There are a number of very specific and compelling reasons for configuring your website to leverage Social Login as we will explain below but the bottom line is this: adding Social Login to your website will substantially increase the number of visitors that are actively engaged on your website and dramatically improve the quality of the connection that your organization has with these users. This increase in both quantity and quality of registered users will in turn translate into more new business generated through the site.

So lets’ look at the specific benefits that Social Login delivers:

1. Makes it Easier and More Appealing for Users to Register
No one likes to compete website registration forms. In fact, according to one study, a majority of people find this process so unpleasant, that they either leave the site upon being asked to register or enter false information in the registration fields. Obviously,for businesses working hard to grow their base of registered users, this is a big problem. But here’s the good news: your targeted users are already actively maintaining accurate identities of themselves on social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google. Better still, most users would prefer to use one of their existing social identities to register on your website. So let them.

2. Makes it Easier for Users to Return and Login Again Later
Having too many logins and passwords to remember is a common problem for all of us. In fact, forgotten logins/passwords are one of the most common causes of user frustration and loss of sales for businesses on the web. So why require your users to create and remember a unique login/password combination for your site. Instead, let them use a login/password that they are far more likely to remember – one from their Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter account. For most sites, Social Login can dramatically improve customer login success and will reduce the support costs associated with forgotten logins and passwords.

3. Improves the Integrity of the Registration Data
The profile information that users maintain on their social networks is much more likely to be current and accurate than the information that they will supply in a conventional online registration. Employing a Social Login solution makes it possible to gain access to the stored profile information from a user’s social network. That is, when a user chooses to register on a site using a public social network identity, that users’ profile information that is stored with that particular social network can be imported (with the users’ explicit permission). Depending on the network, different fields can be imported and the user can allow or disallow access to certain fields. Obviously, having correct information about your registered users is essential to whatever your online marketing strategy happens to be.

4. Creates an Ideal Communications Channel with Customers
When users choose to register using their social network credentials, they are also voluntarily creating a direct communications channel between themselves and the website they are registering with. For many years, a primary objective of every marketing campaign was to get would-be customers to voluntarily join a newsletter or email list, thereby opening a direct communications channel between the marketer and the user. Social Login yields the same result only better. And don’t we want all of our most valued website visitors to also join our extended social networks? Of course we do. In fact, many businesses will bridge this gap today by exporting the names and data gathered from their traditional website registrations and then trying to find those names on social networks (like LinkedIn or Facebook) – all in order to manually invite them to connect. That’s a lot of work and comes with a fairly high error rate. Why not let the visitor create that connection with us immediately and automatically when they register to use the website using Social Login.

Summary

So to summarize, Social Login lets people easily register on your website with just a few mouse clicks using one of their existing social identities. During this process, they can choose to share with you important information from their social network profile which largely eliminates the need for a lengthy registration form. The benefits for users include a much faster registration process and the convenience of an easier to remember login/password combination. The benefits for businesses include improved registration and login rates, the automated import of more accurate user profile data from social networks, and the creation of an ideal ongoing communications channel between the business and its users.

Implementing a Social Login Solution

The sad truth today is that many business websites are ignoring user registration and login completely. This is tragic. It doesn’t make any sense not to ask your most interested online visitors to identify themselves. That’s marketing fundamentals 101. But the problem is understandable – having a complete user registration and management capability on your website was a fairly expensive proposition until recently. Today, technology providers like Janrain, ClickPass, LoginRadius and others have developed Social Login component solutions that can be leveraged and customized to work effectively with websites of all types and sizes.

Feel free to contact us at Nickel River to learn more about Social Login solutions and whether or not it would help your business or organization to get better results from your website.

Charles Bacciocco Principal Nickel River Partners, LLC

LinkedIn Groups are specialized collections or sub-networks of professionals with similar interests, occupations, backgrounds, or other common affinities. In each group, individuals discuss relevant topics of interest. They also share ideas, make business contacts, learn opinions, obtain feedback, and simply ask and answer questions (you can actually become a “Top Expert” at this and make a name for yourself!).

