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Get Ready As Corporate Sites and Social Networks Start To Connect

Categories: Social MediaPosted on July 12th, 2009

To Increase Engagement, Brands to Allow Users To Login With Facebook, MySpace, Twitter
In a recent report titled the “Future of the Social Web” we found that we are entering the era of social colonization, every webpage and experience will be social–even if brands choose not to participate.  I spent time with Palo Alto startup Gigya who now has a product that enables brands to quickly allow users to login using third party identities (like Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook) quickly to a corporate web experience.  Right now, brands are “Pollinating” the social web by letting their corporate created content spread to social networks. As a result, companies are going to start aggregating conversations –the natural reaction to centralize trusted discussions.

  • Problem Situation: Users are bombarded with brands trying to entice them to sign up and registered to a variety of websites, and new technologies are going to make registration pages are a dying breed,
  • Opportunities: To increase the changes that users will interact with brands, they will easiest way for them to engage by allowing users to interact with their existing identities on social networks.
  • Potential Solutions: Tools that aggregate the conversation, brands may lean on Gigya’s Socialize whose aim is to easily manage the complicated APIs and authentication of identies from 3rd party social networks. On a related note I’m going to test JSKit’s Echo who on Friday, announced they will aggregate conversations from multiple social networks
  • Example: Gigya showed me examples of Turner Broadcasting who aggregated conversations about the online Final Four Basketball championship and integrated conversations from Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. This means that the online viewers of the Final Four could interact with their Facebook and Twitter friends in real time on the Turner broadcasting site.  Gigya shared data with me about the engagement of each network, during the NBA Eastern Conference Finals Message Distribution by Platform (average of all games) showing that MySpace users created 53%
of all messages Facebook: 35%
and Twitterr just 12%.
  • Who’s it for? This is for brands that want to aggregate multiple social graphs and eventually life streams onto their site or experience.  The most obvious use cases are real time events, but this will soon become helpful all digital media, and will likely start to happen on TV.  Which vendors should talk to them?  Any Community Platform vendor, a CMS vendor moving into this space, or media company or their agency.
  • Challenges: For brands in particular this comes with some considerable challenges –beyond just the technical implementation. At the business level, expect brands to slam up to:
    • Difficult for brands to grasp. This is a complicated and daunting strategy for brands, who don’t know how to approach the changes as the social web envelopes other online experiences. 
    • Privacy Concerns: Secondly, brands that are going to allow this need to figure out how to later segment specific social graphs of users, and ensure privacy expectations of the users are communicated up front.  I could write a whole blog post on how corporate security  groups in IT and legal will justly try to stonewall this.
    • Lead Generation Changed For Brands: Because brands will let users login using their social network identity (like Facebook or Twitter) they are increasing their chances of user interaction and engagement –but miss out on lead generation in the traditional sense.
    • Daunting for Vendors: For Gigya, and other vendors, they’ll need to move fast. while they manage the multiple identity protocols (it’s a complex task as they are moving targets, so it’s often best to outsource this) this eventually will be a commodity technology.   For any platform (community or CMS) who wants to venture into this space, managing this will be a costly venture.
  • Key Takeaways: Brands need to quickly recognize that every web experience will be a social experience –there’s no way to stop it.  Savvy brands will get ahead of the curve and be proactive by allowing users to login and experience their corporate web experiences in the context of their existing social networks.   While this comes with inherent risks about lead generation (control) and privacy, the opportunity to increase engagement and let content spread ever further is at hand. Get started by:
    • 1) Do research in existing social networks to find out what communities are talking about the most in context of your brand
    • 2) Match that with your own corporate website and enable users to login with their existing social identies
    • 3) Start with a real time event or conference that gives you a limited period of time to trial and experiment.  5) Realize the way brands measure leads in the future won’t be by name and email rows in databases –but perhaps by friends, fans, and followers.
    • 4) Demand that your community or CMS vendor provide the tools needed for this to work, or work with vendors that provide this service rather than manage yourself.
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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 12th, 2009 at 7:52 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

