Identity management is becoming a big business thanks to an intensely competitive environment in which more and more corporate entities need to know about the visitors logging into their website. It has become an inevitable hazard to extract as much information possible about them and then use it to understand their needs, tastes and priorities.
Social features on sites
In an endeavor to develop stronger and meaningful online relations with prospective clients, they are offering social features such as interactive games or status updates to Facebook. And in every case what they need is insightful information. So it matters how a website can actually identify the right customers and analyze their behavior patterns, to ensure higher conversions or to sell them more stuff.
Online identity of users
To cater to their needs, many start-ups that deal with aspects related to online identity have emerged on the scene. This is where Social Identity management comes into play. It lets users register/ login to a website with their respective social identities as a brand goes on to collect and manage their permission-based useful social data.
1. The Social Identity Management module: It is supposed to offer the advanced user data processing and management, including a cloud-based registration system, which also supports traditional login and social login, allowing websites to maintain, retain and apply relevant user data in a cloud-hosted database across different web properties.
2. Social Plugins: The idea is take a commerce site ‘social’ with a suite of plugins that will allow users to engage with content and also with each other utilizing their social identities.
3. Gamification: This involves incentivizing value-accruing on-site behaviors of users by rewarding with points, badges and some special offers.
Launched as a widget on MySpace, Gigya has diversified into the domain of social logins. It claims to work with more than 500,000 sites, enabling over 1 billion logins each month on to a site through close to two dozen social services. It serves as an intermediary between them and the business sites of those like Frito-Lay, Nike, Sony, and Fox among others.
After it verifies your identity via Twitter or Facebook, for example, the service also passes along whatever social information you’ve given permission to share to the various commerce sites. This may include your nickname, birthday and your friends. It does not share any of your activities on that site back to the network unless you opt to publish something (specific) from there.
To help sites benefit from the Pinterest phenomenon, it has also added the functionality for users to ‘Pin’ images with ease via the Gigya Share Bar. Businesses by doing so empower their target audience to share as well as curate site images, driving referral traffic from the popular social site. Many sites do feature a Pinterest button across their content pages on the Share Bar courtesy Gigya.
