That’s why we’re excited today to launch a new integration with Google+ Sign-In.  With this product launch, Janrain customers can streamline the registration process for Google users, and gather additional profile data to better engage with and improve their experience.

Here is a run down of what’s new:

Simple, secure login

Google+ Sign-In helps improve registration conversion rates by offering a convenient and secure way for visitors to sign up on your site. We’ve made it really easy for websites to get up and running with Google+ Sign-In via Janrain Engage Social Login.

Gather Additional Public Demographic Information

In addition to a verified email address and a first and last name, users can now choose to share additional information from their Google+ profile when they log in to your site. Collect demographic and psychographic data such as gender, location, birthdate, interests, work history, education history, relationship status, profile photo and any other information made public within the user’s Google+ profile.

Access Google+ Social Graphs

Google+ Sign-In enables users to provide access to their Google+ circles of friends. Utilize this social graph information to let users discover what their friends are up to on your site, interact with friends, and surface content recommended by friends.

Drive Adoption of Android Apps

Let your website users instantly download and install your mobile or tablet app to their Android device.  Your users with Android devices don’t need to visit the Google Play store to install your Android app – instead, you can easily prompt them to do so in a single click when they sign in to your site with their Google identity.

You are invited to check out Google+ Sign-in on NPR, HSN and several Universal Music Group artist websites, including LadyGaga.com, Eminem.com and JustinBieberMusic.com.

The team at Janrain has been hard at work, and we are excited to offer the benefits of Google+ Sign-In to you. As always, your feedback is welcome.

At the same time, social media is continuing to impact retail in a variety of ways. Sprout Social says that 74% of people rely on social networks to guide a purchase decision – and I’m not surprised. With word-of-mouth marketing becoming an increasingly important consideration for retailers, ecommerce and marketing teams must work together in order to ensure the strategies and programs are in place to impact social references.

The rise of online sales and the growing importance of social media collide to create a significant opportunity for retailers over the upcoming years. Many innovative retailers have discovered that social commerce is what happens on their own website when they integrate social elements like social login, social sharing or the ability to shop with friends into their existing online shopping experience. The future of social commerce lies within leveraging the popularity of social networks to grow sales at the retailer’s own site.

Take a look at three examples of retailers doing this well and what they’re doing.

Samsung Highlights Strong Product Reviews

Shoppers most often turn to consumer reviews when it comes to seeking information on product performance and quality before they buy, so presenting authentic user-generated reviews on product pages provides an opportunity to increase purchase conversion. People want to know what other people’s real-life experience with the product has been like, and whether they’d recommend it to a friend.

A recent study by Weber Shandwick reveals that the most influential reviews include key elements: they seem fair and reasonable, are well written, and contain product specifications and technical data. When you have all these elements of good reviews, a best practice is to highlight the very best like Samsung does.

UGG Expedites the Checkout Process

UGG is doing a great job of focusing on the shopper’s checkout experience and removing obstacles that could possibly interfere with a purchase. They know that 86% of consumers admit to leaving a website when faced with a registration form so they also offer social login as a means to create an account while expediting the checkout process. Shoppers can choose to use their Facebook, Google or Yahoo! profile to pre populate some of the required fields and bypass those hurdles.

And if shoppers leave the site before purchasing those boots, UGG sends them an email reminder. With social login, UGG collects a verified email address to use in remarketing efforts. One click from this email and the shopper is back at their cart, ready to checkout with those boots.

Macy’s Taps Into the Social Graph

Shopping is a social experience, and one of the main reasons is that we like to ask our friend’s for their opinion on our purchases. Macy’s gives online shoppers tools to get that type of feedback on products from their friends using a polling widget on their site.

From any product page, shoppers can create a poll by adding a few products that they’re interested in to the tool. Once the poll is created, the shopper shares it directly to their Timeline for friends to see, along with a message asking for their opinion by voting for a product.

48 hours later, the shopper has input from her friends on products that she’s interested in, and Macy’s has earned impressions from her friends by tapping into the shopper’s social graph.

When you look at commerce leaders today and those making the headlines, many are being recognized for demonstrating innovation in these key areas and responding to shopper’s expectations for a more social experience when shopping online. These retailers are finding that the technology exists to not just offer a consistent brand experience online but to truly take the online shopping experience to a whole new level.

What innovative examples have you seen where retailers integrate social elements into their online shopping experience?

Roadrunner Records’ Director of Web Properties, Jeremy Rosen immediately saw an opportunity with Janrain’s social login and social sharing tools to offer an easy way for website visitors to quickly set up an account and share content they like with their social networks to foster discovery and conversations.

