Disqus

Disqus was looking for a technology partner to help publishers collect and organize valuable user profile information to enhance and develop their registered audience base.  The company joined the Janrain Fusion Partner Program to make it easier for publishers to create personalized and targeted content for visitors based on a user’s declared interests and demographics.

Ro Gupta, vice president of business development for Disqus, believes that this integration is extremely compelling for publishers who want to develop deep relationships with their most engaged audience – those that consume content and participate in discussions. It allows the publisher to verify the user and gather key information about preferences, which in turn gives the user a better, more personalized experience on the publisher site.

Gupta knew Janrain specialized in user management, which Disqus wanted to enrich based on keen publisher interest to capture and verify more user data.  He views this partnership as a great example of two industry leaders working together to tangibly increase the value of online engagement.

For more information on Fusion Partners and the program, check out our partner section.

You may not recognize the name Automattic, but you’re certainly familiar with the WordPress.com platform, the most popular content management system (CMS) on the web. Automattic manages the enterprise arm, WordPress.com VIP, which powers some of the largest publisher and media sites, including CNN, New York Times, CBS and Forbes.

These media executives have been trying to find a technology solution to personalize their brand experience. The solution had to be easy to integrate, scalable and secure.

Automattic has joined the Janrain Fusion Partner Program to provide VIP sites a technology solution to better understand and engage their audiences. The JUMP integration provides turnkey registration, social profile storage and user insight solutions so WordPress.com VIP customers can acquire more users and provide better, more engaging experiences.

Vice-president of platform services for Automattic, Inc., Paul Maiorana, is looking forward to offering their customers the ability to streamline the traditional registration process for their end users, thus helping website owners better understand visitors to their site. He says this key partnership with Janrain allows his customers to easily enable these additional services and features on their site with just one click. Paul notes it also provides confidence that the functionality is well integrated and supported by both teams.

For more information on Fusion Partners and the program check out our partner section.

We now have more than 30 highly respected technology partners with deep product integrations to support an entire ecosystem of technology choices and engagement strategies for our clients. Here’s a high level overview of the value some of these new partnerships bring:

• Using the Janrain User Management Platform, Automattic can customize and streamline the traditional registration process for WordPress VIP users, thus helping them better understand their customers.
• Disqus can make it easier for publishers to create personalized and targeted content for visitors based on a user’s declared interests and demographics.
• Umbel customers can gain access to social profile data to help publishers and their sales team better understand their online audiences to improve engagement for users and marketers.

Fusion’s success has always been based on working together to increase the value of online engagement for companies and their consumers. We look forward to announcing more exciting partnerships and integrations soon. To learn about our partners, extensions and the Fusion Program, check out our partner section.

If you’re unfamiliar with Umbel check them out here, especially if you host ads on your websites. They have smart technology that analyzes almost every data point you could imagine across your users and properties. Umbel’s segmentation capabilities identifies audience groups based on these data points, including social data, and delivers an interactive dashboard giving clients the ability to easily visualize this information. Umbel customers are able to take this insight and increase ad sales across their properties.

One of our first joint customers to leverage this new partnership and integrated solution is the Daily Beast. For the Newsweek/Daily Beast Company, truly understanding their readers and building the most compelling audience stories for advertisers backed by real data is a critical part of their transition into the 100% digital NewsBeast news organization. We are excited to be working with Umbel to give joint customers the ability to analyze their audience like never before.

Check out Umbel’s announcement on our new partnership here.

With the October 21st rollout of the Janrain Fusion Partner Program we highlighted game-changing partnerships with world-class companies such as ExactTarget, Lotame, BlueKai, Salesforce.com, Oracle, Bazaarvoice, and many more. These partnerships have turned into integrations with JUMP, giving our current and future customers the ability to leverage not only social profile data but other user data to target, personalize, and segment their audience and customers within the platforms and applications they use today.

If you are interested in learning more about the Fusion Partner Program and how it can help your business, check out our partner section.

If you are interested in the vast array of extensions that we offer to our customers, you can visit the Extension Marketplace.

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.

If you have the opportunity to catch one of the Badgville Engage City Tour events coming to Chicago, New York or London this year, take the time to do so – you won’t regret it. Marissa Duggan from Badgeville and her team put on a first class event that bring industry leaders together under one roof to share ideas and vision around audience engagement. I had the privilege of participating in Badgeville’s Engage 2012 City Tour in Seattle last week and want to share some of the key takeaways with you.

Gamification isn’t a trend – it’s a movement.

Gartner predicts that by 2014, more than 70% of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application.  So if you have any preconceived (read: negative or dismissive) ideas on the applicability of game mechanics for business purposes, I’d urge you to take a second look.  The easiest way to think about this space is that’s its about how one can apply game mechanics to non-game environments to motivate people and change behavior.

