After sitting down and tossing out some ideas, we arrived at a pretty radical (but undeniably fun) idea – create an entire Nike-branded twitter platform, with loads of custom functionality for sneaker shops.

That platform eventually became The Hookup, A fully-featured Twitter client that is not only branded to feel premium and polished in the Nike tradition, but also contains a ton of additional functionality aimed at building relationships between sneakerheads and their local sneaker shops.

Once a user is verified as a retailer, they’re given access to a bevy of tools designed to make it easy and fun to create twitter-based missions. In essense, missions are simple mini-contests with rewards. Retailers can easily create their own, or they can choose from a few premade default missions. They can vary in complexity from “first person in the door today gets a t-shirt!” to more complex, labyrinthine objectives.

In addition to creating missions, retailers are given special status on the site so that users are the first to know if their favorite local shop tweets about a new shipment of quickstrike or one-time-only kicks. The Hookup even allows for finding shops near you, so if you don’t have much sneaker game yet, it can help you get there.

See more at WTM »