CNN – Trying to make sites more trustworthy with users’ personal data

There’s a lack of trust between Internet users and the websites that collect their private data.

These sites aren’t going to stop gathering personal information anytime soon, but one company hopes to make the exchange less mysterious when people sign on to a site using a social-media profile.

Logging in to third-party sites or commenting systems with Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Google+ and other social profiles is common — 53% of people have done it, according to a recent study by Gigya, which handles these social logins for major sites such as Pepsi, CBS and Verizon. But Gigya is more interested in the other 47% who don’t use social logins and what it can do to change their minds.

Forbes – Will A Seal Of Social Privacy Increase Trust In Websites?

Startup Gigya is launching a new Internet certification to try to provide more consumer trust in websites about where their social data is going.

SocialPrivacy is Gigya’s new certification, which it has has organized with its partner the Future of Privacy Forum.

AdWeek – Gigya Gets Ahead of Social Login Privacy Concerns

Consumers have taken to logging onto their websites using their Facebook or Twitter accounts in droves. But in Washington, D.C., the increasingly popular practice, which allows a website or mobile app to get instant access to a consumer’s account information from those social platforms, has raised privacy concerns.
To get ahead of policymakers and regulators, Gigya, a company that manages social logins and other interactive solutions for websites, launched Thursday a social privacy certification and seal that reassures consumers their data will not be abused or compromised.

AllThingsD – Gigya Launches Privacy Certification Program for Social Data

In conjunction with the Future of Privacy Forum, social infrastructure company Gigya launched its social privacy certification initiative on Thursday. Businesses handling social data can be audited for best practices by Gigya’s privacy team, in exchange for a stamp of approval to display on their sites. The initiative comes as Facebook and Twitter continue to court thousands of small businesses and app developers to integrate with the social networks.

IBTIMES – Gigya Meets Social Privacy Concerns Head On With New Certification Process

With the proliferation of web-based applications and websites that require users to create an account in order to access all of its content, many developers have taken to allowing their apps’ users to sync their accounts with pre-existing social media profiles such as Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) or Twitter. But while the practice makes perfect sense for simplicity’s sake and saves users the need to remember countless different passwords and combinations, it has also raised a number of privacy concerns as personal data extends beyond the borders of the social networks in which they were originally created.

MediaPost – Gigya Rolls Out Privacy Seal For Sites With Social Log-Ins

Social networking technology firm Gigya is launching a new privacy seal of approval for Web companies that people to register and sign in through Facebook, Twitter or other social media platforms.

The SocialPrivacy Certification Seal aims to assure consumers that their activity won’t be blasted to their Facebook friends or Twitter followers without their consent. To obtain a seal, publishers must promise to refrain from selling user social data, posting to social feeds without permission, engage in social data-based email marketing campaigns without permission, and sending private messages to users’ friends without permission.

VentureBeat – Gigya launches partner ecosystem to turn social, gamification into cash

So you have a million likes on Facebook and your latest sweet nothing on Twitter was retweeted 10,000 times. How many dollars found their convoluted ways through all those pipes and tubes into your pocket?

That’s a question social infrastructure company Gigya is looking to answer.

Yahoo Finance – Gigya on Pace to Nearly Triple Revenue in 2012

Leading Provider of Social Infrastructure for Business Logs Astounding Growth, Now Working With More Than 600 of World’s Largest Companies

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA–(Marketwire – Oct 30, 2012) – Today, Gigya, the leading provider of social infrastructure for business, announced that it finished the third quarter of 2012 with record growth in key business metrics. The company is on pace to nearly triple its 2011 revenue following the seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit sales growth. During the quarter, Gigya also added 85 new domestic and international clients to a roster that now includes more than 600 brands, publishers, ecommerce companies and travel sites. Ecommerce and travel sites have become Gigya’s fastest growing categories with lighthouse enterprises such as Redbox, Adidas, Bad Boy Marketing Group, Jelly Belly, Alitalia, and Crocs all signing contracts with the social infrastructure company

MarketWatch – Gigya Selected by AlwaysOn as an OnHollywood 100 Winner

Gigya, the leading provider of social infrastructure for business, today announced that it has been chosen by AlwaysOn as one of the OnHollywood 100 winners. Inclusion in the OnHollywood 100 signifies leadership amongst its peers and game-changing approaches and technologies that are likely to disrupt existing and entrenched Hollywood entertainment. Gigya was specially selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team and industry experts spanning the globe based on a set of five criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz.