There is an abundance of established LinkedIn Groups to choose from (or you can try starting your own group). You can search for groups based on your own criteria. Some search ideas include industries, technologies, companies, associations, and alumni (one of my favorite), to name a few. For example, a search for “insurance industry” groups yields 1441 groups; “insurance agency” groups comes up with 459, and “Notre Dame,” 458. I generally advise my clients to find at least ten groups where they believe their ideal customers are likely members, at least five groups where their competitors are likely members, and another three groups where they believe their most important suppliers, partners or vendors are likely members.

One way to find the groups you should join is to look at the groups that your best existing customers have joined. Remember, you can see the group memberships of anyone in your network. So pull up a customer contact and look at his or her profile. You’ll see which groups they belong to. Check them out. If the group is of a significant size and seems to have recent activity that interests you, consider joining. Another simple tactic is to look at which groups a close competitor has joined.

Once you are a member of a group, you can adjust your group membership settings to send you email updates of what is happening in that group. At the beginning, I always suggest a configuration that gives you lots of updates. After a while you will likely tire of all the emails and want to condense the updates into a weekly summary. That option is easily selected as well with a few clicks of the mouse.

With LinkedIn Groups as part of your social media strategy you can focus on a targeted audience of users and find interactive opportunities to engage with the people you are seeking. A thoughtful and focused presence on LinkedIn Groups can reap substantial rewards.

Here are a few stats to make LinkedIn Groups look even better:

• As of August 2, 2012, LinkedIn operates the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 175 million members in over 200 countries and territories.
• As of June 30, 2012, professionals are signing up to join LinkedIn at a rate of approximately two new members per second.
• Groups has been voted as the #1 most useful feature by veteran users.
• 52% of LinkedIn Users are members of at least 10 LinkedIn Groups.
• 10% of LinkedIn users (I’m in this category) are members of 50 Groups (the max allowed).

Are you leveraging the power of LinkedIn groups? Are you engaging with potential customers online? Have you increased your connections or gained recognition for yourself and your business? Share your comments and contact us at info@nickelriver.com if you would like to learn even more about enhancing your social media strategy and tools.

Charles Bacciocco Principal Nickel River Partners, LLC

By definition, social media is interactive media, it is about give-and-take and honest open communications. There is a relaxed and informal aspect to it.

However, just signing up for a Facebook and Twitter account and being willing to “dive right in” isn’t necessarily the best approach to launching your social media strategy. Like any other aspect of conducting business, there are risks associated with poor execution. As you take your first steps into the world of social media, you want your early interactions to be seen as relaxed but also knowledgeable and competent.

Every other organizational endeavor you have initiated at your company likely included research, strategy, goals, objectives and metrics for measuring success. Your social media efforts deserve no less. You need a plan and that plan needs to fit your business, your industry and, most importantly, your customers.

Start by focusing on your customers and prospects. Where are they on the social web and what are they doing? Who and where is the competition, etc. That’s the research you have to do before diving in. That means searching Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google for information about your market; homing in on the people and companies that are most relevant to your business and industry; and monitoring the conversations talking place.

Here’s the really good news. There are dozens of tools that can help you do this research. Most are easy to learn and use. Even better, many are free. Here are a few available free and paid social media tools that will get you started:

• Hootesuite
• NetVibes
• SocialMention
• Synthesio

Exploring, listening and monitoring your social media marketplace is the first real step to “doing” social media and doing it well. So get started. Sign up for the free tools and start exploring.

To learn more about social media strategy, planning, and development, contact us at Nickel River.

Dana M. Bacciocco Communications Coordinator Nickel River Partners, LLC

One of the most interesting revelations in this process is the almost ironic juxtaposition of new-school vs old-school marketing and customer service approaches that are made possible (and even required for success) in social media. Said another way, social marketers are finding that to be successful on the social web, business leaders would be well-served to pay as much attention to the best business practices of Main Street as they do to Madison Avenue.
Relationships are a traditional anchor of commerce. Open communication and trust-fostering personal relationships have been at the core of doing business since the first coins changed hands. This is because business has always involved risk. And the tried and true human approach to mitigating this risk has been to do business, where possible, with people they trust.