41 Comments »
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  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm dkb
    Cracking analysis.
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Jason Kintzler
    I would love to see you develop that post on privacy concerns. we're finding public corporations are jumping in to social interaction, despite legal/IT, even for PR.
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Dustin
    You have to ask yourself... Am I putting my store front on main street or the back forty?
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Chris Saad
    On the web each has a chance to find its niche audience
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Scott Kiekbusch
    Am I the only one who thinks it's presumptuous that people want to "connect" with corporations?
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Chris Saad
    People want to connect with PEOPLE - and Corporations are just a group of people
  • December 31, 1969 at 4:33 pm Bob DeMarco
    good info...thanks

41 Responses to “Get Ready As Corporate Sites and Social Networks Start To Connect”

  1. Excellent article Jeremiah; and perfect timing. I am hoping you can come an present this to my team soon.



    2. Posted by Michael Brito on July 12th, 2009 at 10:09 am

  2. Just noticed a great use of this on a hip hop artists website, to login with facebook RyanLeslie.com

    Thought it was cool that he was integrating it this way–really big for a personal brand.



    3. Posted by @MattWilsontv on July 12th, 2009 at 2:22 pm

  3. Great ideas! Can’t wait to see this in practice with a lot of brands. We all hate registration pages. But even signing in with social profiles seems to present a daunting bit of security risk for many users. Some aren’t comfortable with that. I wonder if and when OpenID via a few trusted sources with circumvent this practice.

    And, of course, different brands will always want to gather different data about their users. Ever sign up for a free magazine subscription or media Web site? Sheesh! You have to give up rights to your first born in a three-page form. Hard to imagine those kind of registration sites going down easy since they thrive on providing demographic data for their advertisers.



    4. Posted by Carri Bugbee on July 12th, 2009 at 3:58 pm

  4. [...] Get Ready As Corporate Sites and Social Networks Start To Connect … [...]



    5. Posted by Search Engine Optimization is is worth getting an expert|Taking SEO seriously on July 12th, 2009 at 4:45 pm

  5. [...] Get Ready As Corporate Sites and Social Networks Start To Connect « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang… # 1) Do research in existing social networks to find out what communities are talking about the most in context of your brand # 2) Match that with your own corporate website and enable users to login with their existing social identies # 3) Start with a real time event or conference that gives you a limited period of time to trial and experiment. 5) Realize the way brands measure leads in the future won’t be by name and email rows in databases –but perhaps by friends, fans, and followers. # 4) Demand that your community or CMS vendor provide the tools needed for this to work, or work with vendors that provide this service rather than manage yourself. (tags: smbiz corporateblogging) [...]



    6. Posted by links for 2009-07-13 | Estate of Flux on July 13th, 2009 at 12:02 am

  6. So do you ;-) You also use FBConnect to allow users to comment. But…
    The problem for you are:
    - you don’t have access to the user, or just part of it. You are missing the best part of it, the email address and eventually the phone number. This information is on the social network, not on your website

    The problem for the user:
    As the email address is on the social network (here Facebook), the user has no way to get notified by the website (here web-strategist.com) when new comments are posted.

    The people we met regarding social network integration are interested by it, but they want and the need the informations about these users. This is the added value they would like to get in order to communicate more efficiently in the future. And I can understand that.



    7. Posted by Frederic Sidler on July 13th, 2009 at 12:08 am

  7. @Frederic: I’ll argue with that a bit.

    Firstly, why should a brand get my e-mail or phone number? That’s way too personal. Just because I log it to Jeremiah’s site with Facebook does not mean I want phone calls from him. It’s not like he’s doing me a favor by letting me comment with Facebook. That’s old brand thinking – bow to our power and maybe we’ll throw some table scraps at you.

    Secondly, the thinking behind lead generation is wrong. The current thinking is – let’s evolve the site, but keep lead generation the same. This evolution of the site has far-reaching implications – including on how lead generation is done.

    Thirdly – if I log in to Jeremiah with Facebook, I’d like to be notified of follow-up comments on Facebook and maybe even reply directly from Facebook.

    I honestly think it’s a very good evolution – touch points with brands are multiplying and this implies different levels of engagement. I’d like to start by commenting with Facebook, you can send me updates there, and if I like you, I may give you more – but not before you prove yourself to be worth it.



    8. Posted by Dragos Ilinca on July 13th, 2009 at 2:56 am

  8. [...] was reading Jeremiah Owyang’s post about social networking and corporate sites connecting and he makes a general reference about the changing landscape of lead generation: “Because [...]



