When choosing Software as a Service (SaaS) there are many criteria that we consider: availability, price, data security to name a few. But how often do we consider performance? After all, a poorly performing application has several negative knock-on effects to a business: a one second delay in web page load time decreases customer satisfaction by 16%, and more than a third of users go on to tell others about a bad experience using a website. Performance has also been shown to affect the bottom line, as Shopzilla.com showed when a five second improvement in page load times increased their conversion rate by 7-12%.

Yet a poorly performing SaaS solution could lead to considerably greater problems than an on-premise alternative. After all, we don’t own any of the infrastructure on which the service is running and we are powerless to fix the problem.  Considering the implications, shouldn’t we add Performance to our list of criteria?

But how do you assess the performance of a service? That’s where Intechnica can help and where Janrain turned when they wanted to prove to themselves and the market that their hosted registration, social profile data collection and storage service could handle any load that a potential customer might throw at it.

We started by assessing what a potential customer may require of the service and identified a number of typical user journeys.

The duration of the test, the “think time” over the user journey and the number of iterations were calculated based on Janrain’s own observations. Together they make up the “load model”.

Next we converted these user journeys into scripts that TrafficSpike, our cloud based load testing tool, could execute. The pacing of the scripts was determined by the load model.

The scripts were then launched at Janrain’s service from the cloud by a number of virtual users over a period of time to reflect a rapid increase in load such as may be experienced after a directed marketing campaign.

Once the test was complete TrafficSpike was able to show Janrain the number of realistic “hits” that Capture could handle together with metrics on data throughput and much more.

So what did we find?

1. During three load tests, Janrain’s registration, data collection and storage service handled a transaction rate of over 800 transactions per second for login and over 600 for registration and data.  For a system that performs complex registration logic and workflow, this is an amazing metric.
2. In a further stress test with an average response time under 0.5 seconds, Janrain was able to process 2,472 transactions per second for login and 549 for a comprehensive registration flow. 1600 virtual users were used to generate this load; 800 registering new email addresses, 800 logging on using pre-existing email addresses.
3. Tests were performed against an encrypted data store (which introduces computational complexity).
4. We believe these results would more than satisfy any known use case in the market today.

So, in summary, before buying a SaaS product, do the following…

1. Know your business requirements.
2. Make sure that the service you are buying can actually support your business and scale requirements.
3. Agree to an SLA (service level agreement) that will protect your business in the event of a failure (No service is 100% available).

Similar to prior analyses, we have taken a sampling of sites in prominent industry verticals to measure trends in consumer login preferences. While the overall story arc is similar across these verticals, there are disparate preferences within each segment that merit attention.

On media websites, Facebook leads in popularity with 43% of users preferring to register or login using their Facebook profile. Yahoo! and Google are running strong as the second and third most popular providers at roughly 19% apiece. Despite a modest decline over the past two quarters, Yahoo! continues to perform best in this vertical – perhaps as a result of its realignment as a content network during the past several years. Twitter’s share within this segment has yet to accelerate, but its potential for future growth makes it worth keeping an eye on, particularly given its focus as a network for content discovery.

For marketers and digital strategists managing these types of sites, effective engagement with readers begins by offering incentives for registration. Whether it is to comment on news articles, join a vibrant community, or unlock premium content, visitors need a compelling reason to share their personal information and create an account on your site. Bicycling Magazine, which is a property of Rodale, makes the benefits of registering clear to its visitors. And because registration is offered with a social identity, the process is a breeze, requiring only two clicks. Goodbye lengthy forms and struggling conversion rates.

Similarly, The Sun, one of the largest daily newspapers in the United Kingdom, prompts readers to easily register or login with a Facebook or Twitter identity in order to post comments on articles.

Social login implementations such as these generate tangible business results for content and community sites. For example, lifestyle magazine Divine Caroline, a Meredith property, saw a nearly immediate 12% increase in registrations after adding social login to its registration flow.

