On the heels of my recent SXSW panel moderated by Jeremiah Owyang with Chris Saad at Echo, we wanted to continue the dialog in a deeper way around the vision for a more real time, connected future.

This white paper reviews the evolution of social media experiences, and builds a model of how these experiences will continue to evolve as the tools for social media experiences become better understood and more widely available.

We also discuss how the role of social is shifting to become more integrated into the overall marketing strategy, accelerating growth of all marketing initiatives.

What do you think the future of social will be? Let me know in the comments.

Now RTM isn’t new, we’ve been talking about it since the 90s, though as digital and social marketing has evolved so has its meaning. More than a decade ago it referred simply to strategies and tools for targeting consumers via CRM with contextual offers. I would argue that then the term “Real Time” was a bit of a misnomer. Success was limited by the accuracy of the data acquired or provided by the consumer and there was little opportunity to keep that data fresh over time or interact.

Today, when we talk about Real Time Marketing we’re really talking about using digital and social media to engage in conversations with customers and brand advocates in the moment. It’s not easy to do well and the web is filled with examples of brands tripping over each other and their customers’ sensibilities. However, there are plenty of standouts including the dated standard bearing Old Spice Campaign with Isaiah Mustafa as well as more recent efforts with Oreo and the Super Bowl, and my personal favorite Chicago Cabbie (@chicagocabbie). Boy do I wish he had been in Austin.

As brands strive for authentic conversation, there is no more prevalent source than direct communication via social channels (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc). The best part being that engaged consumers are delivering their attention to brands rather than having them fight over it. The opportunities for serendipitous consumer engagement are limitless. For example: I mentioned that I was unable to get a cab using Uber while I was in Austin. The app simply told me time and again that no cabs were available. This was particularly frustrating when I tried to get a pedicab and I could see available pedicabs (but could only use my credit card to pay them through Uber). This could have been the end of my interaction with the brand, but then I received the following email.

Did this get me to my location any faster? No. Did it make me feel a bit better about the brand and likely to use them again? Absolutely. More importantly, this entire interaction was automated!

Whether brands are using RTM to engage potential customers on their own terms or to not lose a customer after a less than successful interaction, marketers have never had more avenues for communication at their digital fingertips then they do today. Finding your audience and taking proper advantage of the right tools at the right time, now that’s a conversation for another blog post.

Image by @Rantz

My apartment building has several important doors. The front and back doors to the building, the door to my laundry room and the storage room. Fortunately, I have a single key that opens all of these doors in the same way. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be if I had to use a different key for each entrance?

In my previous blog post Five Most Common Mistakes in Social Login, number two was inconsistent registration flows. After reviewing hundreds of implementations of social login, I’ve identified this problem as far and away the most common, and needing of attention. Inconsistent registration flows are a problem because they lead to confusion for your site visitors, which could cause them to leave your site.

If your registration process looks and behaves differently across different points in your website, you can lose as many as 50% of your new registered users.

Many marketers have a habit of thinking about registration as a check-box on the website feature list. Registration is actually really difficult to do well, and when it’s done poorly it can:

• kill an otherwise effective marketing campaign by discouraging people from completing a download or registration call to action on your website
• cause shopping cart abandonment because your checkout process is too hard, long or confusing
• cause a customer to decide not to return to your website because they couldn’t get what they want in the first place

Marketers need to partner with their UX and technology teams to ensure that the registration, sign in and checkout processes on your website are easily understood, easy to use, and operate quickly and efficiently.

The image below illustrates what happens when registration flows aren’t thought through. These are all from a single website. If the user is logged in, they don’t stay logged in from page to page. The site’s commenting login is completely different from the main site login, and the checkout process has two different buttons that lead to the same place.

Site-wide registration and sign in

On entertainment, media, and news sites, site-wide registration usually sits at the top of the page. Quite frequently there is no call to action inviting people to register there, but web designers and marketers feel a need to put the registration link because of “best practices.”

