The challenge is that all this activity happens across many social networks. Conversations are fragmented, and it’s easy to miss something if fans can’t keep up with accounts at all on these sites.

Lee Hammond, VP of Technology at Interscope Records understands these common obstacles that stand in the way of building loyal relationships, which led him to work with Janrain years ago. His efforts have significantly improved fan access to artists, encouraged multi-channel engagement, and increased new artist and music discovery. Learn how Interscope Records achieved these impressive results and watched their registration rates soar 10 to 50% across artist sites in this Customer Success Story.

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National Public Radio (NPR) is a great example of a brand that understands its audience and provides content designed to build engagement through value and delight. Their Digital Services group proved this with an experiment last year where they offered geo-targeted content to readers on their Facebook page, personalizing and localizing the news reading experience.

NPR paid close attention to which pieces of local content resonated with readers (through Likes, Shares and Comments) and which did not. They began with a single station in Seattle, before expanding to five in different regions. The insights they gleaned from follow user behavior allowed them to develop content categories and determine the types of content their audiences were more likely to engage with.

They accomplished several things with this experiment:

1. NPR leveraged their Facebook presence to drive traffic back to their site.
2. They used the viral nature of social media to expose their content to an extended audience through Likes and Shares.
3. Most importantly, NPR used social media to deduce how to best serve their audience.

In turn their audience increased the value they derived from the brand simply by engaging with the content.

Social media has created an opportunity for true one-to-one, real time relationships with customers and brand advocates. Brands that understand and take advantage of this opportunity are truly social.

As its become increasingly clear that consumers’ expectations have evolved to one where they are more open to sharing personal information in exchange for that personalised experience, UK broadcaster, Channel 4, has put forward a strategy that includes viewer registration at the core of their business. Recent research indicates they’re on the right track: 85% of UK consumers would like social login to be offered as an alternative when registering for sites over the standard web registration process.

Once viewers have signed in using social login, they have access to Channel 4 digital content that sits behind the secure sign-in wall, allowing for frictionless movement across programs, content and different devices. As any smart marketer does, Channel 4 clearly communicates the benefits of registering on their site, and explains exactly how their personal data will benefit their experience.

“Organisations are recognising that in order to truly put the customer at the heart of the business, they have to find a way of offering highly relevant and engaging content,” says Russell Loarridge, European Sales Director, Janrain. “Extrapolating what customers want based upon basic profile information will no longer be enough as digital content becomes increasingly personalised.”

The registration solution and social login was first used on Channel 4’s popular Million Pound Drop, which aired during September. An average of 96,000 unique people played along online per episode during that series.

“Through registration, our audience gain a deeper, more rewarding viewing experience as they watch the show live with the benefits of the interactive experience –and in turn, via the social login information, we have a greater insight into our audience which in turn informs our viewer engagement strategy.” says Steve Forde, Head of Viewer Relationship Management at Channel 4.

All of us agree with Russell when he says, “We are absolutely delighted to be part of Channel 4’s vision to put the customer at the heart of the business and have welcomed working with a great team at Channel 4 who have such clarity of vision.”

So many in fact, that centralization of updates, posts and news could have a positive impact on fans’ fragmented engagement and boost affinity. Interscope Records has long believed in making engagement easy for fans, which is one reason they chose Janrain years ago for their user management platform needs.

The new Interscope.com is a gold record

I had the privilege to get a sneak peak at their beta site a few months ago when our client, Lee Hammond was in town to speak with me at the Bandwidth conference. I was immediately impressed!

Attention, time and engagement is fragmented as people devote these precious resources across an increasing number of communities and social networks which makes it difficult for everyone to connect in a meaningful way. Interscope Records has recognized the need to unify the multiple streams of content into one home base for fans to get real time updates and engage with their favorite artists without having to visit multiple sites.

Streaming real-time tweets, news and posts at a central location, Intercope.com, with our partner Echo’s technology has created an immersive experience for music lovers. When they’re ready to comment, share or engage, fans can use social login as to quickly create an account with an existing profile from Facebook, Twitter or others like Google.

The social web is constantly evolving based on new technology, sites and networks, in conjunction with users’ expectations, needs and wants. The challenge for marketers goes beyond staying fresh and top of mind, but providing the content, resources and experiences that your audience wants today while looking forward at the same time. As organizations continue to increase onsite engagement and activity, we’ll recommend that they look to Interscope.com as a model of providing a high value user experience.

As we look back on the past two weeks of Olympic events, one thing is certain: people everywhere craved information. We passionately wanted to know how our country stacked up in the medal count, whether our favorite athlete won her event, and how our team was performing.

