Segmented content feeds

While the news feed will remain the default setting on the Facebook home page, users will now be able to toggle between viewing two additional distinct feeds – one featuring updates from friends, and a second exclusively featuring updates from brands liked by the user. Because consumers still use Facebook primarily to interact with friends, and the average Facebook user has 262 friends as opposed to liking about 80 brand pages, Facebook users may increasingly self-select into the content feed featuring updates from friends as opposed to brands.

How will this impact social media marketers? It could yield a decrease in impressions for posts from liked brand pages. If we assume that impressions within the friends feed will trump impressions within the feed for followed brands due to our natural predisposition to favor content from friends, then brands will need to find new ways to penetrate the news feed and disseminate their content. Social sharing, which empowers online consumers to share comments, articles, purchases, products and other content from websites directly to their social network, is the golden ticket.

Increased emphasis on visual posts

Facebook is tweaking its news feed algorithm to place greater emphasis on posts and status updates that include rich media. We shouldn’t be surprised by this change. After all, our eyes organically gravitate toward images and videos within the news feed, and these types of posts tend to generate the highest click-through rates.

This change dovetails with a recent assertion that Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm provides up to 1,300 percent more weight to shares than likes in terms of placement within the news feed. This is good news for marketers seeking to encourage the use of social sharing on their own websites, due to the fact that content published to Facebook via an effective sharing technology solution dynamically incorporates a thumbnail image from the page, in addition to populating the page’s meta title and description into the shared post.

You’ve probably heard us say it before, but as networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn become so entrenched in our culture, social feeds are evolving into a powerful recommendation engine for new content, ideas and products. In short, our friends are helping us navigate the web. The latest evolution in Facebook’s news feed will reward digital marketers who grasp this paradigm shift and empower consumers to advocate on their behalf.

What do you think of Facebook’s news feed changes? How do you plan to evolve your social sharing and Facebook strategies as a result of the changes? I’d love to hear your take in the comments below.

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!

Here are the steps Paul followed to implement Janrain social sharing:

1. Sign in to the Janrain Engage product dashboard (if you already have an account; if not, simply sign up), scroll down to the “application info” section, and ensure that your website domain and any development sandboxes have been added to the domain whitelist.  This security feature prevents malicious websites from grabbing your site’s code and using your Janrain social login or sharing application on their site:
   
2. On the dashboard home page, click “Social Sharing for Websites” in the Quick Links sidebar:
   
3. Change the share mode to “Share + Direct Share” to enable users to share content with selected friends or contacts – we refer to this experience as “targeted sharing”:
   
4. Click “Email Providers” and check the box to enable email sharing.  If you haven’t already done so, you will need to follow a few simple steps to configure a Google and Yahoo! developer application for email sharing, which takes about five minutes per provider.
   
5. Use the WYSIWYG drag-and drop editor to select the social networks you would like to include within the social sharing widget, and the order in which they appear.  If you haven’t already done so, you will need to follow a few simple steps to configure a developer application for these social networks, which takes about five minutes per provider (does that sound familiar?).
6. Use the controls to toggle between landscape and portrait orientation for the social sharing widget, and also view how it will look on a mobile device:
7. Use the intuitive styling controls within the dashboard editor to change background colors, font colors and sizes, border, button, tab and link colors, widths, radius, opacity and more:
   
   
8. Once you’ve styled the social sharing widget to your liking, save your changes.  For our test scenario, Paul decided to stick with the default look and feel.  Now it’s time to grab the widget JavaScript code.  Note the editable settings within the widget code to customize the title and description of shared content, pre-populate a user-generated message, and tailor the referral URL.  These settings can be edited from within the dashboard or inline within the JavaScript code.  Once you’re ready, copy the widget code and paste it into the <head> within relevant pages of your site:
   
9. We asked Paul to deploy Janrain social sharing on a page featuring this beautiful, majestic photo of Mt. Hood.  Our graphic design team was kind enough to supply the silky share button that appears beneath the photo.  Wrap the <div> tag listed above in the dashboard screenshot around an image, button or call to action in order to initiate the social sharing widget on the page:
   
10. Success!  The social sharing widget is now implemented.  Test it out by clicking the share button to render the widget as a modal overlay on top of the page.  The social sharing widget can also be easily embedded into the page if preferred instead of the lightbox UI treatment.
    

Now, let’s test the social sharing widget to ensure that it functions correctly.  Click to share with Facebook, at which point a permission screen appears in a new browser window asking the user to approve permissions:

After the user approves permissions, he can complete a broadcast share to all of his Facebook friends by sharing this wonderful photo of Mt. Hood to his timeline, or he can choose to share it with selected recipients by browsing a list of friends within the widget.  This targeted sharing experience is also supported for Twitter (via direct messages)), LinkedIn (via inbox messages) and email.

