Signing up for a new website is a little bit like dating. As a brand, you need to get enough information from the website visitor to make their experience pleasant and useful. If you ask for too much information, however, they click away, never to return.

Social login is a great way to make it easy for visitors to give you their information. You just need to make sure they know what information they are giving you, and what’s in it for them to give you that info.

You can start your relationship off right by following just a few easy, clear steps.

Be Clear About What You Want

Facebook has made it very easy to clearly delineate what permissions you are asking for, and why you want these permissions. In addition to lining up each permission in a bullet point, Facebook gives you the ability to show a custom message for the registrant.

This little-used feature of Facebook registration apps can make a difference in your relationship with your customers. Learn how to customize these fields here.

Don’t Ask for Too Much Too Fast

Facebook supports the notion of progressive profiling. This means you can ask for a limited set of data up front to get the relationship started at registration and then later, when the relationship is ready, you can ask for additional information.

The key is to progressively ask for only the profile data you need, when it’s relevant to the action they want to take. This means you can ask for permission to share on their behalf when the user clicks a Share button, ask for movie interests when they join a ticket sweepstakes, or their friends’ info when its time to invite them to a party. Check out our detailed post on how to tackle progressive profiling, Don’t Be A Data Creeper.

What’s In It for Me?

Just because you know why people should register on your website, that doesn’t mean site visitors know. Lacking a clear call to action with associated benefits is one of the most common mistakes with online registration. Just like in dating, if you want something, you need to be clear about it.

Yamaha does a great job of this on their site, and offer both social login and registration with a Yamaha account identity to get the relationship started.

When the sign-in button is clicked, Yamaha clearly outlines the benefits of an information exchange.

As the web hurtles ever closer to dynamic, relationship based interactions, it is important for brands to become more engaging. Being clear about registration expectations and data exchanges is a small step in that direction.

What are some great permission screens that you have seen?

Traditionally, brands have relied on three sources of data to inform customer intelligence – explicit data collected at registration, clickstream data, and transaction history.  Unfortunately, clickstream data can be unreliable due to the fragility of browser cookies, and the friction associated with traditional registration methods means that brands often struggle to convince consumers to share personal information at sign-up.  As evidence of this friction, 88% of consumers report having provided false personal information when asked to complete a traditional registration form.

So, where does this paradigm leave marketers who are seeking to develop deeper relationships with customers?  Brands can gain a more sophisticated understanding of their users by leveraging the profile data that people already maintain on their social networks.  Social profile data includes not only basic demographics such as name, age, gender, geography and email address, but also deeper psychographic information such as interests, marital status, political views, hobbies and friends.

Because the profile information that users maintain on their social networks is transparent to friends, family and coworkers, it is more likely to be current and accurate than personal data that users may supply during a traditional registration process.  And unlike the clickstream, social networks maintain declared data on users (in other words, information that consumers have provided about themselves), which possesses a much higher degree of integrity and stability.

Social login makes it possible to gain permission-based access to profile information from a user’s social network.  When a user chooses to register or login on a site with a social identity, a permission screen asks her to approve sharing her profile data.  Depending on the identity provider, brands can choose which data fields and permissions they wish to request, and the person can choose which specific profile fields she is comfortable sharing.

Once brands have access to social profile data, the next step is to store and utilize it in a flexible database that can pair legacy data, site activity data and offline or third-party data with a social profile to build a true 360-degree view of a user and inform data-driven marketing programs.

The vast amounts of demographic and interests data contained in a social profile provide the foundation for customer intelligence and effective targeting and segmentation. A platform to collect social profile data via social login and store and leverage it in a flexible database makes it all possible.

Planning for Success:

Unify Data Silos with a Centralized Repository

It’s hard to fight a battle with one hand tied behind your back.  Similarly, marketers struggle to make smart decisions when they lack a unified view of a customer because online user data is stored in multiple silos such as email, CMS or CRM.  Social profile data is most useful when it is combined with existing information you already collect about your users, such as site activity data, transaction data, or offline data.  An effective database solution should marry user data across each of these disparate sources to provide a single, global view of a user.

Define a Flexible but Structured Schema to Store User Data

User data needs structure in order to be actionable.  For example, it can be a colossal challenge to query age ranges for users in a database when dates of birth are stored in inconsistent formats.  Your database solution needs to normalize profile data that gets placed into the system, and enforce some structure to ensure that the data can be easily queried and applied for practical use in marketing campaigns.  A flexible schema ensures that profile information stored in your user database works with you, not against you.

Feed Profile Data into Third-Party Applications

Simply storing social profile data isn’t enough.  The data needs to be easily accessible for applied use, which is why your user profile management system needs to be pre-built to support integrations with component technologies commonly used by brands to connect with consumers.  For example, your database solution should integrate seamlessly with email marketing solutions, eCommerce and merchandising platforms, personalization and recommendation engines, CMS, and targeting systems.

Improve Targeting and Segmentation Using Social Profile Data

Your user profile database should make it easy to create target segments of users and feed user data into your email marketing system to send tailored offers.  Suppose, for example, that you wish to promote an upcoming concert in London by sending a tailored email offer to 18-24 year old females who are located in the United Kingdom and fans of Taylor Swift.  Or, perhaps you would like to target male users with a declared interest in camping, in order to personalize product recommendations on your eCommerce site.  Social profile data improves the relevance of marketing initiatives.

Refresh User Profile Data to Keep Your Database Up-to-Date

If one of your users changes her email address or location, how likely is she to let you know about it?  Data quality is a problem for marketers, many who are working with databases that have been infested with John Doe and cartoon characters.  Since our social network profiles are transparent to friends, we are all more likely to keep the information stored accurate and up-to-date.  Each time a user signs in to your site using a social identity, you can collect a fresh copy of profile data from their social network to help maintain a clean and current database.

Incorporate Progressive Profiling to Build a Richer Understanding of your Audience

Hopefully you wouldn’t put someone through the wringer on your first date by asking 50 questions … Right?  Dating advice is surprisingly relevant when it comes to learning more about your online users.  Don’t ask your users to share their life story on your first date.  Build progressive profiling workflows that invite users to share more information about themselves at the right moments.  The points at which people post comments, share content, purchase products or write reviews all present an opportunity to inquire and build a deeper, more comprehensive customer profile.

Case Study:

Sears uses social login to collect a rich set of profile data from shoppers, including interests and social graphs (friends).  Using this data in parallel with its personalization engine, Sears offers relevant product recommendations for shoppers based on the interests in their social profile, as well as gift ideas for a shopper’s friends based on the birthdates and interests of those friends in her social graph.

To learn more about collecting and storing social profile data as well as other social technologies, check out our Definitive Guide to User Management.

Building a relationship between friends is the same as building a community online. Social profile data is a valuable asset to companies wanting to build a stronger relationship with their constituency. While this data will not completely sidestep the audience courting period, it does give companies a better overview of who is visiting their sites, how they like to participate, and where to drive more traffic for better engagement opportunities. Companies just starting to delve into collecting social data should keep a few questions in mind:

1. What information do I want from my audience?
2. Why do I want this data?
3. How will I use it once I have it?
4. When is it appropriate to ask for certain permissions?

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.