ClickZ – Gigya Aims to Take Your Community Data Out of IT and Into Marketing

Last month Gigya launched User Management 360 which is a revamp of their previous social login infrastructure. The change heralds three important new features for content publishers who want to build an online community. The first change is called Registration-as-a-Service (RaaS) which allows anyone to create registration pages within minutes. Anyone who has had to build their own registration form will know that this is no mean feat. Businesses have previously needed to build custom registration systems on their own, but now someone without any technical know-how could get this system up and running in no time. The instant registration system supports both social login and also your own custom form to provide users with a choice of sign-in options and benefits.

Information Week – Gigya Helps One Retailer Tap Into Pinterest

After contracting with Gigya to manage its social infrastructure, book and specialty toy seller Indigo sees huge traffic boost from Pinterest.

Search Engine Watch – Gigya Aims to Take Your Community Data Out of IT and Put Into Marketing

Last month Gigya launched User Management 360 which is a revamp of their previous social login infrastructure. The change heralds three important new features for content publishers who want to build an online community. The first change is called Registration-as-a-Service (RaaS) which allows anyone to create registration pages within minutes. Anyone who has had to build their own registration form will know that this is no mean feat. Businesses have previously needed to build custom registration systems on their own, but now someone without any technical know-how could get this system up and running in no time. The instant registration system supports both social login and also your own custom form to provide users with a choice of sign-in options and benefits.

Eweek – Oracle Links All of Its SaaS Business Apps to Social Media Platform

The Oracle Social Media Platform, introduced at Oracle OpenWorld Oct. 2, brings social media functions to all Oracle business applications delivered in the cloud, CEO Larry Ellison says.

SAN FRANCISCO—Oracle CEO Larry Ellison introduced his company’s Social Relationship Management Platform at the Oracle OpenWorld conference with the claim that it differs from all competing enterprise social media products in that it is a platform, not just an application.

Destination CRM – Gigya’s CEO: Social Data Redefines Marketing

You could describe Gigya as that company that helps big brands like Pepsi and Verizon build out their social infrastructure. With more than 500 enterprises on their client roster – reaching one billion-plus users per month – Gigya is on a quest to connect online business with social platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

TechCrunch – Social Data: Gigya Launches User Management Platform To Put Marketers In The Driver’s Seat

Businesses understand the importance of implementing a social strategy in the Facebook Era — and not just because it’s cool, but because it can have a real effect on user engagement. Just ask Salesforce, which recently acquired Buddy Media for $643 million or Oracle, who followed suit by snatching up Vitrue for $300 million. Over the last five or so years, we’ve more or less seen the maturation of social media management (and marketing), but Gigya is one of a group of companies that believes social infrastructure is finally emerging as the next big business in the Social World.

Mashable – How BYU Is Scoring a Digital Touchdown in College Sports

With a passionate fan base, brand-building religious affiliation and nationally renowned football program that operates as an independent free of responsibilities to a particular conference, Brigham Young University has a lot to build on from a sports marketing perspective.

Forbes – Listening To Social Media Cues Doesn’t Mean Ceding Control

“A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is – it is what consumers tell each other it is.” – Scott Cook, co-founder, Intuit

“Our head of social media is the customer.” – Unknown spokesperson, McDonald’s

These social media adages are scary enough to give any CMO the chills. The lifeblood of online marketing before the Age of the Consumer has centered around control – of brand, user experience, messaging, conversations. Marketers have been told countless times over the last few years that social meant the end of control. You were told that no longer would your users linger on your carefully manicured website, absorbing your delicately crafted messaging as they click on products and articles. You were told that consumers now had the power, and, in some ways, that has become the reality. But that’s not the whole story. Social business has evolved to the point to where marketers are taking back their brands and, by using social infrastructure, they are reaching, understanding and influencing their customers like never before.

VentureBeat – Verizon Wireless gamifies its site and gets 30 percent more logins

Verizon Wireless has “gamified” its community web site and received a big boost in traffic as a result.

Gamification is the use of game-like mechanics to increase engagement with non-game activities. It’s becoming a popular way to boost interest in everything from corporate web sites to education. Verizon employed gamification vendor Gigya, which was brought aboard through digital agency Modal. Gigya considers the implementation to be a case study in gamification.

VentureBeat – Indigo: Pinterest doubled our social traffic and increased conversions 50%

Everyone knows Pinterest is huge and growing, and driving huge amounts of traffic … and all online retailers want a piece of it. The question, of course, is how.

