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Janrain Engage for Sonny

WordPress 3.3 Sonny, launched earlier this month and we have since released a new version of our Janrain Engage for WordPress plugin including our latest social login widget and some cool new features.

Highlighted new features

• Supports WordPress version 3.3
• Updated with latest Janrain Social Login Widget
• See which Social Providers people are logging in with on your site. This information is included in the Users section of your WordPress Dashboard.
• Added new WordPress shortcodes to easily personalize content that is different for visitors that are and aren’t logged into the site.

Janrain Capture for Magento Extension Released

Now it is even easier to integrate Janrain’s hosted registration into your sites built using the Magento platform. Our latest Janrain Capture for Magento Extension integrates seamlessly with the Janrain Engage plugin (social login and social sharing) we released earlier in 2011.

• Centralized and hosted user profile database
• Integrated with Janrain Engage to sign in with a variety of social identity providers
• Supports single sign-on

Please note that you need to license Janrain Capture to use this extension.

This post at Mashable from our head of products highlights the complexities of social profile data and will help you understand the five critical features of a user management system so you know what to look for in your solution search.

On the Front Lines of Social at f8

Integrating lighter sharing into the new Facebook Ticker feature greatly expands what a publisher can do to help drive discovery and mindshare using Facebook.  By setting expectations up front that users will see more serendipitous content within the Ticker, Facebook made a move to entrench itself as a primary aggregation point for a user’s interest graph.  For users, the Ticker is the starting point for surfacing what content friends engage with and what friends’ interests are in real-time and this likely will drive many to follow their Ticker versus their hashtags.

Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated Facebook Ticker along with Spotify during the keynote but it was important to note the range of other music services he shared that are also using the expanded Open Graph to drive deeper engagements.  Open Graph represents the biggest opportunity to drive a new class of apps and engagement as we extend beyond the sharing of content to the sharing of apps.

From a privacy perspective, it’s going to be a little daunting for users who don’t understand how to change their privacy settings or what they can opt out of in terms of sharing.  Users can choose to opt out, setup Friends Lists or apply new Smart Lists to filter content in the new Facebook Timeline but how a user controls their Ticker and how Facebook’s Graph Rank algorithms affect what’s surfaced in that Ticker is less intuitive.

Facebook Timelines

I spoke to Facebook CTO Bret Taylor about the importance of the new Facebook Read plugin which is coming soon.  Publishers will have a number of new ways to generate recommendations from their readers including time spent on a page, percentage of an article that one scrolls through and by manually recommending an article.  The new social plug-ins will greatly enhance a publisher’s ability to drive viral engagement through Facebook as users look to share more about the food they eat, the music they listen to, the news they find interesting and the fantasy football teams they’ve put together.

At the VC panel led by Facebook’s Ethan Beard, a panelist admonished brand managers for not getting out of their silos and sharing data across the company.  Brands and marketers are more incented than ever to know who their Facebook users are and they will want to plug in platforms like Janrain to generate and capture this data across all social touch points.  There are trade-offs for moving into a world where everything is shared but Facebook sets the bar high in exposing even more of the interest graph and content owners will not want to be left on the sidelines as all content gets more social.

As they move across the social web, they freely share data from their different profiles with websites to speed up the login, sharing and purchasing process. This rich social profile data includes demographic and location data, information on their friends and social graph, hobbies and interests.

The abundance of data available in these social profiles has created a new world of possibilities for marketers who can now offer a personalized experience onsite, deliver more targeted ads and campaigns, and streamline the acquisition process. The challenge for most marketers is storing this data and then accessing it effectively to reap the benefits.

Join us for a free webinar Wednesday August 17 at 10a PDT with social media expert Carri Bugbee and Vidya Shivkumar Janrain Director of Product Management to learn how to make the most of social profile data.

In under an hour we’ll cover: 

• The ins and outs of social profile data – what it is and how you get it
• What to do with the data once you have it – including best practices and use cases
• A quick introduction to Janrain Capture – a social profile storage solution used by leading brands such as Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, Kodak and National Geographic

Meet our speakers: 

Carri Bugbee, Social Media Marketing Strategist
Carri is a Social Media Masters teacher for Social Media Club, Online Marketing Summit, and provides private training on using social media platforms for marketing. She’s also a contributing author to “The Big Book of Social Media Case Studies, Stories, Perspectives.”

Vidya Shivkumar, Director of Product Management, Janrain

Vidya heads up Product Management at Janrain and brings over 10 years of product leadership experience in Internet and SaaS-based products. She has also held product management positions at AOL, iovation and DataMotion.

At the same time, we’ve entered a landscape where individuals expect brand interactions to be personalized, and online experiences to be social.  As a marketer, how do you align your online initiatives with these shifting paradigms?

The answer rests with social data.  There are over 1.5 billion online users with active social network or email accounts.  Think about the wealth of data each of us maintains on these accounts – demographics, interests, opinions and friends.  Marketers can tap into this trove of data with permission from users by offering social login and employing a database or CRM equipped to store social profiles.