“Once you’re logged in, it’s really easy to share. Just one click to share to Facebook or Twitter, or with email contacts.” –  Jeremey Rosen

Turn up the volume on engagement

By enabling visitors to easily share content to their Facebook Timeline, Roadrunner Records amplifies awareness of their artists across the open graph. Each story published to Facebook by music fans reaches an average of 105 friends though the Newsfeed and receives 50 pieces of feedback (a Like or Comment). And because people trust endorsements from people they know, 43% of audience-shared stories are clicked on. On average, each post shared to a social network sees 26 clicks back to the website.

Roadrunner Records artists are reaping the benefits of online engagement and awareness as a result of integrating Janrain social login and social sharing technology on their site.

Read Full Case Study

See it in action!

Huffington Post has received accolades (and a landslide of traffic) for their implementation of technology that allows readers to show their friends what they are reading. Let’s take a look at what they are doing, and talk about why you might want to do something similar.

Huffington Post Leverages Facebook Connections

If you’ve visited Huffington Post, you’ve seen these boxes, where, if you are logged into Facebook, you can see which articles your friends have read. These same activity elements can be shared out to social networks like Facebook. This is very useful for reading recommendations. These activities are important – they drive a lot of traffic back to the site.

In 2009, Huffington Post said that instituting these social news features increased Facebook referral traffic by 48%. Comments also increased by a huge number. If you’ve ever been on the site, you know that popular articles can accrue thousands of comments.

Yet, it’s three years later and there are still so few companies doing this. Why?

Facebook Social News App Limitations

Facebook has made it easy to implement recommendations and show friend connections on a site with their Open Graph widgets. However, if you simply use Facebook Social Reader or the Recommendations Box widgets, you cede control of your page content.

With the Facebook Recommendations box, Facebook decides which pieces of content to show your site visitor. Facebook also decides which friends show up in their feed. In addition, Facebook collects all of the data about your user – what they do on the page, which pages they comment on, and which items they share – all the while this high value social profile data could be used to enhance your marketing programs.

Some companies don’t like the idea of giving up this control.

Social News with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter

Why not build a social news application that includes not only Facebook, but LinkedIn and Twitter as well?

Broadening your social networks, also means broadening the social profile data you could request permission to access, collect and use. Some social experts are pointing out that Twitter may in fact have better data about its users than Facebook does. In addition, LinkedIn recently made major changes to their login API to include verified email, job titles, and other important data which is attractive for B2B sites.

By building an open social reader application, you can give someone who prefers Twitter or LinkedIn the same social reading activity that we have been describing. This works especially well for B2B sites that may want to keep their branding and community focus on business and away from the casual nature of Facebook.

(Janrain has built something similar with one-click sharing and reading application on Facebook’s Open Graph, with plans to add more social profiles in the near future.)

What’s more, by taking this open web approach to building on-page engagement tools, you will be more prepared when up and coming networks release their APIs. Google Plus and Pinterest have intimated that their APIs will be available soon. If you have an open platform as I describe here, you can simply fold in these new API when they come along.

Activity Streams

One natural extension of the open integration approach is to start surfacing more of a visitor’s activity to their friends on-site. Huffington Post has done a good job of this as well.

In addition to the sidebar box mentioned above, a person can also navigate to her own profile and see the history of what her friends have read, opening up even more relevant content. You can also see which Huffington Post users she has followed recently, as well as her entire network of friends on HuffingtonPost.com.

By giving each site visitor a public facing profile, you create more content for search engines to index, and you also create another engagement point for friends of your readers or customers.

By building this activity feed and incorporating multiple social identities you can start to build a 360 degree view of who your web visitors are by requesting permission to progressively access more social profile data as they engage more deeply with you and your content. You also make your website a central hub for discussion and activity around your brand (instead of allowing the entire discussion to happen off-site). You can see that this level of on-page integration is the natural progression of social as it becomes more and more ingrained into our lives.

This activity can apply to many businesses besides media. A B2B company can show a stream of white papers downloaded. An education company can show a stream of courses taken and tests passed. A retailer could show a stream of things that their friends have purchased. The list goes on and on.

Of course, the next step toward even better personalization is using the social profile data gathered to create personalized ads, email marketing, and user-specific offers. The technology to do all of these things exists right now.

Janrain works with a number of partners to create personalization activities like I’ve outlined here. We’ve positioned ourselves as the central identity hub powering the necessary user authentication to each of these services, and have had discussions about these ideas with a number of clients.

