Have you ever seen something on your computer screen that was so personal, and so perfect, that you thought, “how did they know?”
Sometimes that is a great feeling, because it shows that the company knows you, and wants to deliver something that is just right for you.
Other times, it can feel like a violation because you may not understand why the company is making that recommendation. You might wonder just how much they know about you...
Robert Scoble recently sat down for a lively talk with our founder, Larry Drebes about the Janrain User Management Platform. We love that Robert tells developers that “they need to consider Janrain for their user management system” because in essence, we’ve done all the work so that they can focus on changing the world with their core competencies. Plus Robert shares his own frustrations with setting up a new account at websites as the two discuss the usefulness of social login.
Personalization is far from an exact science. Despite the torrent of consumer data and merchandising tools at an online retailer’s disposal, product recommendations on eCommerce sites today often are plagued by irrelevance, banality and inaccuracy. Coupled with privacy concerns, this has caused a segment of online shoppers to question the value of personalization.
While consumers have been slow to cozy up to the idea, this isn’t because personalization is a poor merchandising strategy – retailers simply aren’t doing it right. So how do you recommend products that are actually aligned with a consumer’s current interests? Which data sources provide the best window into a shopper’s motivations? These are the questions eCommerce managers should be asking.
The data within a consumer’s social network profile may hold the keys to effective personalization. But before explaining why, let’s start by looking at how eCommerce personalization works today.
As many marketers already know, data on your users brings great opportunities, but challenges can exist which makes it critical to do your homework on solution options before you invest and proceed.
This post at Mashable from our head of products highlights the complexities of social profile data and will help you understand the five critical features of a user management system so you know what to look for in your solution search.
Social networks collect a lot of data about users - in fact, across all networks, there are millions of new data points created every minute. That’s a wealth of information for marketers to use to customize messaging and offers. Of course, that’s what makes social media marketing so exciting.
It’s easy to see the power and potential of this data, but we must do some work up front to determine how to use this data in ways that are both responsible and useful for users. By and large, the backlash from users toward online privacy comes when users don’t understand what information they are sharing, or how it might be used.
The easiest way to think about how to use social profile data is that old classic, TheGolden Rule: Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You.
Let's look in more detail at some strategies we can employ to gain the maximum benefit from social data.
Online consumer behavior has changed as people participate in conversations with friends and brands, look to their social networks for advice and product recommendations, and shift between their many personas for work, play and family.
As they move across the social web, they freely share data from their different profiles with websites to speed up the login, sharing and purchasing process. This rich social profile data includes demographic and location data, information on their friends and social graph, hobbies and interests.
Marketers across industries claim that their databases are littered with anonymous, inactive users who have visited your site and left a worthless contact record behind for you. Commerce sites, that typically require a shipping address and billing information to register an account, are no exception. A recent survey by Experian reveals that 75% of retailers say incomplete, outdated or false consumer contact info resides in their databases. These retailers indicate that 12% of their data in their customer database are incorrect.
We call these the "living dead" - site visitors who register once, never to return or, worse, give false information that leads you down a dead trail - and share techniques from national brands to overcome zombie attacks in our webinar: The Zombie User Apocalypse Has Overrun Your Database.
Remember when you needed Internet Relay Chat and forums to interact with friends online? The explosion of social networks like Myspace, Facebook and Twitter radically changed the paradigm for peer interaction on the web by providing one platform to communicate with all of your friends. Now, brands are channeling the power of these networks to bring social experiences directly onto their sites.
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.
Marketers are inherently data-driven. We know that data informs knowledge about consumers and their motivations, helping us tailor offerings or messaging to better serve them. But the conventional methods of collecting user profile data, and specific applied use cases for such data, remain nebulous for many online businesses. Traditional registration forms often lead to inaccurate or incomplete profiles, and many website analytics platforms don’t deliver actionable information about individuals, beyond IP-based geographic location.
At the same time, we’ve entered a landscape where individuals expect brand interactions to be personalized, and online experiences to be social. As a marketer, how do you align your online initiatives with these shifting paradigms?
The answer rests with social data. There are over 1.5 billion online users with active social network or email accounts. Think about the wealth of data each of us maintains on these accounts – demographics, interests, opinions and friends. Marketers can tap into this trove of data with permission from users by offering social login and employing a database or CRM equipped to store social profiles.
But collecting social profile data is only half the battle. Understanding how to utilize it to increase engagement, conversions and customer lifetime value is critical. Our new white paper, “The Future of Marketing is Social Data”, discusses these concepts with practical tips about how to leverage social data in your marketing efforts to:
Offer faster, more accurate recommendations to customers
Whether you are an ISP, telecommunications provider, financial institution, government agency or a corporation, you probably store rich profile information on your customers and employees. Your user identity and customer management systems may contain reputation scores such as credit worthiness, past purchase history, payment profiles, digital fingerprints, and other profile data. By enabling your users to sign in to other websites, which may include partner sites, with an identity that carries the brand of your organization or business, you can share valuable profile information with these sites and facilitate ecommerce, digital signing, employee discounts, benefits management and much more.
However, most businesses use either proprietary or closed identity and login systems that pose significant challenges to user profile portability across the web. Janrain Identity Service was built to solve this market problem. Identity Service issues portable identities that carry the brand of your organization to your existing users. Your users can then sign into any website that accepts your login credentials and securely, and selectively share their profile data. Identity Service offers a consumer friendly user experience on top of the widely adopted OpenID standard, quickly and securely transforming a closed system to be open standards compliant.
Posts
Have you ever seen something on your computer screen that was so personal, and so perfect, that you thought, “how did they know?”
Robert Scoble recently sat down for a lively talk with our founder, Larry Drebes about the Janrain User Management Platform. We love that Robert tells developers that “they need to consider Janrain for their user management system” because in essence, we’ve done all the work so that they can focus on changing the world with their core competencies. Plus Robert shares his own frustrations with setting up a new account at websites as the two discuss the usefulness of social login.
Personalization is far from an exact science. Despite the torrent of consumer data and merchandising tools at an online retailer’s disposal, product recommendations on eCommerce sites today often are plagued by irrelevance, banality and inaccuracy. Coupled with privacy concerns, this has caused a segment of online shoppers to 
As many marketers already know, data on your users brings great opportunities, but challenges can exist which makes it critical to do your homework on solution options before you invest and proceed.
Social networks collect a lot of data about users - in fact, across all networks, there are millions of new data points created every minute. That’s a wealth of information for marketers to use to customize messaging and offers. Of course, that’s what makes social media marketing so exciting.
Online consumer behavior has changed as people participate in conversations with friends and brands, look to their social networks for advice and product recommendations, and shift between their many personas for work, play and family.
Marketers across industries claim that their databases are littered with anonymous, inactive users who have visited your site and left a worthless contact record behind for you. Commerce sites, that typically require a shipping address and billing information to register an account, are no exception. A recent 
Remember when you needed Internet Relay Chat and forums to interact with friends online? The explosion of social networks like Myspace, Facebook and Twitter radically changed the paradigm for peer interaction on the web by providing one platform to communicate with all of your friends. Now, brands are channeling the power of these networks to bring social experiences directly onto their sites.
Marketers are inherently data-driven. We know that data informs knowledge about consumers and their motivations, helping us tailor offerings or messaging to better serve them. But the conventional methods of collecting user profile data, and specific applied use cases for such data, remain nebulous for many online businesses. Traditional registration forms often lead to inaccurate or incomplete profiles, and many website analytics platforms don’t deliver actionable information about individuals, beyond IP-based geographic location.