In fact, Autodesk presented a case study that included how they drove a significant increase in trial software downloads due to viral marketing that was supported through Badgeville’s game mechanics solution.

Creating a “social media strategy” does not equal a fully socially engaged enterprise.

Sean O’Driscoll, co-founder and CEO of Ant’s Eye View took the audience through the Social Engagement Journey and described the role gamification plays throughout each stage.  The net of his talk boils down to this:  The end result and value of social to business is a customer base that trusts the organization, recommends it to others, and plays an important part in future direction through online communications.  But you can’t get there if you are simply paying lip service to your commitment to social.

One of the things I particularly liked was his discussion on ROI.  Of course we all want to be able to accurately forecast how our investments will pay off down the road.  But be wary of executives who hide behind ROI as a way to defer making a tough investment decision.  (He challenged the audience to respond to a request for ROI with their own: “What’s the ROI on the phone system we put in place to take calls from customers; what’s the ROI of PR?”)  The best line of the evening in my opinion came from Sean, “Remember, there is no R, without an I.”  1% of your budget is not an investment in social.

Engagement is enhanced when people are rewarded for their actions.

Jim Petty, from Bazaarvoice, spoke about the amplification that occurs when you combine social technologies like theirs, which enables clients to create and harness insights from communities in which users can engage in conversations through activities such as ratings and reviews and game mechanics.  This view was supported by An Le, of Yammer, who spoke of the value in transparency and recognition within an organization.

Identity is crucial to maximizing the value of engagement.

As professionals with responsibility for online activities, we all share common goals:

1. Increase traffic to our website
2. Convert those anonymous visitors into known, recognized users
3. Learn as much as possible about these users, in order to
4. Deliver engaging, relevant, personalized and meaningful user experiences
5. To ultimately drive corporate objectives (more purchases, time on site, etc.)

The reason we at Janrain are so pleased to be partners with companies like Badgeville and other social engagement technology companies is that we complement one another in this scenario.

All in all, a great event.  And if you still doubt that game mechanics can effectively be applied to just about anything, check out the picture – attendees could earn badges for sampling the custom cocktails!

This means that Demandware customers can now enjoy the many benefits of JUMP already being realized by our online retail customers like Sears, Guitar Center, Whole Foods, and Illy Cafe. These and other commerce customers are realizing increases in registration conversions, decreased cart abandonment, a reduction in false user data, and improvement in customer service calls as a result of a forgotten password.

The majority of these benefits come from a unique combination of social login and a robust registration system which ensures that retailers obtain the data they need while letting online shoppers register and subsequently login faster. The ability to pre-fill registration forms with verified social profile data becomes all the more important as shoppers spend more time on mobile devices and struggle with text entry on small screens.

Benefits for shoppers

• 77% of shoppers prefer social login for fast registration and checkout

• Shoppers can share products, reviews, and purchases to social networks or targeted to a select group of friends
• Shoppers never have to remember, or recover, a site-specific username or password

Rather than paying for data append services, retailers are embracing social login as a source of permission-based, cost effective and rich shopper data including verified email and shipping addresses, interests, and demographics for use in targeting, personalization, and product recommendations. However, making this data available to 3rd party systems like recommendation engines is frequently done on a one-off basis. To save both time and development efforts, we have included support for the open source Backplane Protocol in our LINK cartridge. The Backplane Protocol broadcasts user identity, and profile data to trusted applications on a website, making it easy for retailers to plug and play vendor applications such as polls, reviews, and content personalization tools.

Benefits for retailers

• 30-50% increase in registered users
• Decrease registration drop-off and cart abandonment due to new account creation requirements which drive 86% of shoppers away from your site
• Eliminate the false data provided during sign-up by 88% of shoppers who admit to providing inaccurate data to create a new account
• Drive word of mouth marketing through social sharing which returns an average of 13 referral clicks for each shared activity to a social network

Features for retailers

• Social login from more than 25 identity providers including PayPal Access, Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Twitter, and more
• Customizable, hosted registration screens include social and traditional registration, pre-filled social profile data, CAPTCHA, opt-in, field verification, dirty word filters, password reset, and profile management
• Collect and store rich social profile data in a flexible hosted database for use with targeted communication, personalization, or recommendations based on demographic and interest data
• Map social and traditional identities to a single user record
• Multi-site sign-on enables users to move from within your network of sites without re-authentication
• Analytics provide insights and performance into shopper acquisition and social referrals
• LINK certified for reliable and rapid deployment

Our Digital and Social Media Strategists and commerce experts are also available to share best practices, develop wireframes, and walk retailers through the planning process so that the implementation is easy. Best of all, for retailers who aren’t ready to implement the complete JUMP-based registration system, the LINK cartridge makes it easy to start small by adding social login to an existing registration and login system.