Have you tried to build anything like this where you are? We would love to hear about it in the comments, or contact us directly.

In short, it seems that users like to keep their unique identities separate on different social networks. Of course, the networks would prefer that we only use one identity (theirs!) for everything, but people like to present different facets of themselves to different social circles.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you use different social networks for, and how many online identities you currently maintain. Thanks for sharing!

In my previous post, we discussed a number of ways that website owners can drive additional engagement on your site. Engagement continues to be an important metric because it is a leading indicator for a number of harder and more important bottom line goals; increasing engagement is the first step to improving time on site, conversion rate, and repeat visitors.There are a number of additional ways that community managers and marketers can drive additional engagement and activity. So much so, that we should discuss some additional ideas for creating an engaged community. The tools and platforms that empower these interactions are varied, but their goal is the same: to make your site stickier and more interesting for your users.

Ratings and Reviews

Consumers trust each othermore than your team’s marketing speak. So, give users the chance to have their voice heard. Review platforms allow specific products to be discussed by users who may be in the market, or have used the product before.One concern with ratings is that they are frequently abused with paid or incentivized reviews coming from all sides – competitors, marketers, and affiliates. In order to maintain the quality of your reviews assets, you should require a real identity to be linked to the user’s account. Even better: have users use their real names, and put a face and reputation to a critical review.Sears works to build community engagement on it’s e-commerce site through offering ratings and reviews on all products.

Loyalty and Rewards

You can effectively drive user behavior through rewards and points systems by incentivizing behavior you want to see more of from users. The concept is simple, but powerful. By creating an immediate feedback loop, you reinforce positive actions for the user in a way that triggers our natural reward response mechanism.

Within his framework for the evolution of the social integrated website, Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group discusses how brands can establish social context and why it is important. We know that friends have always been a trusted recommendation engine for new products, ideas and content. By incorporating social context into the user experience, brands can dramatically improve engagement metrics such as time on site, page views and brand advocacy, while also increasing the likelihood of purchase and conversion.

Here are just a few examples of how social has diffused across the web to brand sites from networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Social Search

In February, Google announced an overhaul to its search tool that blends activities from friends on Twitter, Flickr and other networks into its search results. Imagine that you are planning your next vacation getaway to Maui. A search for hotels on the island reveals numerous options, but a close friend who just returned from her own jaunt to Maui has recommended one result via a share on Twitter.

This is the power of social search. It contextualizes what can often be an overwhelming amount of information in search results, based on recommendations from friends.

But Google is not alone with this initiative – Microsoft also has grasped the importance of integrating social experiences into its offerings. Bing’s new “Let your friends help you decide” television ad campaign is all about enabling smarter decisions based on the interests and activities of your friends.

Social Shopping

We’ve recently discussed a number of ways to apply social media to facilitate commerce on your retail site. The mandate for social media integration is clear, because regardless of how much glossy marketing copy you write to describe your products, consumers will always be more influenced by their friends and networks.

So, how can retailers integrate friends and social graphs into the shopping experience to influence purchase behavior? In the example below, Etsy queries a member’s Facebook social graph to recommend gift ideas based on his friend’s interests:

Similarly, Sears’ social shopping features allow customers to bring their list of friends from Facebook to the site. Sears then recommends gift ideas based on the birthdate and interests of those friends:

This is a powerful application of social commerce – one that helps innovative retailers like Sears and Etsy differentiate their shopping experience from competitors and leverage peer relationships to grow sales.

Social Content

Twitter’s value to consumers is due to the relevance of the tweet stream – we rely on our friends and contacts to curate interesting and relevant content to us, in real-time. Media and entertainment sites can replicate this experience by incorporating social content. For example, The Huffington Post curates relevant site content based upon the articles that a user’s friends read or comment on, and Yelp streams business reviews, profile updates and other user-generated content to members from their friends on Facebook:

Matchmove Games, a popular gaming site in Southeast Asia, has also integrated social context directly into its core product. Members can invite their friends from Facebook or Yahoo to join the site with the click of a button, and gaming activities from these friends are then streamed to members on the Matchmove home page.

Inviting friends from Facebook to join the site:

Streaming on-site activities from friends on Facebook:

These use cases are compelling, but how do you make social context a reality for your site? The building block is social login. When users rely on their existing account from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google or LinkedIn to sign-in to your site and approve sharing their social profile data to speed up the registration process, you have the tools needed to personalize and socialize their experience with your brand.

While privacy may be a concern for some consumers, research revealed a couple years ago from Plaxo shows that over 90% of users will allow sites access to their profile data during the social login process. Permission marketing is the high road for brands as they strive for deeper relationships with consumers, and social login reduces the friction to establishing consent.

