You know my obession with bridging the offline and online divide. One of the easiest, and most powerful, ways to do this is by offering tangible rewards for digital activities. It’s great to see Gowalla partner with Paul Frank and Element.

The Paul Frank promotion offers you 20% in flagship Paul Frank stores across the country, and the Element badge gets you a free water bottle and an in store discount.

Why this is especially cool –

1) It follows a new trend in location based rewards where users unlock more than a badge for following a brand and checking in. This is similar to Starbuck’s Foursquare promotion, where the mayor of each Starbuck’s location gets a dollar off their coffee. The Paul Frank and Element rewards take it even further. In the Paul Frank and Element scenario, everyone wins not just mayors.

Why this may not matter–

We saw yesterday just how far location based services are from mainstream adoption, with Forrester even advising marketers to  “wait and see” on these technologies.

A side note — While I might not have the data to back this up, I feel like the Gowalla audience takes pride in not only being early technological adopters but identifies as less mainstream than your typical Foursquare users. Put simply, would the Wall Street Journal ever partner with Gowalla?

From this perspective, a partnership with Paul Frank and Element, two brands who definitely embrace orginality and quirkness, makes a lot of sense.

So what will it take for Check-in technologies to go mainstream? Are partnerships that offer tangible rewards, rather than badges, the first step?