I was excited to find an email in my inbox today from Starbucks, asking me to visit their Facebook page so I could send a coupon for free ice cream to a fellow Facebook friend.

They’re currently running a promotion where you can send a coupon (it gets mailed, not emailed, which is the only downfall of this campaign … let’s keep things digital, baby!) for a FREE pint of Starbucks ice cream. There is a limit of the number of pint coupons they’ll give away – up to 20,000 coupons for a free pint every day through July 19 – and the link in my email drove me right to the Facebook fans page where I could sign up a friend to receive the coupon (okay I’ll fess up, I sent the coupon to myself!) and if the max number of coupons per hour has been given away already, you get linked to a printable coupon for a buck off their ice cream and you are asked to return later to try and get the coupon.

Social networking is huge, but rarely has a company made a significant attempt to really target spreading information via this path. Starbucks is providing a coupon for a free high value product directly from a facebook application – and actively building new lists of people to market to – very nice. And if that coupon’s unavailable, providing an alternate coupon so the user doesn’t feel like a total loser – that’s a win/win situation.

I’ll be printing my coupon now for the dollar off, and checking my mailbox for my free ice cream coupon in the weeks to come.