The Facebook news feed and Twitter stream have revolutionized the way we interact with peers and brands on the web. Now, with the help of tools that leverage a user’s friends and social graphs, brands can also bring these types of social experiences to their own websites.

This post is part of our social media best practices series, which looks at how to leverage Janrain’s solutions to drive your marketing metrics. See our previous Social Media Best Practices Series here.

Fundamentally, people are attracted to social technologies because they like sharing their lives and experiences with friends. In fact, the ability to share is one reason that Jeremiah Owyang has said that email was the first social network. Before Friendster or Tribes, people emailed cute cat videos to each other.

That desire to connect and share with others is the driving user need for Janrain’s Invite Friends functionality. Invite Friends is different than Social Sharing. Where a social share event is a broadcast message to all social connections, Invite Friends allows the user to send a targeted message to selected friends. It’s the difference between a “come one, come all” poster to the Friday night party, and a party invitation delivered through the mail. More targeted, more personal.

This functionality can be used for a number of purposes, like sharing a deal or offer, telling friends about an achievement, targeting a sensitive message to the best connections in the user’s network, or asking a friend to join the user in a new social experience.

Janrain offers Invite Friends functionality for Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, and Windows Live (Hotmail). The end result in social networks is a network message (e.g. a Facebook Message or Twitter Direct Message) from the user to their friend; for Google, Yahoo and Windows, the end result is an email from the user to their contact’s email.

The Invite Friends functionality is very easy to implement. It’s based on Janrain’s Contacts API. In order to implement this functionality, you must first ensure that you have asked for the correct permissions from the user. In Facebook, the user has to authorize your site to access their contacts. In email providers, the user authorizes access to their email address book.

The contact list that is returned from Janrain is normalized and available in XML or JSON. If the user has connected multiple identities, contacts from multiple networks can be displayed. Now, you can render those contacts in the way that makes the most sense for your users.

There are a two common options for rendering contact lists.

You can queue them up to be auto-populated from a keystroke trigger, like Gmail:

Or you can import photos and allow users to check which contacts they want to communicate with:

Make sure to allow the user to select all or none of their contacts easily, in addition to toggling a selection for an individual contact easily. Also note that Janrain won’t return any information from a Facebook user’s friend that the friend has not authorized for the user to access.

Another way to leverage your user’s social graph is through a Refer a Friend experience. This is a highly targeted way to maintain the exclusivity of an experience, by limiting access to social referrals. You can enhance the velvet rope feeling by limiting the number of friends that can be referred.

Inviting friends with a targeted message is important functionality to consider for higher value, or more sensitive experiences that don’t make sense for users to broadcast to their entire network. Not surprisingly, they are also more effective marketing messages than anything you could send directly from the brand. Open rates on messages and emails from known contacts are 43% higher than from email marketers, and transaction rates are 2.5 times higher.

Janrain has detailed documentation on using the Contacts API to start this process, and please contact us if you have any questions on how to build your own Invite Friends experience.

Social Sharing

Incorporate Friends and Social Graphs

• Filter product listings or reviews to prominently display content that friends have recommended.  In other words, provide a window into purchases, product reviews and activities from friends.
• Invite Facebook friends directly to check out a particular product or visit the site.
• Recommend gift ideas for Facebook friends based on their birthday or interests.  See the image below for an example.

Social Ads

But what about the users?

There are a number of ways to add value for your website customers by allowing them to link multiple identities on your website. For example, many users want to share content across multiple networks. Also, some users prefer to authenticate with specific identities for certain tasks. For example, they might prefer Twitter for sharing links, and Google for completing e-commerce transactions.

South by Southwest developed a great example of how to use the Account Mapping functionality from Janrain Engage to improve customer experience both online and offline.

The user-interactive conference has had a private social network called SXSocial for several years. In the past, you could manually tag or follow other conference attendees, and see what sessions they had marked on their own agendas.

At the 2011 event, SXSW attendees took it to another level and enabled attendees to link their social network accounts to their SXSocial profile – even an existing profile from previous years. On initial login to the community site, SXSocial members were prompted to link one or more accounts, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Once they linked an account, the SXSocial site reviewed their social graph, and notified you of any of your connections who were planning to attend the conference. With more than 20,000 attendees, a number of people discovered that colleagues they knew would also be attending. Then, they could direct message and coordinate schedules to meet up offline.

As conference organizers look for ways to extend and amplify the conference experience, Account Mapping provides a powerful way to integrate existing social graphs quickly and easily.