One of my key points was that users increasingly expect a consumer-grade experience, even while companies expect an enterprise-class solution. That means that companies have to keep up with fast-moving consumer websites, like Facebook and Pinterest, and offer social engagement that is just as valuable.

There are a lot of other nuggets, including how I see corporations wearing their underwear on the outside of their pants.

The Next Web livestreamed the event, and you can catch the video here:

Doodle.ly by @DoodlelyOwl

Earlier this week I had the pleasure to join a few colleagues and 700 others in New York City for Pivotcon2012.  This was my first experience with this conference, and I came away impressed.

First, kudos should go out to the organizers and Editorial Director Brian Solis, because they did something that I felt – for the most part – really worked, and isn’t done at too many (any?) other shows.  They constructed the agenda so there was a story arc throughout the two days.

Monday morning started at a very high level – discussions around the implications for leadership in a socially connected world, gradually shifting into more detail through conversations on investing in trust and transparency within your business, building an adaptable brand in a social era, the slow and often agonizing attempts to move mainstream businesses to adopt social.

At times, there was a sense of group therapy – social media practitioners expressed frustration at the slow pace of change within their own organizations. It’s difficult for someone in my space to imagine, but a lot of companies still aren’t comfortable or ready to truly embrace social.  One presenter remarked her company had formed a social media strategy team 18 months ago and only recently rolled out their first Facebook page! The focus in the room was on celebrating these successes as forward movement. One panelist, noted that they define success based on ROLO – Return on Learning Objective. This creates a safe place to allow for experimentation, without a sole focus on driving quarterly numbers.

Doodle.ly by @theREALdanmeth

Charlene Li from Altimeter Group challenged the attendees in a discussion on courage – and the importance for digital and social marketers to encourage senior leadership to make the leap of faith and have the courage to move their organizations into the social stream. She asked everyone to remember the trepidation they had when they wrote their first blog post, or sent their first Tweet. That sense of foreboding is still real for many executives.

From there, the conversations got more and more detailed, moving from building a social business, the role and impact social can have on employees, what social means for individual departments like customer service, advertising, marketing and even specific segments such as music, journalism, health and more.

I learned a lot, tweeted a bit, met some great people, and came away with a few nuggets:

1) ROI will continue to be an issue with regards to social.

This is due to multiple factors.  First, demanding ROI is often a tactic by leaders who don’t understand and want to block a project.  (Something I’ve written about before).  But there is another reason as pointed out by David Rogers – nobody is calculating ROI correctly, and every time marketing talks about ROI it “makes us look stupid to Finance!”  There is a difference between marketing effectiveness and KPI’s and this makes it difficult to calculate ROI.

2) The keys are transparency, sincerity and authenticity.

This transfers throughout your brand, your employees, partners, and customers – everywhere.   No, you can’t, as one panelist pointed out, have your interns out drunk on a Saturday night with the ability to tweet under the corporate account.  But you also can’t stifle the conversation.  You need to think of your employees as “meta-journalists” – they will amplify the good and bad of your brand.  So by all means, train them on what is and isn’t appropriate.  It’s also ok to be imperfect in social channels – even great brands like Coca-Cola recognize this.

3) B2B is coming on strong with more case studies and success stories in social media.

Presenters from traditional, mainstream businesses feel that they are still in the early stages of adoption and have a long way to grow in social media, but they are building off five years of successes and failures from consumer companies.

Based on my experience and the feedback I got from my Janrain peers and others with whom I chatted during the show, I can pretty confidently predict we’ll be back at Pivotcon in 2013.

Were you at Pivotcon? What were your favorite highlights?

We held our first event on Monday evening at the offices of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).  More than 150 people signed up to interact with us on the topic of “The Many Faces of Your Brand:  Using Social Identities to Communicate with Multiple Audiences.”  My colleague, Jamie Beckland, Janrain’s Director of Digital Stategy, and I led a discussion on the challenges brand marketers face when communicating with different segments of our audience, and how utilizing the data that is available when a consumer chooses to login using a social identity can facilitate these conversations.  As Jamie noted, “As a brand you must create an experience relevant to each segment of your audience, but that won’t work unless you know who they are in the first place.”  Social Media Influence wrote a nice synopsis of the evening if you are interested in reading more.