Once the user has selected the recipients, he can edit his shared message within the text box in the widget, and click to share.  Notice that the meta description and photo have been automatically added to the shared message for Facebook (and LinkedIn) within the rich media portion, as designated by the widget code:

When one of the recipients of this shared message accesses her Facebook account, she will notice a message from the user shared directly to her Facebook timeline, which also triggers a notification within Facebook for added visibility:

The user can also share with his email contacts by connecting his Google identity, then browsing a list of his Gmail contacts:

Once a recipient is selected, the user can craft a personal email and send it from within the share widget:

The recipient now receives an email in her inbox with a link to the photo of Mt. Hood.  Because the Janrain social sharing feature uses Gmail and/or Yahoo! as its default mail clients, the email looks as if it was sent directly from the user’s email:

That’s all there is to it!  Using only the setup wizard within the Janrain Engage product dashboard and the quick start guide on our developers site, our VP of Sales was able to get up and running with Janrain social sharing in less than 30 minutes by following these ten simple steps, despite possessing no formal programming experience.  It’s that simple.

The question is, can you beat Paul?  The challenge has been set forth.  Take the test, and let us know how long it takes for you to get up and running with Janrain social sharing.

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.

Built using Facebook’s Open Graph technology, our one-click sharing features help websites increase exposure of their site content within Facebook, while addressing the privacy concerns that Facebook users have expressed over automatic sharing from social readers. Essentially, the feature puts users in direct control of how they share stories and other content with transparent messaging, the option to turn automatic sharing on or off at any time, and a countdown timer for auto shares.

You can see the feature in action at TMZ.com.  Click to read an article, and scroll down to the bottom of the article to interact with the one-click sharing widget.

Here is an overview of what’s new:

Contextual One-Click Sharing

Let users click a button to easily share contextual activities from your site in a single click, such as articles read, videos watched, products liked and more. Define actions within the share button based on the content of your site.

Optional Frictionless or Automatic Sharing

Users can choose to turn on frictionless sharing at any time, which automatically shares content that users interact with to Facebook.  The feature offers a clear, transparent opt-in and allows users to toggle automatic sharing on or off as they desire.

Countdown Timer Respects User Privacy and Transparency

For users who have turned on automatic sharing, a configurable countdown timer alerts users before content is shared to Facebook.  Users can conditionally opt out of sharing the message, or choose to un-share any content that has been published to Facebook.

Easy Implementation

Deployment of one-click sharing is quick and easy – if you’re a Janrain customer, you can be up and running in an hour or less.  Simply log in to your Janrain Engage dashboard or navigate to our product documentation to start using it.

This launch is a big step forward toward solving the privacy and transparency concerns that have hindered the popularity of social readers and frictionless sharing technology.  We’re very excited to bring these new features to you, and as always, we welcome your feedback.

Here’s what the media has to say:

• Janrain Rolls Out One-Click Sharing to Facebook as Alternative to Social Reader Apps
• Facebook Hopes Third-Party Social Reader Will Help Users Avoid Sharing Too Much
• Janrain Releases One-Click Tool for Social Sharers
• Janrain Unveils Frictionless Sharing Tool
• Janrain Offers New Facebook One-Click Sharing Tool
• Frictionless Sharing May Give Brands More Ad Options

Social Login Trends

For the first time ever since Janrain began analyzing such data nearly three years ago, Facebook’s popularity as a chosen provider for social login eclipsed 50%.  That said, a nearly equivalent percentage of people would rather use a different social identity, such as Google, Twitter or Yahoo!, to log in to sites across the web. When it comes to social login, people want choice. 

Facebook’s share of social logins has increased steadily during the past three years.  Facebook’s 6% growth compared to Q2 2012 primarily came at the expense of Google, whose share dropped from 30% in Q2 to 25% in Q3.  And while Twitter’s share has not flourished at quite the rate we expected three years ago, Twitter checked in at 10% share of social logins in Q3, which is an all-time quarterly high for the network.

It is also interesting to note that preferences differ depending on location. For example, Mixi is the most common social login of choice in Japan, while Hyves contends with Facebook as the most popular social network in the Netherlands.

Social Login Trends by Vertical

As with prior analyses, we have taken a sampling of sites in four industry verticals to measure trends in consumer login preferences.  While the overall story arc is similar, there are disparate preferences within each vertical that merit attention.

Facebook leads across industry verticals including retail, consumer brands, media, entertainment and gaming, and music-related sites.  Its popularity is especially pronounced on music sites and entertainment and gaming sites.  On retail websites, we are witnessing an increasing preference to use PayPal to create an account and sign-in during the checkout process.  PayPal’s share increased to nearly 10% on retail sites in Q3, up from 2% in Q4 2011.

The second most favored portable identity provider across each of these verticals is Google, but its popularity is most evident on retail sites, which could perhaps be a reflection of the trust that people place in Google as a secure provider of their online identity.

