If you have ever logged on to a site and skipped the registration process by clicking the Facebook log-in button, then you have used a social sign-in.
Yesterday I was talking to some of my digital partners and I asked them how many of their current projects include social sign-in.
“All of them,” they said. “For any site where there’s a user account.”
A “user account” isn’t strictly something limited to e-commerce. A user account is any frame of customization applied to a site which otherwise wouldn’t be customized. In many cases, sites are useless without recognizing who you are and what you want.
My blog, for example, can recognize you as you comment so it can keep track of your comments no matter what blog you make them on (even now, very few radio industry sites can do this).
What’s the point of a Facebook news feed without it being your feed or the feed of one of your friends?
CNN and Huffington Post enable social log-in, and the feature set on HuffPo in particular is quite powerful.
Some time ago I had a conversation with Janrain, a company which specializes in this type of sign-on (you might want to take another look at that interview).
As of yet there is very little social sign-in for radio assets, but that will be changing soon.
In order for people to sign-in there needs to be an experience on the back end of sign-in which justifies the effort and provides value worth registering for.
If I could customize your online stream, for example, I’d want to sign in.
If your listener club kept track of my points and what I was cashing them in for, I’d want to sign in.
If I could listen to your stream and interact with my friends on your site while I listen, I’d want to sign in.
If I wanted to specify which advertisers I wanted more information from, I’d want to sign in.
The days of radio sites being online brochures are numbered. Soon, you will have as many sites as you have consumers who visit them.
The future is the radio sandbox, where consumers play together in the presence of your brands.
It’s not about you – it’s about us – in your presence.