Last week, I discussed how Janrain’s Account Mapping API can link together social identities from multiple networks to create a more holistic view of your website visitor. The power for marketing teams, online merchandisers, and e-commerce managers should be clear.

But what about the users?

There are a number of ways to add value for your website customers by allowing them to link multiple identities on your website. For example, many users want to share content across multiple networks. Also, some users prefer to authenticate with specific identities for certain tasks. For example, they might prefer Twitter for sharing links, and Google for completing e-commerce transactions.

South by Southwest developed a great example of how to use the Account Mapping functionality from Janrain Engage to improve customer experience both online and offline.

The user-interactive conference has had a private social network called SXSocial for several years. In the past, you could manually tag or follow other conference attendees, and see what sessions they had marked on their own agendas.

At the 2011 event, SXSW attendees took it to another level and enabled attendees to link their social network accounts to their SXSocial profile – even an existing profile from previous years. On initial login to the community site, SXSocial members were prompted to link one or more accounts, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Once they linked an account, the SXSocial site reviewed their social graph, and notified you of any of your connections who were planning to attend the conference. With more than 20,000 attendees, a number of people discovered that colleagues they knew would also be attending. Then, they could direct message and coordinate schedules to meet up offline.

As conference organizers look for ways to extend and amplify the conference experience, Account Mapping provides a powerful way to integrate existing social graphs quickly and easily.