The first thing that is needed in site-wide registration is a clear call to action that explains two to three benefits for registration. Yamaha does a great job of this with the modal overlay when their page loads.

Ideally, registration and sign in should look nearly identical, with the exception of the registration process possibly asking for a password. With social login, you can even use conditional logic to indicate the remaining fields that they need to complete after you pre-fill data from their selected identity provider.

Commenting, forums, and chat sign in

It is very common to use third-party tools for interactive website elements. Many people fail to realize that these can be registration points that are the first step in getting a site visitor on your mailing list or into your marketing automation flow.

Third-parties build registration functionality into their interactive tools to make using them easy. When someone clicks Log In within your commenting section, they should be routed through your main website registration flow so the data goes into your database instead of or in addition to the commenting vendor’s database.

Backplane is an open-source technology that enables interactive elements to easily interact with each other and your primary site registration process. The resulting user experience is one point of registration for all technologies on your site, along with one user profile in your database. You can see a list of Janrain partners who use Backplane here.

eCommerce checkout

It is very common for ecommerce websites to think of their site registration and checkout flows as two distinct entities. In some ways this makes sense. Checkout is where all of the attention goes, and any disruption can potentially cost millions of dollars. Even as they are increasingly using social login for engagement experiences, online retailers have been somewhat slow to implement social in their checkout flows because of this sense of caution.

In order to unify registration flows, it makes sense to implement the same login or registration options as the rest of the site. As a bonus, social login is proving to be very valuable for commerce marketers. L’Occitane recently showed that social login users have nearly 11% higher average order value (AOV).

Contests and sweepstakes

Contests and sweepstakes can drive a lot of traffic. Giving away the right product can get people excited and willing to give you their contact information. Take it one step further and put contest entrants into your registration database and opt them into your mailing list.

By creating an account for contest entrants you make brand, content and experience engagement seamless. There is often a post-contest glow for new entrants where they view a brand favorably. Encouraging them to comment, share, and otherwise participate deepens engagement with your brand, encouraging long term loyalty.

7 UP’s Every Bottle Wins campaign is a great example of how to use social login in a contest, and it has the added benefit of appearing inside a Facebook campaign page.

Lead generation forms

We are seeing Janrain clients roll their lead-gen pages into their registration flow as well. This is commonly accomplished by putting user data into the user database after the lead gen form is filled out. Janrain actually published a guide on how to integrate social login with Salesforce landing pages.

Once someone has given you their information in return for a download or registration, there is no reason to gate additional engagement points, and many benefits for you both to make it easier for them.

Just like having a single key for all of the doors in my building, working to integrate all of your registration points into a single cohesive flow makes things much easier for your customers.  Doing these sorts of integrations is certainly becoming more complex as websites are being developed with many moving parts, with more technology from a variety of vendors. Pay attention to keeping your user experience easy and quick, and consistent if you want to keep your campaigns effective, improve conversion rates, and keep customer loyalty.

Where have you seen a registration experience done well?

This dynamic creates challenges around getting the right message to the right person across multiple channels, including web, mobile, desktop apps, social media and more. Marketers today need to ask themselves, do I really know who I am marketing to when data exists in multiple silos? The good news is, if that answer is “no,” Janrain offers a user management platform solution that helps solve this pervasive problem.

Connecting Big Data to a Personalized Experience

Let’s translate the concept of big data into a small-town scenario, decades ago, where Susie Q is shopping at the local boutique.  The shopkeeper knows her name, birthday, sizes, favorite brands, favorite colors, overall style and her level of influence amongst other shoppers. And, beyond that, they know she likes to jog, she drinks an occasional martini and loves vacationing at the beach in Florida. They know that if Susie Q likes something (or not), the entire town will know about it within three hours. Before she even walks in the door, they are smiling and waving her in as they cater to her unique attributes based on these “data points” stored in the sales person’s head.