Thankfully the Internet was flowing with updates, scores and articles on the events that kept us up to date…or motivated us to track down a live stream.

Many of our Janrain customers were part of this information flow, so we wanted to take a few minutes to recognize and congratulate them for helping to make the Games special for us all:

FoxSports

During the games laptops, tablets and smartphones were getting up-to-the-minute details from FoxSports.com.

When sports fans create an account on their site, they can comment on stories about their favorite athletes and share articles with their friends in social networks or via email.

Since they launched their 2012 Olympic campaign across their site, FoxSports experienced an increase in new accounts created with social login, posts to social networks and referral traffic back to their site.

Visit London

When millions of visitors come to your city over a two-week period of time, there’s a lot of hotel, transit and event information put in high demand. And VisitLondon provided the desired details, and then some.

Through their site, VisitLondon helped visitors make the most of the facilities, venues and events that London has to offer, delivering an experience that will keep tourists coming back time and again.

The National Post

When Canadians visited the National Post’s website, they not only got all the updates, but also had the ability to create public profiles that fostered a sense of community with others who shared their interests. As they commented on articles, they were able to interact with others participating in conversations online.

Janrain is proud to have played a role in supporting the 2012 London Olympic coverage through our great customers mentioned above, and many others such as Bicycling.com, The Sun, Newsweek and Runners World with a streamlined way for fans to access and interact with content and the event coverage.

And the countdown to Sochi has begun!

Essentially, the Infinite Player acts as a recommendation engine for public radio content. Each user can customize the selection of content by voting up or down on what they are listening to in similar style to the voting on Pandora.com. An up vote tells the Infinite Player to play more similar content. A down vote skips the current program and tells the Infinite Player to play less similar content.

Distracted Listening On A Per-User Basis

NPR points out that when radio began, it was a communal activity. Everybody gathered around to listen to the radio together. This communal activity evolved into an individual experience as radios became smaller and more portable. People could choose which station they wanted to listen to and this created demand for more diverse stations that fit the needs of various audiences. People could listen while they were doing other things. NPR calls this Distracted Listening.

The limitation was that each radio station could only play a limited amount of material. Even with song requests, every person listening to a particular station at a particular time heard the same content. It was a shared experience, even if you didn’t really want that.

The technology now exists, of course, to allow people to listen to whatever they want whenever they want. I listen to around 30 podcasts per week from NPR and other sources, all at my own leisure as I walk and bike around the city. But what about discovery?

There’s something magical about discovering a new song, story, or piece of journalism. Having your world expanded is an enlightening experience, and this is something NPR’s Infinite Player does well. By offering endless amounts of content in an asynchronous fashion, NPR can expose listeners to programs that they normally do not listen to, and together, NPR and the listener can create a personalized station that expands their world in a comfortable way that is unique to each listener.

Going Deeper on Personalization

Of course, offering listeners the ability to vote on what they are listening to is just one way of helping them discover new content. NPR has opportunities to take other factors in to play in their personalization efforts.

NPR requires that a user log in before listening to the Infinite Player. This enables them to not only personalize the individual listening session, but also, by tying the sessions to the user’s NPR profile to create a deeper personalized experience over time. The longer the voting history, the better the experience for the listener. Of course, it doesn’t end there either.

Once a user is logged in, NPR can take other factors into consideration for future personalization. While they are not doing these things yet they could potentially consider user intelligence like:

• on-site behavior – time on individual pages or what the user shares and comments on.
• social profile data – if the user logs in with their Facebook or LinkedIn account, then, if the user allows it, a certain amount of data is shared with NPR. This might include employment, professional organizations, music interests, and other data.
• friend’s activity – if a listener’s connections on social networks are interested in certain content, then that listener may be interested as well.

Once they personalize listening content in this way, NPR could expand that into it’s website experience as well. Logged in users could land on the site and see content from their local member stations. A music enthusiast might be presented All Songs Considered as the front page story, while an economics junkie might see Planet Money’s blog posts front and center.

Exciting Times

As a Janrain employee, I get really excited about this level of personalization. I think that an Internet that responds to our intent and interests is far more engaging and enjoyable than an Internet full of content pushed by a handful of taste makers. Not only is it more enjoyable, but it’s also better business.

The more engaging your website is, the better chance you have of keeping a customer’s attention, having them spread the word about you, and eventually move into your sales funnel. This kind of personalization is what I aspire to help all Janrain customers achieve.

What about you? What kind of personalization have you seen that gets you excited? What do you think about the direction of personalized web experiences?

When we began development of Janrain Engage in early 2008 we talked with online marketers at brand and destination websites about their frustrations and challenges with user authentication, as well as their perceptions of using a third party identity login method (ie, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc) to resolve these issues.  At the same time I reached out to a variety of SaaS companies that provided products such as community and commenting functionality.