Two days later we held our very first European Janrain User Group meeting, graciously hosted by Channel 4 in their very hip headquarters in London’s Westminster area, complete with an awesome sculpture tribute to the athletes of the Paralympics.  The goal of the day was to facilitate networking and share best practices – not just from Janrain TO our clients – but also BETWEEN clients.  As an observer it was really gratifying to see a packed room and the interaction between all the participants.

A couple of sessions in particular stood out to me.  In the first, Jamie covered how his team evaluates client web sites to identify ways for them to increase engagement and improve the overall end user experience.  The really cool thing was what happened next – one of our clients volunteered his site for critical feedback from the others in the room.  Watching our customers provide suggestions and stories on what worked for them in hopes of helping him represented everything we were hoping to accomplish during the day.

The second moment for me was when Russell Loarridge, Janrain’s European Director of Customer Acquisition, led an interactive discussion on how to communicate social engagement strategy and success internally in order to create momentum and support from different areas of the business.  As the room split up into small groups to identify challenges and suggest paths to resolution, the amount of participation was evident in the heightened noise level in our large meeting space.  If the promise of social media is increased communication and sharing across people, then our European customers are well on their way to realizing its full value!

We concluded our formal events on Thursday evening with a lively debate on the role of privacy and anonymity within our socially connected online world.  I want to personally thank Mike Pegman, Lead Security Architect for Universal Credit at the Department for Work & Pensions and Nick Blunden, Global Digital Publisher for The Economist for taking the lead and driving a very successful evening.

The last week in September saw London host Social Media Week; a series of events exploring the social, cultural and economic impact of social media. The aim of Social Media Week is to help people and organisations connect through collaboration, learning and the sharing of ideas and information, concepts that, likewise, underpin the Janrain ethos.

Collaboration sits at the heart of social login; using social identity to create richer, more meaningful and relevant relationships between the consumer and the online brand. However, it is also impossible to have a meaningful conversation about social identity without also considering consumers’ expectations of privacy.

So, we decided to host a public debate titled Collaborating While Blindfolded – to address just that issue during SMW.

The question we wanted to discuss was “If the key to online engagement and collaboration is having insight into your users’ unique characteristics and using that to personalise their experience, can privacy and anonymity be preserved in our increasingly socially connected online experiences?”

A number of customers, prospects and partners joined us at Kettners, a boutique private dining venue in London’s Soho district, to hear Mike Pegman, Lead Security Architect for Universal Credit at the Department for Work & Pensions and Nick Blunden, Global Digital Publisher for The Economist, argue the case for privacy and data sharing respectively.

Some fascinating concepts were raised, with three key take-aways:

1. Privacy is not about data; it is about the control you as an individual have over your own personal data assets.
2. Online brands, organisations and marketers within those should support a privacy model, where the default setting should be one of ‘private’ rather than ‘open’
3. The expectation that consumers have regarding privacy can be far removed from the reality; the real debate around social identity and online collaboration should be around transparency and control, not privacy.

Now this is of particular interest given our most recent announcement – Janrain’s Transparent One-Click Sharing – a feature which puts users in direct control of how they share stories and other content with transparent messaging, the option to turn auto-share on or off at any time, and a countdown timer for auto shares. A direct effort to address key privacy concerns Facebook users – and those participants in our SMW debate – expressed over automatic sharing from social readers.

The pent up demand for online collaboration through social identity management is huge. Customers want a more relevant online experience; they want targeted, timely offers; and they are increasingly appreciating the trade-off between free content available online and their social data assets. And growing numbers actively want to share social information, especially if it will contribute to a better, easier online experience.

However, as the digital economy evolves and matures, what is absolutely key is the establishment of a trust framework that teaches individuals how to best manage their online identity and establishes an ethos of transparency, collaboration indeed, as the key to engagement.

Photo: Chantal Photography

Chatter seems to be at the middle of all, pushing for organizations to be more social, work collaboratively and to engage customer, employees and partners in a way that is familiar and appropriate for them. It seems as if Chatter has moved into every aspect of the Salesforce.com platform.