It is worth noting that, for the first time in the past five quarters, Yahoo!’s once declining share of social logins leveled out across the major verticals, and it actually picked up 3% share on music sites.  Windows Live (Hotmail/MSN), historically a strong performer on entertainment and gaming sites, has experienced a notable decline in share of social logins during the past year.

Mobile Social Login Trends

On mobile applications, Facebook saw a big jump in popularity as a social login provider in Q3, while Google experienced a small decline.  Not surprisingly, these trends closely mimic desktop web preferences.

Social Share Trends

Social sharing is not just for sharing articles anymore. People are now able to share comments, purchases, reviews and other content from the web to their social networks. As a result, social networks have become a recommendation engine for web users. As we all suspect, Facebook and Twitter are far and away the most popular networks for sharing, but LinkedIn and Yahoo! maintain preference on niche sites that are catered to their audience (B2B sites for LinkedIn, as an example). During the past year, Twitter has rivaled Facebook, with nearly 40% of people preferring to share content they interact with across the web to their Twitter stream.  It’s also worth noting that, since Janrain introduced the capability to support sharing via email to Gmail contacts in June 2012, we are already seeing adoption within that channel.  2% of all sharing activity on the Janrain platform occurred via Gmail in Q3, a trend that we expect will only increase over time given the continued popularity of email as a preferred channel for sharing.

What do these findings mean for your business?

As you optimize your on-site social media strategy, it is important to keep your audience in mind when choosing providers to offer for social login and social sharing. While you might assume one provider will be more popular than others, we’ve found that people prefer choice. If you haven’t offered social login and sharing yet, here are some reasons to do so:

For Digital 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 enables your users broadcast content and activities from your site to their social networks, increasing brand advocacy and creating an effective source of 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.

For marketers, generating quality site traffic is crucial.  Digital publishers determine CPM rates and revenue models based on quantity and quality of site traffic, and retailers rely on generating high-converting traffic to product pages to drive purchase behavior.

Social networks are a veritable gold mine to generate referral traffic, but many brands have struggled to achieve visibility within the news feed.  Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm can be a tough nut to crack – we know how you feel.  It is designed to promote relevance by favoring news feed posts from friends with whom you frequently interact. While your brand page may have plenty of fans and likes, your Facebook posts could get lost in the news feed unless consumers frequently interact with your messages or visit your page.

Social sharing helps circumvent this challenge by tapping peer recommendations to promote your site content in social feeds and drive quality traffic to your site.  It lets consumers promote content or activities from your site (such as comments, purchases and reviews) to their friends on multiple social networks, which fosters brand advocacy and drives qualified referral traffic to your site.  Some Janrain customers generate as many as 25 qualified referral visitors to their site every time content or activities (such as comments, purchases or reviews) are shared to a social network.

Social sharing harnesses the high EdgeRank affinity scores that your site visitors already have with their friends, and uses those friends as a channel to promote your content through word-of-mouth marketing.  Social posts that originate from consumers are more likely to filter to the top of the news feed than those from your brand.

Planning for Success:

Enable Sharing to Multiple Networks

People carry multiple personas online, and their sharing tendencies are a reflection of that.  We use Facebook to share personal updates for friends, Twitter to share content about our interests to a broad audience, and LinkedIn to share professional content.  Your social sharing tool should allow people to share content with multiple networks, all from a single interface.  This broadcasts your content across multiple social streams and casts a wider net for your brand.

Increase Utilization with Contextual Sharing

Many sharing buttons are presented as a game of hide-and-seek on a page.  Users need to seek out a button hidden on a page and click it to initiate a share.  There is a better way.  Prompt users to share content or site activities contextually – immediately after posting a comment, purchasing a product, writing a review, or achieving a game milestone.

Improve Relevance with Targeted Sharing and Refer-a-Friend Programs

While social sharing puts a megaphone in a consumer’s hands, sometimes a whispered conversation is a more appropriate way to share.  The most effective sharing tools let users browse a list of their social network friends or email address books and choose recipients for a shared message.  Users want to share relevant content and site activities with selected friends via direct message (Twitter), to their friends’ wall (Facebook) or privately via email, and targeted sharing makes it possible to create highly effective refer-a-friend programs.

Access Profile Data When Users Share

Most sharing tools only provide an anonymous view of who is sharing content from a site.  As digital marketers become more sophisticated about understanding their online consumer for targeting and personalization, your sharing tool should allow you to collect detailed and accurate profile information about the sharer.  Prompting users to connect their Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn identity enables users to opt to share (no pun intended) access to their profile data when sharing content from your site.

Don’t Redirect Users Away From Your Site to Share

Lots of free sharing tools redirect a user away to a social network to complete a share action.  Why would you want to send away your hard-earned traffic?  Browser redirects create a jarring experience for your users and increase the likelihood that they will bounce from your site altogether.  An effective social sharing tool contains the entire sharing experience on your site.