On entertainment and gaming sites, which tend to be more community-oriented, Facebook again leads the pack by a wide margin. But 57% of users prefer to login with a different social identity. Within this vertical, Google earns 23% share as the second most popular network. It’s also worth noting that while Windows Live (Hotmail/MSN) maintains an 8% share of social logins on entertainment and gaming websites, this is a 6% decrease from the previous quarter.

More than ever, people are using their social networks to share interesting news articles and content with their friends. On media sites, it is now common to be presented with the option to share an article comment with Facebook friends, Twitter followers or LinkedIn connections.

Across the websites of all Janrain Engage customers, Facebook and Twitter are far and away the most popular sharing destinations, but Yahoo!, LinkedIn and MySpace maintain preference on niche sites that are catered to their audience (B2B sites for LinkedIn and music sites for MySpace).

Creating a viral loop of referral traffic between your site and the social networks requires more than just dropping a few generic share buttons on various pages. Social sharing needs to be contextually integrated into the user experience on your site. For example, VH1, an MTV property, lets music fans share videos and their reactions to them after posting comments.

When implemented strategically, social sharing can become a steady and valuable source of qualified traffic to your site. Citysearch, for example, generates an average of 28 referral visits to its site each time a member shares his or her review of a local business to a social network stream.

Social login and sharing open the door to collecting a rich amount of profile data from a user’s social network account, and each social network provides a different set of profile data on their users. This information can be used to speed registration, create community by leveraging a user’s social graph (friends), and enable personalization of content or email campaigns based on a user’s demographics or interests. Here is a look at the profile data that users can choose to share with your site from their social network:

Social login has achieved significant adoption on media and entertainment websites during the past several years. Understanding how consumers leverage their social identities to connect and interact on these sites helps you tailor content your audience, improve engagement and drive higher CPMs from advertisers.

Coupled with increasing reluctance from consumers to maintain distinct usernames and passwords on each frequently visited site, brands are rapidly seeking ways to leverage social network identities within their own properties. Through a secure process known as social login, these identities can be used to speed up registration on sites across the web. But which identities do people prefer both for sign-in and content sharing?

Each quarter, we seek to answer these questions by analyzing social login and social sharing preferences for online users across the 365,000 websites using Janrain Engage.  Today, MediaPost published an update of our quarterly social login and sharing data.

Download full PDF here.

What do these findings mean for your business? As you work to add a social layer to your site to improve engagement and drive conversions, social login and sharing should be fully integrated. We hope these findings provide a useful benchmark as you optimize your on-site social media strategy.

For Marketers:

Social login helps solve the challenge of how to collect more accurate data on your users without sacrificing registration conversion rates. Social login shortens the registration process to a single click and gives you instant access to rich demographic, psychographic and social graph data on your users. This social profile data can be leveraged for content personalization or product recommendations and more tailored segmentation and targeting. Social sharing lets your users broadcast content and activities from your site to their social networks, increasing brand advocacy and creating an effective channel to drive qualified referral traffic to your site.

For Developers and Technologists:

It can be a big headache to implement the plumbing to each social network API on your own. These networks use different protocols under the hood, such as OpenID, OAuth, hybrids and proprietary technologies. As a result, coding social login on your own requires a significant investment of time, engineering expertise and ongoing maintenance as the networks change their APIs, often without advanced notice. Your social login and sharing solution should allow you to easily connect to all the social networks by writing once to a single API. By cutting deployment times from weeks or months to a couple days, you can focus on your core competency while trusting that the social and user management tools on your site just work.

Nobody wants to create a new account to use a new online service. Nothing feels more redundant than entering the same information into a site that we’ve added a hundred times before.

Something changed a few years ago. Facebook, Twitter, and Google made it easy for web services like Get Satisfaction to allow people login through them, gaining one-click access to their public identity information.

This was a major leap forward: it used to be that anonymity was the default, and even if people used their real name on a web service there was no way to easily validate that it was actually that person. Every web site had to rely on its own separate and disconnected user database. Now, login and registration is a one-click action, and social interactions tend to be a lot more civil, since people bring their reputation with them everywhere, and there’s less anonymous trolling.