Salesforce.com had example showcases of various companies that are leveraging the power of social, brands such as:

• Rosignol, which leverages chatter to empower and inform sales teams
• Activision uses Service Cloud to let the community and customer service department support customers in a new way.
• Virgin America, which uses Service Cloud to manage customer inquiries, support and service concerns
• GE creates social networks around products, customers, partners and engineers
• CareerBuilder which leverages Social Key to gain a better understanding of customer likes, interests and needs.
• Pandora combines social data for targeting which gives sales team information they need to sell ad space

One of the really interesting releases was the introduction of Data.com Social Key, a new service that helps tie business data with social information. For those of you that don’t know, Data.com provides access into enriching data through partnerships with organizations like Jigsaw and Dunn&Bradstreet.

With the introduction of Janrain’s updated Salesforce.com extensions, you can begin to tie in social profile data with the traditional Data.com information and Social Key data. With these three combined, you have a pretty complete information profile about customers and prospects that you never had, but Social Key is not set to launch until 2013.

It was evident that Salesforce.com is betting the future of business interaction on Social, and they are making massive investments to see its success. The types of integrations and complete experiences in Salesforce.com using social is adding huge value to brands, big and small. We are all excited at Janrain to see the Social Enterprise move forward.

Janrain has stepped up to the plate and have put together a handful of sessions that not only do we think you’d be interested in, but we believe to be important topics that need to be in the forefront of discussion as we pave the path towards improved online identity and engagement.

To ensure we get a chance to speak, please vote for the following sessions:

Game Mechanics in 2020
Janrain & Badgeville present the future of Gamification, and how you can do the future now.
Presented by: Cory Huff, Janrain and Adena Demonte, Badgeville
Vote Now!

Mindless Behavior: Building a Community
Mindless Behavior is an excellent example of a less-known artist who has developed community and strong fanship using their website + real time streams to engage users.
Presented by: Cory Huff, Janrain and Lee Hammond, UMG
Vote Now!

The Decline of Consumer Good Gate Keepers
How Samsung, and other companies are building relationships directly with their customers.
Presented by: Cory Huff, Janrain and Matt Moller, Samsung
Vote Now!

The End of Trolls? New Ideas of Online Identity
How have anonymous user policies changed? Are anonymous voices still important? An intimate discussion on the changing notions of user identity.
Presented by: Jamie Beckland, Janrain and Jenna Langer, Livefyre
Vote Now!

Dr. Pepper: To Facebook – And Beyond!
Building a large fan base in social channels takes a huge amount of work, and a huge amount of creativity. See how Dr. Pepper successfully moved users from social channels, into fully branded experiences.
Presented by: Jamie Beckland, Janrain and Richard Lyons, Dr. Pepper Snapple Group and Steve Baer, code and theory
Vote Now!

Getting to Know You: From Anonymous to Known User
Social data provides individuals and companies alike with powerful fodder to cultivate a relationship, a mutual understanding, a marketing opportunity.
Presented by: Tore Steen, Janrain
Vote Now!

One Integration to Bind Them All
Websites are getting smarter about tapping into data and realtime activity streams to create a dynamic website and enhance experience on their site – Citysearch, Orbitz, etc. Backplane protocol can allow websites and app providers quicker and more detailed access to logged in users data.
Presented by: Jeff Mills, Janrain and Vidya Shivkumar, Janrain
Vote Now!

Backplane Protocol Workshop & Hackathon
Every web app developer wants to quickly get their product in the hands of users as quickly as possible but find it takes time; a lot of time. By becoming Backplane compliant, developers can quickly improve their reach and get their apps on big-time sites by making it easier for websites to integrate your app into their current programs. Attend this workshop and learn how to get your app/widget Backplane compliant in an hour or less.
Presented by: Brian McGinnis, Janrain and Tom Raney, Janrain
Vote Now!

How Multiscreening Saved Television
How social engagement on another screen keeps viewers engaged rather than add to distraction
Presented by: Gina Rau, Janrain and Ryan Currier, Pac12 and David Berzin, Viacom/MTV
Vote Now!