    9. Posted by Is Social Media Changing Lead Generation? | Kyle Lacy, Social Media - Indianapolis on July 13th, 2009 at 3:30 am

  9. [...] was reading Jeremiah Owyang’s post about social networking and corporate sites connecting and he makes a general reference about the changing landscape of lead generation: “Because [...]



    10. Posted by Is Social Media Changing Lead Generation? | Kyle Lacy, Social Media - Indianapolis on July 13th, 2009 at 3:30 am

  10. [...] was reading Jeremiah Owyang’s post about social networking and corporate sites connecting and he makes a general reference about the changing landscape of lead generation: “Because [...]



    11. Posted by Is Social Media Changing Lead Generation? | Kyle Lacy, Social Media - Indianapolis on July 13th, 2009 at 3:30 am

  11. [...] was reading Jeremiah Owyang’s post about social networking and corporate sites connecting and he makes a general reference about the changing landscape of lead generation: “Because [...]



    12. Posted by Is Social Media Changing Lead Generation? | Kyle Lacy, Social Media - Indianapolis on July 13th, 2009 at 3:30 am

  12. We have also used this approach to help our clients bring to life a social strategy, even if funds aren’t available for creating new content specifically for social media. Instead, this allows brands to “unlock” their content and “socialize” their own brand sites.



    13. Posted by Craig Goldstein on July 13th, 2009 at 6:10 am

  13. To see more example of Gigya Socialize in action you can visit
    http://www.vimeo.com/5048511
    http://www.vimeo.com/5379526

    Socialize aggregates the social APIs as well as the authentication APIs into a single, consistent API, making it easy for brands to focus on building the best possible user experience with these tools, and not on managing the updates made to an ever-increasing number of identity providers.



    14. Posted by Liza Hausman on July 13th, 2009 at 8:10 am

  14. [...] I’m losing leads. This one was picked up by Jeremiah “Because brands will let users login using their social network identity (like Facebook or [...]



    15. Posted by Words Go Further| Is the corporate website experience becoming a social experience? - Words Go Further on July 13th, 2009 at 8:32 am

  15. Wordpress plugin also available, Drupal available in a few weeks
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gigya-socialize-for-wordpress/



    16. Posted by Liza Hausman on July 13th, 2009 at 8:44 am

  16. Is there a concern about privacy here? What will Facebook do with all the data they are gathering about these brands users? Can’t it be use as a competitive advantage?



    17. Posted by John Deem on July 13th, 2009 at 9:44 am

  17. While integrating Facebook Connect, JSKit, Disqus, etc. with your corporate website or online community may expand your audience, the trade-off is measurement and tracking of users and their activities. Ideally, the integration would:
    1) Map Facebook or Twitter IDs to local IDs upon initial login, so while users can continue to login with Facebook IDs, you can track their activities based on their local IDs.
    2) Instead of using Facebook Comments or Disqus Comments, stick with local comments but provide option to publish to Facebook activity stream or Twitter.
    3) Make it very easy for users to invite their “friends” on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere to join your site.

    More of my thoughts about this “do both and integrate” strategy on my blog: http://communityzenmaster.com/blogs/lliu/archive/2009/05/15/build-your-own-community-or-go-where-people-already-are-do-both-and-integrate.aspx



    18. Posted by Lawrence Liu on July 13th, 2009 at 10:43 am

  18. [...] Debate Comments- Jeremiah Owyang spoke today about the importance of being able to login using 3rd party applicatio… (i.e Facebook Twitter, etc). This comments solution does exactly that. Less typing to sign in will [...]



    19. Posted by Our Evolution To A Social Media Website- Who, What, How & Why? « Social Networking Schmoozing on July 13th, 2009 at 2:29 pm

  19. Great post Jeremiah – I’ve had an interesting experience over the past few years driving a corporately-sponsored social media site to develop the open standard at http://www.openmethodology.org.

    As it was a major part of a sales strategy for services work, there was a coupling between the corporate side and open social media site, some on the open site but more behind the firewall. Security, privacy, brand and IP loss issues were all there, but confidence grew in the approach over time.

    Our research was primarily based on market trends and growing demand for an open approach, which gave us the case to have a blended corporate/open social media approach. It was a big change, but certainly a growing trend that will come in a few different forms (not just social networks).



