After eleven years in Portland, the producers of WebVisions is taking their show on the road. The first stop of 2012 is New York City. Make plans now to be in the city January 18 - 20 to explore the future of web and mobile from the industry’s top visionaries. No doubt, this is an event to attend with a rock star lineup of fabulous speakers and sessions, networking opportunities and some fun woven in each day!
Top of your list should be the session led by Jamie Beckland, Janrain’s Digital and Social Media Strategist Friday, January 20 at 8:45. Set your alarm clock, grab some coffee and get ready to explore the social profile data opportunity.
Last week, Janrain attended the Data Marketing Summit, Digiday’s twice-yearly event showcasing the most cutting edge uses of data for publishers, brands and advertisers.
Digiday holds this conference twice a year because the amount of user and customer data is exploding, and the industry is changing so quickly that a traditional annual conference would be outdated by the time they finished programming the agenda.
Instead, speakers covered a wide range of topics in a discussion-heavy format. This allowed for everyone to share case studies and success stories that were hot off the presses. The format created one of the most engaging and innovative conferences of the year.
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.
While retailers are still experimenting with social tactics, many are still looking for some ROI against their social activities. The tactics in use range from Facebook pages to blogs to product sharing and forums, all in hopes of increasing engagement with shoppers to convert them over to customers.
We recently hosted a webinar with guest speaker Sucharita Mulpuru, VP and Principal eCommerce Analyst at Forrester on the topic of the Social Commerce of 2012. We heard from many attendees that the insights shared will play an important role as they develop their plans for next year. What follows is an overview of the key findings and takeaways from the webinar, but I also invite you to watch the recorded session here as well.
A team of Janrainers traveled east to Boston this week for the 2011 Shop.org Annual Summit to talk with retailers and partners about social commerce. Anytime you attend an action-packed industry conference you know that there are highlights you might have missed, or conversations you ran out of time for. Thankfully, Shop.org created this short video right from the EXPO hall floor to share some of the ecommerce trends being talked about.
Whether your customers are shopping online, or just researching your products and services, there’s no doubt that online browsing will play a major role in holiday shopping this year. Retail marketers everywhere are turning their attention to social, mobile and location based tools to improve the shopping experience and provide shoppers what they want.
With just a few months until showtime, Forrester Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru recently shared three areas that online retailers should focus on for the upcoming holiday season. With the overwhelming number of email offers that consumers will receive soon, she stressed how critical it is that retailers’ emails are effectively delivered, opened and act upon.
Janrain is excited to announce the addition of the wildly popular location check-in service, foursquare, to our social login provider list. With over 8 million location based users, it would be foolish as a brand marketer to pass up the opportunity to allow these users to easily login to your website and/or mobile app and gain a multitude of information about that user.
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
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After eleven years in Portland, the producers of 
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 
A team of Janrainers traveled east to Boston this week for the 2011 Shop.org Annual Summit to talk with retailers and partners about social commerce. Anytime you attend an action-packed industry conference you know that there are highlights you might have missed, or conversations you ran out of time for. Thankfully, Shop.org created this short video right from the EXPO hall floor to share some of the ecommerce trends being talked about.
Whether your customers are shopping online, or just researching your products and services, there’s no doubt that online browsing will play a major role in holiday shopping this year. Retail marketers everywhere are turning their attention to social, mobile and location based tools to improve the shopping experience and provide shoppers what they want.
Janrain is excited to announce the addition of the wildly popular location check-in service, 
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.