Susie Q doesn’t mind granting information on her likes, wants and needs because she knows in return she will be delivered value in the form of a good shopping experience, including relevant recommendations, products and shopping experiences tuned to her unique needs. A similar scenario applies to consumers today and accessing data on how they prefer to communicate, shop and what they tend to take action on. While technology has changed dramatically over the decades, humans haven’t evolved so much and consumers essentially want a consistent, highly personalized and engaging consumer experience across channels.

The Solution to Cross Channel Marketing

To deliver this experience to millions of Susie Qs today, the connection points across a myriad of channels and input/output modes need to be translated into action. We see many great examples of personalized lifecycle experiences that are greatly enhanced and more impactful via data-driven touch points. Companies such as Gilt Groupe, Netflix, Amazon and more are tuning into data to drive consumer action.  And, Janrain’s JUMP platform is helping marketers at Samsung, Ugg Australia and Macy’s and many more put data into action to build stronger relationships.

Is your organization embracing customer choice and putting data into action to drive a better consumer experience? Our team helps marketers do this every day, leading to more personalized experiences across the channels consumers are taking action in. The phrase, “the customer is always right” is often tossed around. Today, it’s more like “the customer always has the right to choose” and we just need to be tuned into their channels.

In the movie, we have four very different consumers, all seeking the Great Wizard to fulfill a unique need. Dorothy simply wants to book some travel to home sweet home. Scarecrow wants a brain. Tin Man wants a heart. And, the Lion wants courage.  In today’s world, they may all end up shopping on GreatWizardHasItAll.com (similar to Amazon.com), each expecting to quickly find the very thing they are looking for.

In our world of rapid technology advancements focused on driving more relevant consumer experiences, our friends on the yellow brick road reminded me of the true task at hand. Marketers must focus on taking consumers down a path, engaging them and offering a highly relevant experience across channels. No small feat. Just like Dorothy and her friends, consumers that go down the same “road” are often met with roadblocks that are not relevant to them, forcing them to take another path down Competitor’s Lane.  And, of course, there are plenty of other distractions, like lions, tigers and bears. Oh my!

The Magic is in the Data

Back to today . . . as marketers focus on getting to know their consumers as well as possible, they can’t hide behind a curtain, like the Great Wizard. And, that didn’t work so well anyway. Yet, marketers are expected to deliver the magic in the form of a personalized, relevant experience to every unique consumer. And, that magic is driven via data and the automation of lifecycle communications that deliver information to the right consumer at the right place and right time. In this age of “meCommerce” and “Datamyning,” actionable data on individuals is the element that equips marketers to drive a more relevant consumer experience across channels and communicate in more meaningful ways.

Just like Dorothy’s friends heading down the road together, consumers may appear to be heading in the same direction, yet every one of them is on a journey to find just what they want. Today, we would consider Dorothy a power-user of social media, making new friends along the way, sharing information and influencing behavior. And, the socially influential Dorothy-type will have increased influence in years ahead, with social media use spiking 37% YOY. The challenge is to understand and engage these influencers, catering to their needs based on implicit and explicit attributes derived across channels.

With this new marketing focus on understanding consumers via big data, there is a great opportunity to become more customer-centric. Comprehending the wide array of information that’s available is the starting point. Next, harnessing it into action to drive more relevant consumer experiences in the here and now is what it’s all about. If we succeed, we build better consumer experiences and help connect the Dorothys of the world to their ruby slippers, supplies for Toto and to finally booking that travel plan they’ve been dreaming about.

Homeward Bound

You may think there’s no place like your home page, however, once consumers land there, the magic is in what happens next. Janrain is helping companies such as L’Occitane, Samsung, Yamaha and more, use Janrain’s JUMP platform to acquire, understand and engage consumers and strengthen their relevance and relationships. And, customers like Purina are able to understand if Dorothy has a little dog, too.  Here’s to a great year ahead on the road to relevancy!

Previously, I have discussed how we are closer than ever to putting the customer right at the heart of ‘customer loyalty’ as we look for ways to increase engagement with our consumer audiences. As I continue to explore what Customer Loyalty really means to consumers and businesses in today’s emerging social environment, I want to consider the three key truths that should underpin all customer engagement strategies.

