Force.com enables businesses and organizations to quickly build user-centric websites.  Janrain takes the convenience factor one step further by allowing site owners to offer their users frictionless sign in and registration. Users can choose from a selection of over 25 different identity providers which include Google, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Facebook, and PayPal. Once the user signs in with their preferred identity, the rich user profile data returned as part of the social login can be used to pre-fill registration forms. Imagine being able to download whitepapers or register for webinars without having to fill out a lengthy registration form! For the site owner, this translates to collecting verified information on the user such as an email address, title or company name.

The benefits don’t stop with sign up and registration. Social integration also enables organizations to build viral audience growth through social sharing and the ability to tap into a user’s social graph. It opens the door for a variety of interesting programs such as referring a friend or sharing an offer.

Setting up Janrain for Salesforce sites is quite easy.

Here is a step by step guide to making your Force.com site social.

1) Configure your new Janrain Engage widget:

First, get Janrain Engage and then head to your configuration dashboard to set up identity provider developer applications and the widget’s look and feel.

2) Configure your Saleforce Site’s Auth. Provider:

Select and configure Janrain as your Auth. Provider from within your Salesforce site Adminintraion Setup screen.

3) Configure your Salesforce page and paste in your Engage code:

Copy the Engage widget code from the “Get the Code” section in the Engage dashboard and paste it into your Salesforce site.

Find out more at the links below:

Salesforce Announces Social Sign-On with Janrain
Salesforce Social Sign-on setup instructions: see page 684 [pdf]
Get Janrain Engage
Force.com

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.

mixi is a Social Networking Service that launched in  2004. It allows friends to connect and make new acquaintances in a fun, and convenient way. At this time mixi has over 25 million users world wide.

The mixi identity provider is now available to all Janrain customer’s and is ready for configuration in their Janrain dashboard.

How to Add mixi to Your Social Login Widget

If you are an existing Janrain customer, simply log into your application dashboard to configure mixi as a login provider for your social login widget.

Learn More About Janrain Engage

Don’t have Janrain Engage yet? Visit our Janrain Engage product page to learn more about how our solution can help you increase online registration rates and improve user engagement with our social login and sharing tools.

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.

This becomes meaningful when shoppers can login to a commerce site in a secure way with their PayPal identity, and retailers can personalize the shopping experience and expedite the checkout process by prepopulating their shipping address. The ultimate result is reduced cart abandonment and increased sales.

Retail marketers are increasingly finding the value in shopper data and would be foolish to leave that on the table during a transaction. For shoppers, PayPal Access offers them the option to utilize their PayPal commerce identity to login to the merchant’s site. Retailers using Janrain Engage for social login already offer this experience for shoppers who register with a social identity like Facebook or Google.  Now, they can offer the choice of PayPal Access to pre-populate much of a shopper’s information during checkout, including name, email, shipping address, and phone number.

During the authentication process, a shopper may grant the retailer permission to access this information. Retailers may then utilize this profile data to customize the shopping experience, speed up checkout, or send personal offers. A primary benefit is the trusted PayPal name both for shoppers seeking secure transactions and retailers that want verified user data.

While top media organizations have been reporting the announcement positively, highlighting what this means for consumers and retailers, some stories haven’t accurately reflected the details of the new platform. For example, Econsultancy reported that PayPal is putting up a “barrier between retailers and customers”:

In offering a ‘solution’ that aims to circumvent retailers’ normal registration process, PayPal is really keeping valuable data about customers out of retailers’ hands. That data, of course, tells them who their customers are.

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

This highlights the ongoing confusion of user identity. Janrain works closely with identity providers to ensure that we support functionality that empowers marketers. In this case, there are a number of clear wins for our customers. In fact, the PayPal Access website clearly defines the benefits of the platform for consumers, merchants and developers.

Janrain customers have had access to shoppers’ profile data since we launched PayPal as an identity provider last October. Janrain customers who have already set up PayPal as an identity provider in their Janrain Engage social login widget are already set and will see the PayPal logo has been updated with the PayPal Access branding. To add PayPal Access as an identity provider to your social login widget, simply access the dashboard to get start getting additional data like shipping address now.

Still have questions about PayPal Access or want to learn how to offer this convenience to your shoppers? Give us a call.

Impact to Janrain Customers

Facebook has been slowly rolling out updates to user profile pages since f8 and APIs that enable deeper engagement with users are currently in developer beta.

As a Janrain customer, no immediate action is required on your part. You will enjoy continued access to the same set of rich user profile data that is returned as part of the Janrain Engage social login product. Here at Janrain, we are testing Facebook’s APIs and introducing new user permissions to ensure optimized placement of the social posts users make from your site to their News Feed in order to maximize referral traffic back to your content.

Janrain understands how developer conferences like f8 can cause concern for your digital roadmap. In order to help make sense of what f8 means for you, please join us for a deeper roundtable discussion with extended Q&A. Members of our product and digital and social strategy teams will be available to discuss what all of this news means for Q4 2011 and into 2012, and we’ll be taking your questions throughout the conversation. Get the details and sign up here.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at how Facebook is making user engagement and content discovery possible.