As the popularity grows each year, more and more industry leaders want an opportunity to be a part of SXSW, making it even more difficult to participate. Make sure Janrain gets invited by submitting your votes now – every vote counts!

Believe us when we say it’s the one of the most energetic, inspiring and creative events of the year. We advise you start planning now!

Interesting new technologies shaking up the identity world include the new OpenID Connect standard which is currently “functionally complete” and now exists as an implementer’s draft.  OpenID Connect provides identity services over the top of the successful OAuth2 protocol.  Several technology companies demonstrated prototypes of how distributed claims may be presented in one unified context.  This is an interesting development, moving forward from a paradigm of one identity provider being the sole source of all claims in a particular session.  Attribute brokering was discussed at the last meeting six months ago, but at this workshop it was clear that the ecosystem was still growing steadily.

Several multi-factor authentication technology demos were presented from simple integration with a secondary device like your smart phone verifying your identity via a pin to analyzing blood vessel patterns in your hand with the phone’s camera.  There was a cool hardware device enabling on the fly configuration of different security standards to protect a set of resources.  Mozilla demonstrated their innovative “Persona” product based on BrowserID.  Rather than tip off the identity provider that you are logging into your favorite site, BrowserID embeds your credentials in the user agent.  One attendee expressed concern that BrowserID was “yet another identity protocol” but new ideas were generally welcomed at this workshop.

And, of course, the attendees visited the contentious “privacy” space and what it means in today’s Internet.  Are we entitled to it, how and when?  Who owns our data?  In one session, an interesting discussion ensued on how to balance an attribute provider’s responsibility to silo and secure user data while still having the flexibility to verify and assert some authority about the data.  In an era where we occasionally see large wholesale data breaches, balancing privacy, availability and trust is a big issue to get right.

I also found the engineering “best practices” sessions interesting.  One was a deep dive into the finer grained details of the OAuth2 bearer token and the best approaches to securing this resource.  How does a trusted partner application refresh an access token when they don’t possess the refresh token or the client credentials?  How does this life-cycle flow work?  Questions like these are not addressed in the specifications and are intentionally left out-of-scope for various reasons.  Several interesting approaches were proposed, but to me the best part of the session was simply to work through familiar problems with some very smart people.

Fellow Janrain engineer Johnny Bufu and I also presented two sessions on the new Backplane 2 protocol.  Vlad Skvortsov, Vice President of Engineering from Janrain partner Echo joined us for the second session to help discuss the details of building an implementation for the new protocol, which Janrain released as open source software (https://github.com/janrain/janrain-backplane-2) the day before the workshop.  Backplane 2.0 is an exciting new secure messaging framework built on top of the OAuth2 protocol.  See http://backplanex.com for more details.

I left the conference feeling like the Conversation was just starting.  There were so many new ideas to digest and many existing technologies to learn more about.  Stay tuned!

This was my first time at IIW, and also my first time attending an “Unconference.” At an Unconference, there is no formal or pre-planned agenda. Participants propose topics they would like to discuss each morning, and everyone is then invited to join in the discussions. Given the wide range of backgrounds and job titles of the participants, this format resulted in lively and informative discussions that weren’t limited to technical presentations and lectures. I found this refreshing, and enjoyed listening to conversations that ranged from moral and philosophical, to detailed and technical.

Some major themes at the event included:

• Proving your identity on the web
• Government regulations and guidelines: NSTIC
• Vendor Relation Management
• Improved protocols: OpenID Connect, SCIM
• Privacy and data protection

Proving Your Identity

There were some interesting talks about proving identity on the web and obtaining verified attributes. Solutions included address verification through your mobile carrier or actual USPS mail, biometrics, and using social network data to do crowdsourcing and predictive analysis. This all falls under the category of proving who you say you are on the internet. Use cases include government agencies, or anyone else who wants to verify your identity with a high degree of assurance. Although the biometrics stuffs seems a bit immature, I can see a day where all smartphones have some type of biometric scanner which validates your identity.