If you are a current Demandware customer or considering the Demandware eCommerce platform, contact us to learn more about the Janrain LINK cartridge and the top retailers already leveraging Janrain for user management and social engagement.

Social Login

Customizable Hosted Registration Screens

Social Sharing

With the Spring 2012 release, Janrain introduced several new remote provisioning and application management features, and core platform capabilities making it easy for its platform partners to offer a rich set of social features and customizations to their customers.

Remote Provisioning and Management

Several new API calls have been added to the Janrain Partner API to offer greater flexibility with remote configuration and management of Janrain Engage application instances from within the partner’s platform. Partners can now enable their customers to configure additional identity providers, reset their API key, add and remove administrators associated with their Engage application as well as request additional social data from their end-users at registration-time, all from within the partner’s platform.

Additional Integration Options

The OAuth2 compliant Backplane 2.0 protocol now facilitates the transfer of sensitive user information between applications through a secure server-side flow. With the release of Backplane 2.0, partner platforms have more than one mechanism of integrating social login offered by Janrain with their platform – the Engage API, the Plugin API and Backplane.

New Core Platform Features

Janrain’s platform partners can now offer their customers the following additional capabilities:

• Expanded Social Sharing: Enable customers’ end-users to share to a select group of friends/contacts, to their social networking walls or via email with the new social sharing widget and APIs.

• Additional Identity Providers: Offer end-users’ the ability to login with Asian providers such as Sina Weibo, Mixi, and RenRen in addition to Germany-based SoundCloud.

• Support for Regulated Industries: For partner platforms offering hosting, content management or tools for regulated industries, federal agencies, state, or local government websites, Janrain’s support for FICAM LoA1-compliant identity providers, makes it possible to offer frictionless registration via social/3rd party login on their websites.
• 3rd Party Analytics Integrations: Janrain’s widgets support JavaScript event hooks to measure registration, login and sharing events from within a platform customer’s analytics systems such as Google Analytics, Adobe SiteCatalyst, CoreMetrics or Webtrends.
• Mobile Configuration and Development: Platform customers who utilize the Janrain dashboard for configuration of identity providers and widget layouts can customize and test the look and feel of social login and sharing UIs for iOS or Android-based mobile web and app experiences.
• Application Framework Support: Platform partners who develop mobile applications using Apache Cordova/PhoneGap, can use the Janrain Engage for iOS and Android PhoneGap plugin.
• Traditional Login Buttons: By simply adding a custom branded login button that represents a site specific id/password to the Janrain Engage sign-in widget, platform customers eliminate the need for username and password boxes on their sign-in interface.

Redesigned Documentation

Lastly, with the goal of making it easier to navigate Janrain’s rich set of capabilities, Janrain launched its new Developer portal, complete with quick-start guides, code examples and comprehensive API documentation.

If you are a current Janrain partner, we that hope you will immediately begin taking advantage of the above capabilities. We look forward to hearing your feedback at products@janrain.com.

To learn more about becoming a Janrain partner, please visit www.janrain.com/partners

What struck me as really exciting that day were just how many items were in the final two buckets – capabilities we were about to release to our customers.

Well, these capabilities are now available, and there should be something for just about everyone in this list:

• Social Commerce Extensions
  Retailers can now easily incorporate social login, social sharing and social profile data collection and storage within their Demandware or Magento-based eCommerce sites using the new Janrain eCommerce Connectors.
• Deeper Analytics
  Customers can accomplish deeper segmentation of users into online buyers and registered visitors by correlating social attributes and demographic info with onsite activity including content viewed, time spent on site and conversions using the new Janrain Analytics Connector for Adobe SiteCatalyst. Retailers can leverage additional intelligence offered by social profile and social graph data to target their users with the right set of products and content.
  
• Improved Email Targeting
  Brands can leverage rich social and traditional user profile data stored in Janrain Capture to improve segmentation, targeting and relevance of email campaigns through the new Janrain Email Connector for ExactTarget.
• Government support
  Janrain now supports FICAM-compliant identities for State and Federal Governments as well as for regulated industries.
• Expanded Identity Provider support
  In this release, Janrain has added Chinese identity providers Sina Weibo and RenRen, Germany-based SoundCloud and US-based Tumblr.

We also announced new partnerships with 500friends, Certona and GraphicMail.  All in all, a tremendous amount of work across our entire company has gone into this release.

(PS – I wasn’t 100% honest up above – my excitement in that meeting was also due to what was in the first two buckets!  We’ve got some really cool stuff coming soon…)