Finally, Some Context for Content Sharing

Whereas the Facebook Open Graph of 2010 supported the ability to “Like” a variety of content and web pages, the Open Graph of 2011 supports many more actions or verbs. Simply put, users can now convey a richer set of intentions and context back to their social graph. This makes user actions on your website even more relevant to their friends. Apart from liking a page, your users can share that they read a news article, cooked a recipe, listened to a song, or recommended a restaurant.

Improved discovery

The new Facebook profile page now contains three distinct elements.

• The Timeline that allows a user to customize and share life stages and milestones with their friends and family
• The Ticker that displays all lightweight activities from friends such as “Lisa just became friends with Gina.” in real-time
• The News Feed itself that contains status updates and posts from a user’s social graph.

So, rather than display every action taken by a user’s friends, family and colleagues in a single timeline, these activity updates are neatly segmented into three areas of the profile page for easier discovery and consumption.

Automated Sharing

Users can opt-in to share activities to their Timeline one initial time which allows subsequent actions to be automatically shared to their Timeline. Facebook is encouraging creation of branded Facebook apps to make this automatic sharing possible though similar sharing can also be done from a brand site by requesting the publish_actions user permission which Janrain will make available shortly. Customers will be notified when the permission becomes available.

New Ways to Leverage the Open Graph

Regardless of your industry vertical, the Open Graph will provide new ways for customers to talk about your brands and products with their social graph.

Retailers

Instead of just “Liking” a product page, you can create any verb association. You will probably want users to “Want,” “Own,” and “Give” products, but think about other things customers would like to do with your products, like “Use,” “Upgrade to,” and “Rock.”

Media and Entertainment

Entertainment apps become much more important, as users will have new ways of engaging with video and music content.

Publishers

Publishers have the greatest ability to stay relevant, as the content stream from your website gets more social distribution through automatic sharing, and drives more users back to your site. You now have the option to introduce labels such as “Read”, “Commented”, “Strongly Agreed With”, “Disapproved” to your content.

Other Platform Changes

Lastly, Facebook has also announced several platform changes that will take effect starting October 1, 2011. We want to assure you that as a Janrain customer, no action is required on your part. Janrain has been consistently making changes and upgrades to API calls to ensure support for the latest and greatest from Facebook.

Join our Product and Digital Strategy teams October 7th for more discussion on f8 and get all your questions answered.

Of course, what they get in return will be “lowest common denominator.” We use different account names, networks, and identities for different reasons; it only stands to reason that by requiring us to fit into Google+’s box, we will constrain what we talk about and how we share.

Please check out the post, and let me know your thoughts about what part of your own identity you share on Google+, vs. what you share on other networks.

What’s the problem? There’s no question that user sign-in and registration helps drive increased personalization but sites don’t want to be in the business of managing passwords. Consumers reuse their passwords across sites. If one site’s security is breached the damages can be exponential. Surrender Gmail credentials that are tied to a Google Apps account and you have a real mess.

Google and Janrain have cooperated in launching tools for consumer-facing websites that enable users to login with their existing email credentials. The Google Identity Toolkit (GITkit) and the Janrain Login Helper enable any site to federate login while simplifying registration and providing a consistent user experience.

The Shift to Identity Providers

Google’s Eric Sachs does a great job of laying out Google’s rationale for helping sites get out of the password business. Eric has been the biggest long-time advocate for this shift and the reality is that large identity providers like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are better equipped to manage these passwords. With large teams focused on security and identity services, they can more quickly react to security threats and stay up to date with best practices. See Eric Sachs talk about their announcement of GITkit and why it’s time to kill passwords.

For the enterprise and business market interested in implementing login using email addresses, Janrain provides an SLA and dedicated support along with its Janrain Login Helper service. The integration is lightweight and user profile data is normalized across providers. Login Helper can be deployed alongside Janrain Engage to give customers the option of signing into websites with their social networking accounts or using the more familiar and traditional email address based method. User data can then be stored in Janrain Capture. This offers websites a complete registration flow.   Check out the overview on Janrain Login Helper or contact products@janrain.com to learn more.

Gain Access to foursquare User Profile Data

As with all of our providers, Janrain Engage allows you to gain access to a user’s profile data once they login with their preferred provider. After a user logs in with foursquare, and grants permission to access their data, you can gain access to information such as their username, gender, photo, email and more. You can see a full list of accessible user profile data here:

How to Add foursquare to Your Social Login Widget

If you are an existing Janrain customer, simply log into your application dashboard, click “Provider Configuration” under “Quick Links” and follow our step-by-step set up guide to configure foursquare. Once configured, the social network can be added to your login widget, mobile application or custom UI with a few mouse-clicks and keystrokes.

Learn More About Janrain Engage

Don’t have Janrain Engage yet? Visit our Janrain Engage product page to learn more about how our solution can help you increase online registration rates and improve user engagement with our social login and sharing tool.

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.