But collecting social profile data is only half the battle.  Understanding how to utilize it to increase engagement, conversions and customer lifetime value is critical.  Our new white paper, “The Future of Marketing is Social Data”, discusses these concepts with practical tips about how to leverage social data in your marketing efforts to:

• Offer faster, more accurate recommendations to customers
• Serve customized content
• Create highly personalized and relevant ads
• Test messaging for online and offline campaigns
• Incentivize loyalty and reward influencers

Check out our new white paper and let us know what you think.

Surprising, right?  One of the chief mantras of earned media is that the consumer is in control, yet Razorfish’s study found that the control element really isn’t what makes consumers tick.  Rather, most still prefer feeling valued, efficiency, trust, as more important elements of engagement with a brand.

The report also acknowledges that harnessing word-of-mouth and peer recommendation trumps all other marketing channels as a means of generating influence.  When asked which channels or sources influence decisions to use a particular company, brand or product, 71% of consumers surveyed responded that reviews from family members or friends exerted a “great deal” or “fair amount” of influence.  Further, 90% of online consumers trust recommendations from people they know.

For online businesses seeking to optimize their social CRM efforts, the takeaways are evident:

• Your corporate website is still the go-to location.
  Company websites are the best at making consumers feel valued and facilitating trust, consistency and relevance.  So, don’t make it hard for your consumers.  Reduce barriers to sign-up by letting them utilize their existing social identities.
• Don’t completely ignore one channel in favor of another. 
  Your corporate website, community site, Facebook and Twitter presences are all key components of an integrated marketing strategy.  They should augment each other.  Leverage earned media (such as your Facebook and Twitter pages) to drive traffic to channels where you own more of the message, like your website.  By then enabling your website users to share content from your site with their social networks, you can create a virtuous circle of qualified, sustained referral traffic.
• Make your consumers feel valued. 
  But how do you build relationships if you don’t know anything about your consumers?  Gaining an understanding of the demographics, interests and social graphs of your consumers can help you increase lifetime value, either through customer service, loyalty programs, targeted campaigns or content personalization.  Social and behavioral data are the foundations of effective consumer engagement.

Social logins made it easy to quickly register users to websites and social sharing generated significant qualified referral traffic, an average of 12 referral clicks per post, back to sites, validating the premise that our friends, family and coworkers – our social graph – wield much influence on our online activities and purchase behaviors.

By accepting social logins and enabling social sharing, marketers suddenly found themselves with instant access to a wealth of information about a user’s social graph, their hobbies, interests, and demographic data. The next logical step is to use this data for content personalization, user segmentation, and targeting. However, long development cycles involved in redesigning backend databases to store social data and associated infrastructure costs, have kept marketers from taking advantage of this information.

Help has arrived in the form of a powerful combination of Janrain Engage, a turnkey solution for social login and Janrain Capture Express, a comprehensive hosted database for social profile data. Users login with their preferred social account such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn or others via Janrain Engage, grant the website access to their information via a permissions page. Capture Express then automatically stores the profile information on behalf of the website. Profile data can be easily and readily accessed by the website via APIs and used for content personalization, targeting, further mining and analysis.

Finally, marketers can take advantage of social data without the hassle of database redesign initiatives, ongoing maintenance schedules and capital expenditure.

In addition to Capture Express, Janrain Capture comes in two other versions: Standard and Premium. Please visit our plans page to learn more about the features and benefits of each. Also, feel free to check out the video we put together that provides a good overview of Janrain Capture:

During the past decade, organizations have evolved their online presence from static brochureware into dynamic web destinations that provide personalized and rich experiences for users. To fuel these experiences, online businesses must have a robust repository to store user profile data, preferences and behaviors.

With the advent of social networks and solutions like Janrain Engage, which enable organizations to collect rich demographic and social graph information on their audience, company databases often have not been optimized to fully leverage and encapsulate this information.

That’s where Janrain can help. Yesterday, we announced the release of Janrain Capture, a cloud-based solution that enables online businesses to store user profile data and make it actionable. Companies such as National Geographic Channel, Kodak and YellowPages.ca are using Janrain Capture to build enriching online experiences for their members.

National Geographic Channel selected Janrain Capture to provide a single, flexible hosted user profile system and distribute user profile info to the National Geographic’s Pluck social community platform and email system. National Geographic Channel is also using Janrain Engage to enable its users to sign in with an existing account on Facebook, Twitter, Google or other networks.

YellowPages.ca™ chose Janrain Capture to add user registration and a profile system in the cloud. Janrain Capture hosts the registration screens and the profile pages, and handles the email verification process. YellowPages.ca also uses Janrain Engage and Janrain Federate to offer login via Facebook and federated single sign on across partner sites.

Key Features of Janrain Capture include:

• Customizable profile database
• Branded registration helper screens for data capture
• Connectors to 3rd party systems such as Commenting, CMS, Ratings & Reviews, or Analytics
• Public profile pages for end users
• End user self-service administrative screens
• Safeguards and access controls for user profile data
• Data import tool for importing existing user databases
• Software as a service deployment

Janrain Engage, Janrain Federate and Janrain Capture can be used separately or together in the Janrain User Management platform to help companies manage all aspects of user engagement.