Mass marketing channels of the last century (television, radio, print media, direct-mail and even web 1.0) didn’t support the development of personal relationships very well. In fact, one could argue that the whole concept of modern brand marketing is designed to overcome this very inconvenience. Over a period of decades, consumers have been taught to trust brand names (instead of people), which is a far more practical proposition for a national company seeking to sell products to millions of buyers.

Humans still prefer relationships when they can have them. Historically, it was common to have a relationship with providers of goods and services, e.g., hardware stores, grocers, personal insurance agents. Studies clearly show that people still desire and value such relationships. The social web makes all this possible again, albeit with significant differences that need to be considered.

Take the time to consider your business; your customers, and your competition. Then gather your team and ask yourselves some fundamental questions:

• What are our customer most interested in?
• What would our customers really like to hear from us?
• What would they most like to be able to ask us about?
• What could we do for our customers on the web that would really set us apart in this industry?
• What could we do to inspire their loyalty and advocacy?

Bring some old-school thinking to your next strategic marketing conversation.

Dana M. Bacciocco Communications Coordinator Nickel River Partners, LLC

When it’s time for dinner it really helps to have meal ideas and ingredients ready, right? It’s a bummer to get to 5:00 and try to come up with an idea for dinner beyond frozen pizza or fast food. However, spending time at the beginning of the week to write down a couple weeks’ worth of meal ideas, make the shopping list, and go to the market, makes it easier. So it is with blogging. Preparation ahead of time pays off by saving time and preventing writer’s block when it’s time to blog.

Consider creating your own editorial calendar for blogging. Brainstorm and research topics and themes. You will keep up with trends in your business and in technology and generate a stream of ideas. Your blog can be like a mini-marketing plan. It can showcase your personality, expertise and interests and draw in readers. Your editorial calendar for blogging can be plan for you to show your solutions to problems and focus on reaching certain markets, too. When you have your central database of ideas, your stocked cupboard, you’ll also have a place to enter more ideas when they come up.

It doesn’t look good to find a blog abandoned or out-of-date. Plan your blogs, keep posts relevant and up-to-date, help readers find your blog, come to your website, and learn even more when they find how relevant and consistent your blog is. That reminds me of another idea. . . how and where to post that blog. That’s next Thursday’s blog entry.

Dana M. Bacciocco Communications Coordinator Nickel River Partners, LLC

Okay, I’m being a little dramatic; that’s a little bit overstated, but not by much. Today the web is social, and that changes everything.

People have learned to expect much more from the web than the typical company website offers. It’s not enough anymore to have a collection of nicely formatted pages that tell people who you are as a business and what you do. People expect more. They want to know more about the people at your company and what they are about. They want to know what your customers think of your service. They want the ability to engage you (and your maybe even other customers) in a conversation before they decide to buy.

In short, many of the the old marketing metaphors (a megaphone comes to mind) no longer apply.  The paradigm has been inverted.  Push is pull; up is largely down; and companies no longer lead the marketing waltz. Instead, they follow the customer’s lead.  As a result, company websites without social web functionality are rapidly becoming obsolete.

Consider most of the business websites you see. Most are largely static electronic brochures, not that different from their glossy paper cousins of the 1990s or the garish yellow pages ads that they replaced.

There are a number of obvious flaws with these websites:

• There’s no shared knowledge between users
• No relationship development
• No open dialogues
• No crowd sourced innovation
• No viral marketing mechanisms
• No community building (and therefore no possibility for customer advocacy)

The Next Generation Company Website is a Social Website.

