Even with a clear focus on lead generating activities that result in on-site conversion, marketers face challenges to reach their goals. In fact, a recent study by Demandbase indicates that 84% of B2B marketers felt their ability to generate new sales leads using their website needed moderate to strong improvement.

A full 87% of B2B marketers claim their website could be improved by Tracking and Reporting Unregistered/Anonymous Users. While the real value of a registered user differs across websites, B2B marketers have seen that website visitors who have logged in spend 54% more time on site (source: eBay), visit a site 9X more often and have 4X as many page views as anonymous site visitors (source:  McKinsey). There’s no doubt that it’s critically important to identify and nurture these lead potentials when they arrive at your site.

Tactics that marketers use to encourage site visitors and potential buyers to introduce themselves typically includes offering gated content that requires a registration process to access. The challenge with typical registration is that you may not receive complete or accurate information, and if your form is beyond a couple questions, you’re likely to lose that site visitor.

Janrain Engage customers who offer LinkedIn or Salesforce identities as social login provider options are not only offering site visitors more choices, but offering options that make sense for the user and the marketer, resulting in benefits for both: faster registration for prospects, and accurate profile information for the marketer.

Silverpop Leverages Social Login for Gated Content

A great example of a company removing registration friction for a business audience is the online media division of The Business Journals. Since deploying Janrain Engage Social Login in June, they have reported a 12% increase in site registrations across 40 online properties.

The Business Journals Experience 12% Increase in Site Registrations
With LinkedIn as a provider option, the B2B marketer has the opportunity to tap into the professional social graph of prospects, and with Salesforce, receive a verified business email address. When coupled with Janrain Engage Social Sharing, B2B marketers have an opportunity to further their reach in these networks, driving more qualified referrals back to their site.

Will social media play an important role for B2B marketers in the near future? We believe so and are seeing a growing interest from technology solution providers and other organizations that want to add a social element to their B2B website and marketing efforts. In Forrester’s report: Market Overview: 2011 Social Media Platforms For B2B Tech Marketing, they indicate:

Today, there is increased demand for social media platforms from B2B tech marketers that are using social media tactics to engage with business technology buyers.

Adding these identity providers to your Janrain Engage Social Login widget is easy to do via your application dashboard. If you’re ready to integrate social login on your B2B website, learn more about Janrain Engage here or give us a call.

Why is this important? It is important because it opens up a whole new world for B2B marketers who can now tap into salesforce.com’s extensive user base and gain access to their professional profile data. This rich data set includes a user’s first and last names, verified corporate email address, their organization ID, profile photo, language and locale. Salesforce.com is one of the few large providers that return a verified corporate email address.

White paper sign ups, conference registrations and filling out product lead forms just got a whole lot easier both for the marketer and their prospects. Marketers get accurate data and the prospect experiences a faster sign up process. This also opens up other interesting use cases such as expense report applications, sales commissions management, payroll & benefits management, and subscription billing to name a few.

Adding support for Salesforce.com via Janrain Engage is a simple process. If you are an existing Janrain customer, please log into your application dashboard, click “Provider Configuration” under “Quick Links” and follow our step-by-step set up guide to configure Salesforce.com. Once configured, the networks can be added to your social login widget, mobile application or custom UI with a few mouse-clicks and keystrokes.

“We are excited to partner with an industry leader like Janrain to make it easy for customers to use their Salesforce identity to access other websites and mobile apps,” said Chuck Mortimore, senior director, salesforce.com.

Screen shot below shows the drag and drop configuration for Salesforce.com logins via the Janrain Engage application dashboard.

If you would like to learn more about accepting social logins on your website or via your mobile applications, please visit the Janrain Engage products page.

• Facebook Questions relaunched in limited public beta. Will this service be LinkedIn or Yahoo Answers? Is it a threat or alternative to LinkedIn, which has made Q&A a strong point?
• Blog Post by Monique Neely on using Linkedin Signals to find and analyze tweets by industry, company and time frame. (Eric to set-up)
• The Future of the Web is Data by Ben Parr.
• Practical issues surrounding API integration, including lessons learned from Janrain’s SX Social integration.

Hear what Jim Cahill, Chief Blogger and Head of Social Media for the Process Group of Emerson and Vidya Shivkumar, head of products at Janrain, have to say by listening to the full podcast on B2B social media marketing.

When a user posts from your website back to their LinkedIn professional network, Janrain now passes richer content: an image thumbnail, the user’s title, the URL from your site and a description.

We have also enabled greater access to a user’s LinkedIn profile data and connections which allows you to get to know your audience better and then present content that is more relevant to the individual user. To see the full list of profile data available when a user logins with LinkedIn, please see our Provider Guide.

With a user base of over 75 million professionals, the LinkedIn platform offers professional oriented websites an instant audience to increase reach and build readership.

A great example is the online media division of The Business Journals, a division of American City Business Journals. Since deploying Janrain Engage in June, the nation’s largest publisher of metropolitan business journals has seen a 12% increase in site registrations across 40 online properties. Over 25% of the logins via Janrain Engage utilize LinkedIn. This not only speaks to the login preference of business users but also reflects their trust in the LinkedIn brand.

Janrain Engage customers can easily enable sign ups and social publishing for LinkedIn by visiting their product dashboard.

With over 50 million members, LinkedIn is a prominent communication and networking platform for business professionals, and presents a great opportunity for you to enable word of mouth marketing via your users through another social channel.

Configuring social publishing with Janrain Engage is seamless, and can be done in minutes. Simply add a few snippets of JavaScript to your site, select the networks you wish to enable for social publishing, and you’re set.

With our separate announcement last week about the addition of Google Buzz, we now support publishing to as many as six social networks.

LinkedIn has an active member base of over 50 million business professionals, and further integration with their platform is on the way for RPX. In the coming weeks, users on your website will be able to import their LinkedIn contacts, and publish their activities from your site to their LinkedIn status.

Here are a few other recent feature updates to RPX:

• Updated Sign in Widget – We have updated the look and feel, as well as the functionality of the RPX widget. In addition, the sign in experience now occurs in a friendly pop-up browser window for all 17 identity providers supported by RPX.

• Facebook Email Support – Facebook now allows users to approve sending their email address to your website during authentication. This feature can be easily enabled from within the dashboard of your RPX application.

• New Dashboard and Setup Guide - The RPX dashboard and setup guide have been redesigned to display more information in an improved format. A simpler wizard flow has been designed to make it easier to configure your widget and select identity providers.

• Downloadable Reports -For RPX Pro customers, we now offer the ability to download sign in analytics in a .csv file. If RPX is deployed on multiple domains, customers can also see which of those domains has had the most sign in activity. The reports are accessible from within the Analytics tab of the RPX dashboard.