com, which expects to have more than 1,000 hyperlocal sites by the end of the year. Customers will need a special credit card to participate.

The arrangement kicks in this fall, launching in Eugene, Oregon. Full personalization based on individual customer data will be fully developed in six to 12 months, according to AmEx (via Chicago Business).

It isn’t clear whether Patch will also be sourcing deals. Patch had previously announced a new initiative it calls “Patch eSaver,” which will show all the deals available in town every Tuesday.

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Over the past year, American Express has embarked on a series of initiatives centered on digital advertising intelligence for SMBs. These include SearchManager (via Clickable) for SEM and multiple social media experiments with Facebook and Foursquare. Now, its small business-focused OPEN division is rounding out the suite with AdManager, which utilizes AdReady’s dynamic display capability to enable merchants to more effectively leverage the format.

Amex OPEN VP Rob Ciccone told BIA/Kelsey that the platform aims to solve the two chief problems that prevent SMBs from actively and effectively incorporating display: It’s “too complex and too expensive.”

AdReady has simplicity in mind with the dashboard it is furnishing to address these problems. Businesses can choose from hundreds of ready-made templates that can be quickly customized. Once the creative is in place, they can then pick from multiple forms of targeting and select media sources for placement across established networks (Yahoo Network, Google Network, DoubleClick Exchange and more). Facebook campaigns will also be included. Banners ads with video and animation are available as well.

The goal is a self-serve vehicle that any SMB can feel comfortable using. And, as Ciccone emphasized, the basic AdManager tool is available to all SMBs, not just OPEN cardholders. Premium tiers, with dedicated advisers for more complex campaigns, are also available.

The jury on the future of display is still in deliberation, with some retailers decrying its static and hard-to-track characteristics, while others, such as Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, extol it as a booming opportunity (Schmidt’s market forecast: $200 billion).

We see display in the throes of an evolution that ultimately could prove revolutionary to its long-term relevance. This can occur as creative, formatting and targeting all push forward by incorporating more dynamic rich media forms and leveraging the social graph for deeper consumer insights.

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The hordes of shoppers who still enjoy standing in lines and fighting for parking spaces on the “Black Friday” after Thanksgiving is an offline event. Or is it?

Local sites are prepping shoppers who want to see what’s available at the stores, including The Dealmap, Milo.com, Local.com and Superpages. Other local media companies, including the Los Angeles Times, are helping small businesses get in on the game for Cyber Monday.

American Express is also getting in on the game with Small Business Saturday, a promotion for SMBs that include a $25 gift certificate for consumers who shop participating SMBs, and a cash donation to Girls Inc. of $1 per “like” of the effort’s Facebook page (867,594 “likes” have been registered). We also noticed that Yelp is involved with the effort, listing several recommended local SMBs on a geotargeted basis, which is really useful.

The Dealmap’s effort is categorizing and mapping more than 150,000 unique Black Friday product offers at nearly 50,000 retail locations. Smartphone owners can use their phones to check out the deals when they are on the go, and will even be notified if they are near a deal. The site reports that 300,000 people have downloaded its app.

Milo.com is also in on the game, providing sales information and, more important, real-time inventory feeds for more than 5,000 products. Its inventory feeds will include major chains, such as Target, Toys “R” Us and Macy’s.

Local.com, meanwhile, has integrated the local and daily deals from The Dealmap along with major retailer coupon codes and deals from Savings.com; loyalty card coupons from Coupons.com; and weekly circular ads from ShopLocal. Superpages.com has also done a great job integrating various kinds of coupons.

The LA Times, for its part, is supporting Cyber Monday with a Shopping Directory that is being published in its Main News section on 11/29, and also accessible on latimes.com.

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American Express has recently been leveraging its powerful relationship with SMBs on the Web, including a tie to search engine marketing and lead generation via a deal between American Express Open and Clickable.

Now Amex is going deep with social media, specifically Facebook. It is giving up to 10,000 SMBs up to $100 of customizable Facebook advertising.

The giveaway is on top of two other promotions tied to “Small Business Saturday,” which is designed to drive traffic to SMBs on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. These include a promise to donate $1 every time someone likes Amex’s Small Business Saturday page on Facebook (up to $500,000) and a $25 credit card refund for Amex consumers who shop at a Amex-accepting SMB on Nov. 27.

It isn’t clear whether there is an official relationship between Facebook and Amex. But the program looks like a mutual winner for both. It kind of reminds of us of earlier SMB promos, such as one between Google and Intuit.

Facebook execs Emily White and Tim Kendall will discuss Facebook’s local initiatives during a presentation on Day 3 of ILM 2010.

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