OpenID Connect

On the technical side, I was glad to learn more about OpenID Connect. The main component of this protocol is the presence of an “ID Token” (which serves to identify the user), in addition to an OAuth access token. In effect, it seems to standardize the current “OpenID/OAuth” hybrids where you log in with OpenID, and also get back an OAuth token for making API calls. Another advantage over OAuth2 is that it can save a second API call to get the user’s basic profile data, in that some of this data comes back in the ID token (which is actually a JSON Web Token or JWT). Janrain has created a prototype integration of Google’s OpenID Connect in our system, which we hope to build on soon.

Simple Cloud Identity Management (SCIM)

I also attended a talk on SCIM (Simple Cloud Identity Management). This specification is intended to obtaining user data and identity in cloud based applications easier. The idea is to define a common JSON/XML schema for representing user data, and a common set of RESTful APIs to manage it. Most identity providers have some proprietary data schema and set of APIs already, this protocol seeks to standardize it across providers, as far as I can tell.

The Meaning of Privacy

One of my favorite sessions was about the meaning of “privacy”, and how it applies to the growing and complex world of the social web. With user data spread all over the world and APIs to connect it all, this topic is becoming increasingly relevant. We heard the legal definition of privacy versus data protection from a lawyer in attendance, and the discussion expanded into how such legal guidelines might be applied to the products we create. The question is how to build a product that satisfies these requirements across international boundaries, when the requirements, laws, and social conventions are not well defined.

Personal Data Ownership

One of the presenters (I’m sorry I didn’t write down his name) also quoted one of my favorite Steven Wright jokes, which I appreciated not only because it’s funny, but it’s also a great analogy to what’s going on with our personal data. It goes “I have a large seashell collection which I keep scattered on the beaches all over the world. Maybe you’ve seen it.” The analogy of course is that our pieces of personal data are like seashells, scattered across the many identity providers, governments and corporations of the world. The question is who actually owns this data, and the challenge is how to manage and access this data in a secure way that satisfies everyone involved.

This workshop helped to broaden my understanding of the world of identity and personal data beyond the technical realm. By learning more about privacy, legal issues and international concerns, I hope to bring new knowledge and awareness back to Janrain and help build better products.

	Digital Hollywood Spring April 30, 2012 – May 03, 2012 Marina Del Rey, CA The digital future is here and the experts speaking at the Digital Hollywood Spring event will explore the impact to the media and publishing industries. Larry Drebes, Janrain’s founder and CEO, will join a panel on May 2 at 2:15pm on “The Social Experience: Personalized Communication, Personalized TV, Personalized Apps, Personalized Commerce”. Learn more about Digital Hollywood Spring here.
	WOMM-U May 07, 2012 – May 09, 2012 Chicago, IL This event offers knowledge from today’s word of mouth and social media rock stars about what to do, how to do it, and how to implement it into your own company. Janrain’s VP of Marketing, Bill Piwonka will join a panel discussion Tuesday, May 8 at 11am on “Tools to Use In Content Marketing” that will highlight great resources for content curation, socialization and distribution. Learn more about WOMM-U here.
	WebVisions Portland May 16 – 18 Portland, OR Not only are we sponsors of this great event where experts in web and mobile design, technology, user experience, DIY, strategy and more gather to discuss the future of digital experiences, but Jamie Beckland, Janrain’s Digital and Social Media Strategist will present: “Minority Report: Creating Personalized Experiences without Being Creepy” on Friday, May 18 at 9:15am. Learn more about WebVisions Portland here.

Let’s connect! If you’re attending one of these great events, let us know so that we can set up time to meet.

You’ve invested in developing a Facebook page and growing a community of fans that Like your brand, and now wonder how these activities develop into sales growth, right? Most retailers are still seeking results they can connect back to their social media efforts, and aren’t finding the bottom-line impact they hoped for.

While growing a community and engaging with Facebook fans has its benefits, the ultimate goal is to turn those fans into customers. And that happens on your site.

Register for this webinar to learn how to leverage the social networks to make your ecommerce site a thriving social shopping destination.

What you can expect to learn:

• What tools and technology the leading ecommerce brands are using to deliver a social shopping experience
• How to tap into the social networks to increase site traffic and registration conversion
• The secrets to engaging with fans on your own site to turn fans into brand advocates and customers

Tuesday, April 24 2012 at 9am PST

REGISTER today to reserve your spot.