In a social company website, customers have a voice and customers can interact with other customers. Yes, this is scary. It’s also a huge opportunity. Imagine having real-time access to customer feedback on new services or pricing. Imagine a direct window into how your customers feel about your competitors, about their biggest concerns and fears, or the things they admire the most about you and your company. Imagine having your customers advocating for you, effectively selling your products and services for you! All of these insights and possibilities are part of the experience on a social company website.

The next generation of company websites will be powered by social web interactions, allowing companies to create customized branded digital communities – online spaces where their employees, customers and prospects can share ideas and information, collaborate, solve problems and even have some fun.

These sites will be called Social Websites and and they will serve as the hub of a company’s social media presence, woven directly into the fabric of the social web, mobile-accessible and tightly integrated with Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, etc. but controlled and branded to the business.

Take a look at your website and ask some simple questions:

• Are people able to engage with us (our staff) in a social way on our own branded company website?
• Can they “friend” our employees? Can they “follow” what they say and what they share?
• Can they “comment” on our products and/or services?
• Can they observe other people have conversations with our staff on the website?
• Can they subscribe to those conversations in order to “follow” the dialogue? Can they jump in if they want?
• Can they easily move back and forth between the public social networks to our company website?
• Can they easily share content across both?
• Can we identify users on our website? Do we know them by their social network identities?
• Can we then socially interact with our customers and prospects both on our website and on LinkedIn and Facebook?

If you are answering yes to most of these, you are doing very well. If not, don’t worry, you will be soon.

The next generation of company website technology has arrived.  Don’t wait for the competition to seize your market space on the social web. You can get there first.

Think Social – Act Social!

Charles Bacciocco Principal Nickel River Partners, LLC

So it occurred to me that we don’t yet have a consensus as to what happens when a company realizes the potential for marketing via Facebook. Does this mean the end of the company website? Is Facebook supplemental to the company website? Or maybe it’s the other way around? Should the two be integrated perhaps to leverage the strengths of each? Maybe the two will evolve to combine into something new, a hybrid perhaps?

Well, we think we have the answer to that very important question. We call it “ActSocial” and it’s our very simple solution to a pretty complicated problem. How can you best position your company’s critically important investment in Facebook?

Charles Bacciocco Principal Nickel River Partners, LLC

A few days ago, I was talking with a friend about the range of disparity among insurance agents in terms of their adoption of social media. As with everything that is new and evolving, we both agreed that the range of disparity could be thought of in terms of a spectrum, with agencies spread fairly evenly across its full width.

After we talked, I started to think more about it. It occurred to me that in each U.S. state, that same spectrum must be present – with a few agencies out in front, followed by some trailing close behind, some back a little farther, and some still farther back, maybe not even started yet. But there were 50 out in front.

Who were these 50 most socially innovative agents, each out in front in their respective states? It’s a big country. My friend knew several. I knew a few. But for the most part, I realized, no one had yet attempted to identify and recognize these important social media innovators in our industry.

Until now, that is.

The Forward FiftyTM

I am compiling a directory of what I am calling the Forward FiftyTM – the 50 most innovative and forward-leaning insurance agents in America in terms of social media technology adoption, integration and success.

Why is it important to know who they are? Because, if you believe, as I do, that Social Media will prove to be a vitally important and empowering technology for the independent insurance agency system, then it’s important that these firms be recognized for their innovation. By taking risks, learning new skills and exploring new technologies, they are not only benefiting their clients, employees and carrier partners, they are also blazing a trail for the rest of us to follow. The lessons that their successes and failures can teach us are numerous and valuable.

So we are looking for the Forward FiftyTM – the 50 agencies across the U.S. that have made the most significant progress in adopting a successful and practical social media marketing and communications strategy.

We will use three primary areas of evaluation to determine which agencies should be listed in the Forward FiftyTM directory…

1. Strategy – Has the agency made Social Media a clear and focused part of its ongoing business strategy? Is the strategy thought-out, professional, balanced, and adaptive?
2. Application – is the agency actively and persistently applying itself in Social Media. It is leveraging its website and other appropriate technology tools to pursue its social media strategy? Is it experimenting, innovating, and adapting to customer needs and marketplace developments?
3. Results – is the agency seeing and measuring tangible results? Are those metrics being applied to improve the effort? Are there social media “best practices” that can gleaned from these results.

