'Net Features : social sign in

Collect Email Addresses via Social Sign-In

Allison Howen — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 11:47:00 GMT

Collecting email addresses just got a whole lot easier, especially for B2B marketers.

Silverpop is to thank. The company announced an enhancement to its Social Sign-In feature, which is built through a partnership with social identity and user management solutions provider Janrain.

The enhancement gives Silverpop customers the ability to collect email addresses when an individual registers for an offer using existing LinkedIn credentials. This is an especially valuable feature for B2B marketers, who are more interested in interacting with potential buyers via their professional email than a personal account, as well as for marketers who want to target communication based on recipients' professional backgrounds.

"Social Sign-In benefits both buyers and marketers, making registration processes simpler, thus decreasing the possibility of form abandonment while also getting the marketer closer to the social behaviors of each contact" said Bryan Brown, director of product strategy at Silverpop. "For B2B marketers, while the information collected from social networks like Facebook and Twitter is certainly valuable, the likelihood of attaining a contact's business email address is low. With LinkedIn accounts, individuals are more likely to include their business-related information. Having this capability is a giant leap for B2B marketers in general, and Silverpop customers in particular, as they can take advantage of this enhancement right out of the gate due to our existing strategic partnership with Janrain."

Social sign-in is becoming an increasingly popular feature because many people are too frustrated by online registration processes to create new user accounts, or simply don't want to remember another password. However, Janrain has found that companies can achieve an increase in conversion rates when they provide users with the option to "sign in" using social credentials.

"The increase in form completions and conversion rates has an obvious benefit to marketers, but so does the ability to connect users to their social profiles, providing additional, highly valuable insight about their site visitors," said Tore Steen, vice president of business development for Janrain. "Through Janrain technology Silverpop customers now can collect verified emails and other permission-based profile data only available from LinkedIn for use in their email and marketing campaigns."

Increase Sharing with AddThis Updates

Allison Howen — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 19:11:00 GMT

One of the 'Net's most popular sharing platforms, AddThis, has announced enhancements to its sharing tools. And in testing, these updates have proven to increase sharing by 11 percent.

The platform's change in layout and new improvements aim to enhance the social sharing experience for users and to provide publishers with improved capabilities for driving visitor engagement.

“Sharing, like search, is one of the key indicators of consumer intent on the internet,” said Ramsey McGrory, CEO of AddThis. “The breadth and depth of our presence on the web gives us a unique perspective into the social habits and preferences of consumers. We apply these insights to create more effective and efficient social solutions for publishers and brands, essentially making social engagement easier for users.”

The new functionalities of the AddThis platform include:

• Instant sharing – This allows visitors to share a publisher’s content without leaving the page, which increases the likelihood that the user stays on the site and continues reading.

• Social Sign In – Site readers can now sign-in to a website using their existing social credentials from Google, Facebook or Twitter. This provides a more personalized experience and eliminates the problem of having to create and remember unique registrations at each site a consumer visits. Additionally, social sign in provides publishers with detailed information from the consumer’s social profile, which helps site owners create more personalized content.

• One Code – Whether a reader is viewing a page from a tablet, mobile phone or desktop, AddThis provides publishers with one code that works on every device.

• More personalized sharing – AddThis supports more than 70 languages and 300 services, and the newest sharing tools are optimized to show the right services to the right users at the right time. For example, if a reader is more likely to share on Twitter than Facebook, AddThis will position Twitter higher in the sharing menu.

AddThis Adds Social Sign In

Allison Howen — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 17:04:00 GMT

AddThis is the latest company to join in the fight against Password Fatigue.

The social sharing platform has announced the integration of Social Sign In to its suite of social plug-ins, which enables users to log in to a website using their existing social profiles from three of the Web's largest social networks - Google, Facebook and Twitter.

The new feature offers site owners the option to host the technology on their own sites, giving them access to customer information and databases. This means that Social Sign In is not only valuable for consumers, who can easily login to a new website without creating a new user profile, but it also allows publishers to take advantage of the data that is connected to consumers' social identities. Additional benefits of offering social login include improved consumer engagement metrics and increased time spent on-site.

“Consumers increasingly want personalized content experiences but resist the inefficiencies and hassle of unique registrations at each site they visit. Social Sign In gives consumers a more interactive connection to the site while providing publishers with accurate authentication and demographic data,” says Charlie Reverte, Head of Publisher Products at AddThis. “Our goal is to use social infrastructure to strengthen the consumer-publisher connection by speeding up registration and sign-in with a secure, privacy-assured process.”

AddThis says the new feature will be available on more than 14 million domains, and will support 1.3 billion-plus users monthly.