1. Customers want a more relevant online experience

Recent independent research commissioned by Janrain revealed that simply driving customers to the corporate website is not enough. Many are increasingly disenfranchised by the lack of relevance – not least due to the fact that some 96% of individuals have received information or promotions that are mistargeted.

On the other hand, consumers are now increasingly comfortable with the concept that their personal data is an asset, and are willing to share that data in exchange for a more relevant experience, with almost 6 in 10 (57%) of UK respondents to the Janrain survey liking the fact that social login offers the choice to have a more personalised experience when visiting a website without needing to re-enter preferences. In addition to eliminating the clutter of receiving ads and promotions for products or services that have no relevance, sharing a profile enables the site to transform the way it engages. Two thirds (64%) are more likely to return to a website if the experience is personalised, while 54% will recommend the websites to others.

2. All engagement starts with knowing who the customer is and what he or she is saying – ask ‘Who is saying what?’, rather than ‘What is being said?

Social information has always underpinned the sales experience. In store sales assistants do not need to know a customer’s name, address or telephone number; obvious information such as age, affluence and shopping preferences can often be established at a single glance as an individual walks into a store.

This information influences the way the assistant interacts with the customer without requiring any overt customer input. Applying such social insight online can transform performance: with information on customer hobbies, recent films or TV programmes watched, friends, marital status, etc., an organisation can transform customer understanding and exploit that understanding to make the content and offer more relevant and engaging.

As the Global Vice President of Marketing at Johnson & Johnson recently said, “We have to move from a reach and frequency mindset to a reach and relationship mindset.”

3. Brands must make it easy for customers to engage

Despite the disenfranchisement with irrelevant offers, promotions or content, 78% of UK consumers regularly provide inaccurate information to organisations when registering for a web site – both due to the process being time-consuming, onerous and crucially, a lack of trust between the consumer and the brand. How does the consumer know why a brand is asking the detail it is or how that will be used?

A social login option can help solve these issues, by, allowing a business to keep the initial registration process simple and focused. But more than that, it allows for progressive, permission based sharing that builds trust over the course of the customer relationship.

As I mentioned, there are businesses out there currently who are excelling at building customer loyalty, in the sense that I perceive the market to be going. Next time, we will be looking at some of these case studies and their approach to putting the customer at the centre of the business.

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.

Last month we proudly announced a new partnership with a leader in providing loyalty and rewards programs to the retail industry, 500friends. What this means is that retailers can make it easier for their shoppers and customers to engage with them while building loyalty, increasing registration conversion and decreasing cart abandonment. All critical goals that lead to increased online sales, right?

To celebrate our partnership, we are participating in 500friends’ The Win/Win Challenge where they will reward $25,000 or 1,000,000 airline miles to the online retailer that leverages their LoyaltyPlus product to create the best customer experience.

Ready to enter? Here’s what to do:

1. Learn about 500friends’ LoyaltyPlus and the benefits you can expect when you combine loyalty marketing strategies with social features

2. Check out the official rules for The Win/Win Challenge

3. Sign up to win!

Want to earn extra points towards a win? Integrate Janrain social login, which they make easy to do, and earn bonus points! Your customers will be happy you did since social login is preferred by 77% of consumers and is fives time faster than traditional registration.

Now that’s a win-win!

In our recorded webinar, you’ll learn about the potential Viral Loop that Jeremiah describes as what occurs when you integrate social media on your brand site and the community grows participation and engagement for you. Beyond frameworks, Jeremiah will give you an actionable roadmap to evolve your site into the ultimate social brand site that is utilizing social media to drive traffic to and activities on your own site.

Real world examples showcase leading brands who have successfully added a social layer to their site to acquire new users, increase on site engagement and leverage rich social profile data to improve marketing programs. Stay tuned for the bonus material toward the end where Jeremiah shares his predictions for social media marketing in the coming year.

Tips to Extend Your Social Strategy to Your Site from Janrain on Vimeo.

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.