Case Study:

• Roadrunner Records generates an average of 25 qualified referral visits to its site each time a music fan shares a video, news article or other content to their social networks.

To learn more about social sharing as well as other social technologies, check out our Definitive Guide to User Management.

In those cases, incentivizing your website visitors to share with others by offering refer-a-friend participation bonuses can concentrate many users into sharing all at once. This creates momentum in social channels that can drive awareness within those channels, and create a virtuous circle of interactions. Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm, for example, uses interactions on posts to determine what to show in a user’s feed. If more people interact with a post, it is more likely to be shown higher in the feed.

So, when considering how and when to use a refer-a-friend program, keep these best practices in mind. 

Create value for both the user and their friend

Giving incentives to users for their advocacy is a no-brainer. People love to get something for their ability to influence. But, their friends and other relationships will not participate solely because someone they like asked them. Those second-degree connections need something more compelling than social pressure to engage with your brand on your timeline.

Daily deals sites employ this model effectively. LivingSocial gives a credit to the user if their social connections respond to a deal. That’s great motivation to share in the first place. What makes the program successful is that the second-degree connection gets an outstanding bargain – 50% off a massage, with a fast expiration, prompts those new customers to convert quickly.

Make the incentive relevant

Discounting your product is the first thing that comes to mind when considering potential rewards for refer-a-friend program participants. But, discounting hurts the long-term value of the customer, who comes to expect discounts as a normal part of the buying experience.

There are times when discounting makes sense, of course, for refer-a-friend programs. When the purchase is for a group activity, the discount provides a way for more friends to participate. This aligns your first customer – the referrer – with all of their referrals. The goal is for everyone to have a shared experience, and the discount becomes a mechanism to catalyze group action. Some examples include golf tee times, theater tickets, or books for a reading club.

If your product is not group-oriented, consider other types of incentives, such as increased reputation or status within your community context. These separate the quest for participation from the transactional element, and help customers feel like they are not trading on their personal relationships.

Decide what comes next, first

Combining both a discount and a strong word of mouth recommendation is a marketing one-two punch. These are two of the most powerful, and most widely exploited, marketing tactics. But, they are only good for a short-term boost unless you have a plan in place to turn the new customer into a repeat customer quickly, to cement the emerging relationship with your business.

A refer-a-friend program is not a marketing strategy, it is a new customer acquisition tactic. In order to use it effectively, you must plan out the next several customer touchpoints. This could include inserts into the delivery packaging to encourage repeat visits around a specific product category; a multi-touch email campaign to continue building mindshare; or a personal follow up from the referrer to thank the new customer.

Regardless of the specific next steps, you must determine them as part of the launch of a refer-a-friend effort. Once a campaign begins, you will be busy with the tactical elements of running the campaign, and won’t have time to build out the ongoing strategy. Advance planning is the only way to capitalize on success.

Janrain’s Strategic Services team offers Refer-a-Friend programs with these best practices in mind, and with easy tracking and reporting to keep you focused on program success.

Have you set up a similar program? What type of incentives did you use to increase shares?

As we look back on the past two weeks of Olympic events, one thing is certain: people everywhere craved information. We passionately wanted to know how our country stacked up in the medal count, whether our favorite athlete won her event, and how our team was performing.

Thankfully the Internet was flowing with updates, scores and articles on the events that kept us up to date…or motivated us to track down a live stream.

Many of our Janrain customers were part of this information flow, so we wanted to take a few minutes to recognize and congratulate them for helping to make the Games special for us all:

FoxSports

During the games laptops, tablets and smartphones were getting up-to-the-minute details from FoxSports.com.

When sports fans create an account on their site, they can comment on stories about their favorite athletes and share articles with their friends in social networks or via email.

Since they launched their 2012 Olympic campaign across their site, FoxSports experienced an increase in new accounts created with social login, posts to social networks and referral traffic back to their site.

Visit London

When millions of visitors come to your city over a two-week period of time, there’s a lot of hotel, transit and event information put in high demand. And VisitLondon provided the desired details, and then some.

Through their site, VisitLondon helped visitors make the most of the facilities, venues and events that London has to offer, delivering an experience that will keep tourists coming back time and again.

The National Post

When Canadians visited the National Post’s website, they not only got all the updates, but also had the ability to create public profiles that fostered a sense of community with others who shared their interests. As they commented on articles, they were able to interact with others participating in conversations online.

Janrain is proud to have played a role in supporting the 2012 London Olympic coverage through our great customers mentioned above, and many others such as Bicycling.com, The Sun, Newsweek and Runners World with a streamlined way for fans to access and interact with content and the event coverage.

And the countdown to Sochi has begun!