If you know of an agency (perhaps your own) that should be considered, please nominate them by contacting us at nominations@forwardfifty.org or by participating in the discussion thread which we will post (and put a link here) on LinkedIn.com.

We will post the directory of the Forward FiftyTM on our website at www.NickelRiver.com and at www.ForwardFifty.org. I expect we will name not only those agencies that we deem to be currently the best in their respective states but also the very close contenders as well. It’s hard to imagine in California or New York there aren’t at least half a dozen great agencies really innovating in this critical area. We want to recognize these achievements as well.

I am also going to ask a few well-qualified individuals and organizations to join me in evaluating the nominated agencies. Their names will be announced and posted soon. If you too are interested in helping us, please contact me.
_______________________________________________________________

Chip Bacciocco
Principal
Nickel River Partners, LLC
“We think every website should be social”

Dana M. Bacciocco Communications Coordinator Nickel River Partners, LLC

Over the summer, you assembled your team and got them pointed in a new direction – toward social media as a business-critical marketing channel.  They embraced the idea and collectively began investing the time and energy to get up-to-speed.

Now they are fully engaged and executing your plan enthusiastically. You’re starting to see some results…

1. Your hard-earned new Facebook fans are impressed with your updates and posts. They visit your website hoping to find more useful information.
2. A well-respected expert in your industry now follows you on Twitter.  He has been monitoring your traffic and wants to know more about you and your business so he checks out your website to learn more. 
3. A new contact (and potential customer) on LinkedIn saw your status update regarding the webinar you are hosting next week and goes to your site for details.

But wait!  Will your website represent you and your business well in front of a social-media-savvy audience?! Does your website leverage all the work you have done in your social media efforts and engage your customers in a dialogue? Does it amplify the marketing message and brand image you are trying to convey?

If your website looks more like an online brochure and less like a customer-engaging business resource community, then you have a real problem.  And it’s a problem that is very common these days. Success on the social web requires a complete social web strategy. And perhaps the most important tool you can have in that regard is a social-web-enabled website, one that serves as your social media hub. 

Here’s what you need to do:
  
1. Convert your website into a “social website” and your social media hub.

The electronic brochure websites of yesterday are wholly inadequate to the challenge presented by the social web. To participate meaningfully online today (and more so every day going forward), your business needs a website that allows you to leverage the power of the social web, with all of its extended functionality, information and relationship context.  In other words, you need a social web platform that enables your website to communicate and integrate with other applications across the social web and serve as your central social media hub – upon which you will showcase all your posts, blogs, tweets, pictures and social media activity.

Your Social Website allows you to…

• Showcase your experience, expertise and resources.
• Build a branded community of followers in your target market.
• Create a valued resource for customers, partners and employees.
• Nurture a dialogue-oriented marketing campaign instead of a monologue-based one.
• Leverage the long and organic arms of the greater social web.
• Develop, maintain and encourage relationship development between all users.
• Create an environment in which you have frequent opportunities to offer solutions (i.e. to sell).

When you post a link to your new blog on LinkedIn or tweet about a new event or give Facebook fans your take on a recent merger in your industry, you will bring them back to your website where your valuable expert content is posted and you can engage them directly with a product or service solution.

With a social website, you can pursue a very efficient and effective strategy called the “hub-and-spokes” strategy.  Rather than trying to post content manually and repetitively to 8 different networks, you post valuable content only on your website and then leverage the social distribution features of your social website to “publish” that post in a shorter form to multiple social networks  across the social web.  Each published post contains a link that points back to the blog on your website where the content can be accessed in detail and where followers can find even more. And of course, since your website is socially enabled, when they come to read your highly informative blog, they can use their LinkedIn or Facebook credentials to register and login to your site to reread the complete blog and access your library of additional informational content on related topics. 