These technology companies had very real concerns about integrating third party login into their platforms: usability, deployment requirements and time, impact on internal development resources, future feature enhancements, and ongoing maintenance requirements.

As a result, we developed the first version of Janrain Engage based on the requirements of both brand websites and technology platforms, essentially building it with extensibility and integration to other platforms in mind from day one.  Those development decisions have been proven out by the great partners we have today that have selected Janrain Engage to power some of the most critical parts of their platform – user identity and authentication.

One of the partners I have had the privilege and enjoyment of working with for almost two years is Ning.  Ning is the world’s largest platform for creating social websites and is constantly bringing new features and enhancements to their customers.  In early 2010 when Patrick Mee, Ning’s Vice President of Engineering, reached out to discuss their requirements for offering social login and invite friends as features on the Ning platform it was another proof point, that we had made the right decisions to design Engage for interoperability and easy integration.

Based on Ning’s extensive customer base and solid platform, I anticipated Patrick and the Ning product team to conduct a very extensive technical due diligence.  I wouldn’t have expected anything else since the integration of an outsourced component raises the bar on feature requirements (both today and in the future), architecture, scalability, security, reliability of both the product and services, deployment support, leadership in the industry, viability, and much more.

Ning did not let me down – it was a thorough due diligence of Janrain Enagage.  After several months they made the choice and Janrain was selected to be their partner to provide some of these great social features for the Ning communities.

Some of the great aspects of working closely with other SaaS companies are the insights, new feature ideas, and general technology knowledge sharing that goes on. And we continue to optimize our solutions for easy integration with other platforms, including the release last year of the Janrain Partner API.

The just published Ning Case Study summarizes some of the success they have seen from incorporating Janrain Engage. Ning has been a great partner to work with and many thanks to Patrick, Cristian, Anne, Paul, Nick and Evan for the continued support.

Viewers have long been part of the voting process, and this year Janrain Engage is working with MTV in giving fans a voice. When music fans find a video they want to vote on, Janrain Engage social login powers MTV’s Facebook login authentication. Once they’ve voted, Janrain Engage social sharing functionality lets the fan shout out their choice to their Facebook or Twitter friends.

We don’t know who will take home the most Moonmen, what Lady Gaga will wear, or what this year’s shocking moments will be, but we’re honored to play an important role in giving fans a voice at the VMA’s and look forward to the big night.

Most categories are closed for voting, but you can still vote for Best New Artist right up to the show. Tune in this Sunday, August 28 on MTV.

EasyBib is one of those great websites you wish you knew about back in college.  It is a free tool that lets you instantly build a bibliography simply by entering a website address, keyword, book title, newspaper or journal article.  In total, EasyBib can also automatically create proper citations for up to 58 content types for you.

The site uses Janrain Engage for social sign-on to make the registration process a snap.  Once registered, users can save, store and share multiple projects.  EasyBib also offers plugins and APIs that developers can use to integration citation capabilities on their site.
What is unique to EasyBib’s deployment is its intuitive registration interface.  Site visitors are immediately presented with the option to quickly register using a social network account, and for those who prefer the traditional method, EasyBib has designed a custom button next to the Janrain Engage social login widget.

When clicked, this button spawns a registration form below using JavaScript, enabling users to sign-up the traditional way if preferred.

Using Janrain Engage, EasyBib has more than doubled its site registration rate, and its well-designed registration interface has significantly increased the percentage of new users that choose to sign-in with a social network account as opposed to the traditional method.  Why is this important?  Not only does social sign-on give EasyBib instant access to a richer and more accurate set of social profile data on its users, this data can be refreshed each time a user signs in to ensure that the site’s database is always up to date.

As EasyBib co-founder Darshan Somashekar put it, “Asking people to create accounts the traditional way has been a hurdle for us because no one wants to, but making the registration and login process simple eases much of that friction.”

View a short screencast on how this looks on EasyBib.com:

Visitors to NASDAQ community can sign up within two clicks using an existing social identity, link their multiple social network identities to a single account on the site, and share stock tips and reviews with their friends and connections on multiple social networks, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. In addition to fostering conversations among friends on social networks, syndicating user-generated content directly from the NASDAQ site to these networks creates a valuable source of referral traffic.

Check out this short video to see how NASDAQ has incorporated social into its site using Janrain Engage:

NASDAQ Uses Janrain Engage For Social Login, Sharing and Account Linking.

To view screencasts that feature how other customers are connecting their sites to the social networks, visit the Janrain videos page or subscribe to us on YouTube and Vimeo.