As Easy as Changing a Radio Station
In 1988 I got my first car, an eight year old Chevy Citation. Powder blue. It used to be that I had six buttons from the cassette deck that let me change from one radio station to another. Journey’s “Open Arms,” on one setting, followed by Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” on the next.
Times have changed, and today, we music fans have a variety of online venues to choose from to get our melodic fix. But logging in from one source to another in the online world isn’t quite as easy as pushing a protruding black button on an AM/FM radio.
Today’s social music consumer gets content from all sorts of channels, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and Spotify, to name the biggies. Janrain, a company out of beautiful Portland, Oregon, brings all those channels together, simplifying the user experience, and enhancing the type content that these fans receive.
I met with Janrain at ExactTarget’s Connections Conference in Indy. There, the company presented its solution in a case study with one of the music industry’s largest labels. Through its integration of Janrain Engage, Interscope-Geffen-A&M (IGA) is reducing barriers to registration and building more personalized, vibrant and engaging communities for its users.
Prior to the integration, Interscope’s challenge was managing individual websites for each of its recording artists, and keeping readers navigating through each of them. Require a log in for each unique site, and online users quickly grow tiresome, and tend to go elsewhere. Therefore, a key site objective is to make it easy for registered fans to sign in a single time, and interact with the content in an ongoing communication channel.
Allowing these same IAG fans to use existing log-in credentials from sites like, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and others, makes the process even more seamless. Fan attention, time-on-site, and engagement is critical to the music label’s success in building communities, social networks, and artist following. Interscope Records recognized the need to unify the multiple streams of content into one home base for fans to get real time updates and engage with their favorite artists without having to visit multiple sites, and selected Janrain to deliver that reality. Attention, time and engagement is fragmented as people devote these precious resources across an increasing number of communities and social networks which makes it difficult for everyone to connect in a meaningful way.
Driving Rich Results
“On some of our artist’s websites, our Janrain Engage conversion rate for registration is double the rate of using a traditional email process,” remarks Lee Hammond, Director of New Media, Interscope Records. The Janrain integration has yielded a set of stellar results.
- An immediate increase in registration conversion rates of up to 10% on some sites.
- Over 50% of registration across 125 sites comes through Janrain Engage, and on some sites the rate is over 80%. With a preference of fans to register and login through a social network or identity provider.
- Clear evidence that IGA’s target audience likes to have a choice in sign in provider.
- A single integration point that provides access to a growing number of social networks and providers.
- Single authentication delivering a strong user experience, with more time on site, than in log-in forms.
- IGA has been able to optimize the user interface to encourage fan registration
The lesson to brands is this: Have multiple properties and want to keep your resources focused on loading them with valuable content, and less with managing social platform upgrades and changes?
Go back to my 1998 Chevy analogy, and simplify your authentication solution.
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