    20. Posted by Sean McClowry on July 13th, 2009 at 3:34 pm

  20. A brand name is an organism: alive.



    21. Posted by Paramendra Bhagat on July 13th, 2009 at 5:30 pm

  21. Lawrence Liu those are helpful tips. I expect a service to merge that will let brands map social identities (like on Facebook) to their CRM records.



    22. Posted by jeremiah_owyang on July 14th, 2009 at 4:50 am

  22. Thanks for this post, Jeremiah.

    You raise an issue that we definitely are talking about in the marketing automation/demand generation community.

    Eventually converting digital interaction with pages, downloads and forms to a digital identity is a critical process in modern lead management.

    I was just thinking about some of the pros and cons of having a social media/universal ID versus one-off filling out of forms. I think that it will lower the registration rate … and impact lead rates … because individuals will be more guarded in sharing their ‘real’ identity. But I also think it could raise the quality level of leads and increase the percentage of ‘authentic’ and engaged interactions with customers and prospects.

    So — privacy issues notwithstanding — I can see how it could benefit us beyond the whole relationship/social graph issue and could, in fact, increase overall quality of customer-brand engagement.

    Good dialogue. Let’s keep talking about this.



    23. Posted by Adam Needles on July 14th, 2009 at 7:21 am

  23. Jeremiah:

    Friend Marty Wetherall, founder of FanChatter.com, is doing something similar to Gigya Socialize, and working with sports teams, bands, etc. (i.e. organizations or groups that have “fans.”)

    Here’s one example of FanChatter in action, on the website of the Minnesota Timberwolves: http://www.nba.com/timberwolves/ Fans can connect through their Twitter or Facebook accounts and chat during the games. Their status updates can optionally be posted back to their original FB/Twitter accounts.

    Bryan | @BryanPerson



    24. Posted by Bryan Person on July 14th, 2009 at 9:00 am

  24. [...] Get Ready As Corporate Sites and Social Networks Start To Connect … [...]



    25. Posted by Twitter4SEO | How to Use Twitter Marketing for Top Search Engine Rankings on July 14th, 2009 at 12:16 pm

  25. I have to agree with Lawrence and Frederick above. There are not too many companies willing to give up lead generation. Unless these tools add the company as a friend or connect them automatically, I doubt you’ll see high adoption.



    26. Posted by Mark Fidelman on July 14th, 2009 at 3:17 pm

  26. [...] sites και τα social networks αρχίζουν να διασυνδέονται . Μια προσέγγιση από το Jermiah [...]



    27. Posted by H αξία του “3rd party login” και οι προετοιμασίες .. — about concept on July 14th, 2009 at 5:41 pm

  27. [...] Get Ready As Corporate Sites and Social Networks Start To Connect " Web … (tags: socialmedia marketing socialnetworking facebook content strategy branding integration) Twitter Updates [...]



    28. Posted by links for 2009-07-14 « innovations in higher education on July 14th, 2009 at 8:17 pm

  28. [...] at 7:52 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. var friendFeedTasks4128 = new [...]



    29. Posted by Get Ready As Corporate Sites and Social Networks Start To Connect « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing on July 16th, 2009 at 9:23 am

  29. [...] before traditional media and blogs, thus adding to the multi-directional flow of news. Likewise, pollination and aggregation of content is now evident with the way conversations have  spread outwardly from sites and blogs pushing them [...]



    30. Posted by PR and social media: a 5-year overview « Timi will share… on July 16th, 2009 at 10:07 am

  30. [...] Jeremiah Owyang escribió en los últimos días dos post al respecto que valen la pena leer: Get Ready As Corporate Sites and Social Networks Start To Connect y Social CRM: When Registration Pages Go Extinct. Enjoy! ¿Te gusto? Compartidlo [...]



    31. Posted by Dejen de registrar gente | Suck This Mandarin on July 17th, 2009 at 3:28 pm

  31. [...] there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.Get Ready As Corporate Sites and Social Networks Start To Connect by Jeremiah Owyang on Web [...]



    32. Posted by Links for July 19 2009 | Eric D. Brown - Technology, Strategy, People & Projects on July 19th, 2009 at 6:26 am

  32. [...] Get Ready As Corporate Sites and Social Networks Start To Connect [...]