At Get Satisfaction, we depend on Janrain for our social login and identity services. It’s a solution that I believe could greatly benefit any Web or mobile site that have a login process. There were many reasons we chose to use them rather than build our own, but above all, these guys really know online identity. It’s been incredible gaining the benefit of their skills while we focus on building and scaling our core platform.

Click here for Thor’s top 5 reasons why he recommends Janrain to others.

Social media marketing strategist Carri Bugbee contributed this guest blog post:

For those of us immersed in social media marketing, it’s been a wild ride the past few years. Facebook became the 800-pound gorilla, with a big chunk of all online ad revenue now going to feed the beast. Twitter blossomed from a little bird carrying messages between friends to the siren of mass media and a harbinger of top trends. Geo-local check-ins came out of nowhere to challenge our ideas about loyalty and reward us for stalking. And mobile devices have changed the way we gather and share all manner of information at the point of purchase.

However, this social media mania left most corporate websites a wee bit lonely. Sure, marketers dutifully included links and tried to drive promotional traffic to their websites, but the constant flow of new ideas and familiar faces always lured people back to their networks in rapid-fire fashion.

So, what’s a marketer to do if all the action is happening off-site? How do you get people to come on over to your place and stick around for awhile? For many businesses, the answer is to integrate social media with the corporate website. In fact, this was named the most important initiative for social media strategists in 2011, according to the Altimeter Group.

Of course, it’s no small matter to figure out how to do this and where to start. The landscape of choices changes almost daily – along with the opportunities. However, I did the research, so you don’t have to! It’s all covered in a white paper that details the top tools and tactics for socializing your website. I pulled together helpful tips from many of the top social media marketing thought leaders: Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis, Charlene Li, David Armano, C.C. Chapman, Ann Handley, Steve Rubel, Michael Stelzner and Joe Pulizzi. I also highlighted a few apps and platforms you may not have tried, along with examples of best practices. I hope you’ll check it out and offer your own spin on those ideas below.

One thing I didn’t cover in the white paper is who should lead the charge. This is still somewhat nebulous. Social business is so new, the person (or team) in each organization who evangelizes for these changes may come from a variety of places: marketing, customer service, public relations, sales, search and more. I’ve observed this personally and similar data was detailed in the November 2010 report The Career Path of the Corporate Social Strategist. This means your strategist(s) – maybe that’s you – may encounter resistance from corporate web development teams. They may not appreciate PR folks, for example, offering user interface recommendations.

In the case of smaller businesses, which often outsource marketing and web development, their vendors will have to play nice with each other. It would be great if these services were available all in one place, but I think that’s rare at this point. That will continue to be the case until more consistent social media marketing methodologies emerge. That’s happening to some extent now with Facebook – until the next round of platform changes kicks in.

Whether your business has in-house advocates or outside agencies and consultants, I suspect you’ll have to knock down a few silos to get your website socialized. If you have an opinion about who can and should drive this process – and how this may change the roles of social media strategists – I’d love to hear it!

Today we are happy to announce support for Twitter based sign-in via RPX. Adding Twitter to your RPX grid will help you connect with the millions of users who use Twitter each day to stay connected online. When you add Twitter as a sign-in option, your users will easily be able to sign up for your site by clicking the Twitter button and authorizing your web application. It is simple, and easy for your users:

When a user logs off of your website, RPX remembers that they used Twitter to sign-in. The return experience greets them with a friendly message and one click sign-in experience:

If you already run a website that uses RPX for authentication, you may add twitter support by clicking “Configure Providers” from your developer console at rpxnow.com. If you are new to RPX, simply visit rpxnow.com to create a developer account and get started.

Rich API Access

In addition to adding Twitter authentication to the RPX API, starting today we now provide you with the extended access credentials for users who sign-in via Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and Windows LiveID. With these extended access credentials you can do some wonderful things to improve your user’s experience like publish items to the Facebook stream, build a Twitter application, or help a user update their status on MySpace.

This is our first step in making it possible for you to build a deeper integration into your application using third party APIs. Just as we’ve done for authentication with RPX, this summer we will begin offering a set of APIs and tools that make social integration cross provider and simple.