Now they are members of your online community! And you have a direct channel to communicate with them!

2. Create a digital business community.

At the heart of the social web is the concept of community. Community goes beyond the borders of a single network. Imagine the power of managing an active community of all your customers, prospects, partners, employees, etc. Such a place becomes a showcase of your products and services and an incubator of new ideas, new products and new business opportunities.

Your social website will be a vehicle for building and nurturing that community. Make sure it has all the standard functional capabilities of any social network; features like user registration, user profiles, friending, following, commenting, rating, liking, sharing, posting, etc. All of these are vital to building a vibrant social community of business users. Your website should also be able to broadcast all your social activity as an RSS feed. This makes it very easy to syndicate your content and activities to other sites. And it makes it easy for your followers to stay fully informed of everything you are doing.

In the new world of the social web, your social media activity says a lot about your business, your brand and your style.  Having a social website gives you a place to concentrate and feature all of your social media activity and content in one place.

3. Build your following.

Fans aren’t just a Facebook concept. They are a universal social networking concept and a very real and valuable business marketing concept as well. 

You want to create unique content that offers real value to your community members, information that they critically need.   Make it easy for them to follow your blog/site by providing links to your RSS feed and email updates.  As you blog, invite them to post their comments below each blog post. Make it easy for your community members to interact, ask questions, make suggestions and keep in touch.

4. Start Today

It may help to check out this video we recorded on the subject which you can access here: http://www.nickelriver.com/?page_id=1475  And, of course, feel free to contact us at Nickel River (http://www.nickelriver.com) and we’ll do what we can to help you get started with a social web strategy and a social web platform to execute that strategy.

Charles Bacciocco Principal Nickel River Partners, LLC

Of course the same is true for whatever you want to learn about the social web, social networking and social media marketing – there are hundreds of YouTube videos on the subject.

So I thought I would save my readers some time by listing what I consider to be the top ten must-watch social media explanation videos on YouTube.

Here they are, in a sort of logical order:

Let’s start with the Why behind social media.  Every business considering an investment in Social Media is going to ask Why? and consider its potential return on investment.  Here is Erik Qualman‘s video, “This is Social Media ROI“…

Next, lets step back and look at the big picture.  I think Erik‘s other well known video “Socialnomics 3.0″ provides some useful perspective…

Time for some fundamentals.  Let’s look at a great whiteboard explanation of how Social Networking works.  This is “Social Networking in Plain English” by Commoncraft…

Here’s another classic from the whiteboard illustrators at Commoncraft – “Social Media in Plain English“.   The story illustrates the innate value of Social Media functionality though a clever narrative about a town that likes Ice Cream…

I don’t particularly like the music or the artwork in this one but the substance is excellent.  This is “Social Media Explained Visually” by Say It Visually…

This video is more than a year old but I really recommend it for those wanting to understand the logical trajectory of the Social Web as business communications technology.  Web Strategist Jeremiah Owyang analyzes and explains the five eras of the social web in “The Future of the Social Web“…

As Twitter tutorials for beginners go, I like this one: “How to Use Twitter” by Howcast…

There are a number of tools you need to be aware of that can help you manage all your social media activity in a reasonably organized way.  These apps are big time savers.  Although this video is over a year old, its concise explanations are still current.  Covers TweetDeck, Hootsuite, PingFm and NetVibes nicely…

The newest kid on the block might end up owning the block.  Here’s an “Overview of the Google+ Project” by (who else) Google...

This last one is a good summation and I hope will help motivate you to embrace a social media strategy for your company. This is “Social Media for All” by Davanti Digital…

Well, that’s all ten.  There are dozens more of course, but those are the ten that I think everyone in business needs to see, at least one time.  If anyone has additional suggestions, I would welcome them of course.  If I think your suggestion has broad appeal, I’ll post it to the list.  (Hey, we’re allowed to have more than 10 if we want)

Charles Bacciocco Principal Nickel River Partners, LLC