    33. Posted by Recent Links at Fast Wonder: Online Community Consulting on July 19th, 2009 at 10:21 am

  33. [...] 2ª etapa (actual) – OpenID y Single Sing-On: Estas 2 iniciativas están permitiendo aumentar el número de servicios a los que podemos acceder con un mismo usuario y clave, pero no tenemos disponible toda la información del perfil. Esta tendencia se está extendiendo a las empresas. Están empezando a dar acceso a sus redes sociales con los IDs de Twitter, Facebook y MySpace (más información sobre este tema en el blog de Jeremiah Owyang). [...]



    34. Posted by eTc :: El blog de Marketing en Español » Blog Archive » Web de identidades, el futuro de la web 2.0 on July 19th, 2009 at 11:42 pm

  34. [...] 2ª etapa (actual) – OpenID y Single Sing-On: Estas iniciativas están permitiendo aumentar el número de servicios a los que podemos acceder con un mismo usuario y clave, pero no tenemos disponible toda la información del perfil. Esta tendencia se está extendiendo a las empresas. Están empezando a dar acceso a sus redes sociales con los IDs de Twitter, Facebook y MySpace (más información sobre este tema en el blog de Jeremiah Owyang). [...]



    35. Posted by El futuro de la web 2.0: Web of identities « Blog de Marketing Online de Tristán Elósegui on July 22nd, 2009 at 5:56 am

  35. Great article, thanks for the info. I remember the interactivity capability on the Turner Broadcast of the Final Four and it was pretty interesting and new concept to me at the time, but it seems like this next aspect of social networking is about to explode.



    36. Posted by Promotional Products on July 25th, 2009 at 3:09 am

  36. [...] register with their accounts on those platforms –and then message on these platforms. See how Gigya’s Socialize product has helped Turner Broadcasting with the online event for the NBA [...]



    37. Posted by Playbook: How To Integrate Social Technologies with Virtual Events « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing on August 11th, 2009 at 7:32 am

  37. [...] register with their accounts on those platforms –and then message on these platforms. See how Gigya’s Socialize product has helped Turner Broadcasting with the online event for the NBA [...]



    38. Posted by Web Strategy: How To Integrate Social Technologies with Virtual Events » A Day in the Life of Jonathan “Jon” Gillardi… aka “Johnny Montana” on August 12th, 2009 at 2:52 am

  38. [...] Get Ready As Corporate Sites and Social Networks Start To Connect … [...]



    39. Posted by Principles of Corporate Finance with S&P bind-in card | Bad Credit Loans Reviews on October 5th, 2009 at 9:56 pm

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    40. Posted by Liza on October 14th, 2009 at 6:15 am

  40. In trying to encourage the use of social media or social utilities, to an educational-online environment, it was met with a sense of education being degraded by these sites. I didn’t think so. I felt that for Online Education to attract an audience and create a population of prospective online students, that by creating a portal of ‘games’ and such like a facebook would be a way for the educational site to ‘attract’ students and put the name of the institution on their conversations, like “I played bejeweled or scrabble on xxx university website and made this xxx amount of points”. It is a bragging rights – no to little cost, but a great way to expand the potential and very competitive market place. One idea was to try it with one grade like grade 6. Do analytics on its social network expansion. Over time, see if that translate from prospective students to actual online students. It’s about 6 years, but it could be funded by Industry Canada or AUCC, or other funding things looking for innovation. Also trying to place this educational institutional webpage on workplaces—including the portal to the games. One response was “you want to make this a gameboy website”. No…but realistically, your long-term market in education is YOUTH, as with any adversitizing of a product. So current markets have a huge competition drive already, but its innovative to bring this all to the Youth in a style that attracts them. Serious pages are quickly rejected. Pages that can be tabbed quickly between and hold many types of communication, ie iphone, email, facebook and games, are about how Youth ‘toggle’ from one thing to another in a manner that boggles adults minds these days. These are the navigation tools of the next post secondary students. They will be more willing to switch on if it’s all connected.
    Copyright
    Diana Hohne.
    dhohne@tru.ca



    41. Posted by Diana Hohne on October 31st, 2009 at 7:00 pm

  41. [...] Get Ready As Corporate Sites and Social Networks Start To Connect – Jeremiah Owyang – Jul ‘09 [...]



    42. Posted by » Top 40 Blog Posts on Corporate Social Media Spotlight Ideas on November 9th, 2009 at 3:18 pm

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