Indigo, the largest Canadian online bookseller, was no different. Working with Gigya, the social infrastructure company, Indigo sharply increased social sharing and doubled social traffic in just two months.

Mashable – How to Choose the Right Social Marketing Platform

While much of the tech and financial world has been focused on Facebook’s post-IPO performance, something else has happened that is starting to define the social marketplace. Savvy firms like Salesforce.com and Oracle have strategically gobbled up some of the top social vendors. These acquisitions signify that social business has become big business. The formulation of meaningful social categories is also taking shape, and marketers — particularly CMOs — should take note as they look to gain real ROI from social.

NYTimes Bits – Big Business’s Social Media Buying Frenzy

Judging from the deals, social media for business is moving from start-up to establishment faster than you can tweet “buyout.” Several billion dollars have been spent on mergers and acquisitions in the sector over the past several months, with no sign of letup.

TechCrunch – Gigya Grabs $15.3M From Benchmark, Adobe To “Socialize” Your Business

On the Web, it’s all about engagement. Site owners, administrators, content producers, eCommerce companies — and everyone in between — are constantly trying to find better ways to keep their customers engaged and interacting with their content and products. With the share-pocalypse at hand, brands big and small have to find ways to better utilize and harness social media in their content, customer relation, and marketing strategies. Do this, or get left behind — it’s the directive of eBusiness in the era of Facebook and Twitter.

Venture Beat – Gigya, the startup that adds social to brand name apps, gets $15.3M

Finding an identity all its own, Gigya, a six-year-old startup powering the social functionality behind brand name applications and reaching more than a billion people each month, has raised $15.3 million in its fifth round of funding.

GigaOm – Eyeing international growth, Gigya raises $15.3M

Gigya, a startup that provides businesses with a suite of tools to make their sites more social, announced today that it had raised $15.3 million in new funding from Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications, as well as the Mayfield Fund, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Adobe.

Fortune – How to Save Social Readers From Extinction

Users are fleeing pioneering media social readers on Facebook. Here’s why — and what publishers can do to save themselves.

TechCrunch – Gamification: Insights and Emerging Trends

Gamification and Social often go hand in hand: Just as games come in single-player and multi-player flavors, gamification can be oriented towards solo or social play. For many companies, implementing gamification may first require installing social plumbing. As an example, Mayfield portfolio company Gigya (www.gigya.com) is a SaaS social infrastructure company that provides a suite of tools (like Social Login) that enables any business to add a social layer to their Web presence. Interestingly, they have found that users who are logged-in with Social Login spent 30% more time on-site than users who sign in with native site login.

Infoweek – 7 Examples: Put Gamification To Work

Gigya provides websites with end-to-end social infrastructure. On the front end, Gigya’s Social Plugins and Social Gamification products create a “Facebook-like” social experience to drive engagement.

Venture Beat – Gigya helps Boyd Gaming casino firm gamify its loyalty program

Casino companies know how to treat their high rollers right, but it’s about time they started giving rewards and achievements to their players as well. That’s why Boyd Gaming Corporation of Las Vegas is teaming up with Gigya, which will “gamify” Boyd’s online platform.

MarketWatch – Gigya Touches Down in London

Several up-and-comers were also on hand to strut their wares and rub shoulders with the more-established hierarchy. Gigya CEO Patrick Salyer stood out as one of the more compelling presenters on day one of the two-day event.

Mashable – 5 Ways Spotify Is Pioneering the Hyper-Social Business Model

Spotify has experienced meteoric growth since integrating with the new Facebook Open Graph in September. It is quickly becoming the leader in streaming music, an already crowded category.

Spotify’s growth and its deep connection to Facebook are not coincidental either. In fact, the company’s success is due in large part to its deep Facebook integration and the incredibly balanced user experience it offers.

Social Media Examiner – How Social Login Enhances Websites

Do you manage a site that encourages people to create user accounts? Are you looking for an easy way to tap the power of Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to quickly create user identities?

CNBC – VC’s Big Bets at Montgomery Tech Conference

SOCIAL MEDIA INFRASTRUCTURE

And of course everyone loves to talk about Facebook. There are a slew of companies here built on top of the Facebook platform. Many of them offer the infrastructure for big brands and other media companies to interact with them. Gigya.com provides the technology for websites to allow users to login using their Facebook login. Moxie Software provides the technology for companies to manage all their social interactions.

New York Times – Identity Companies: Paid to Know About You

I was at the Montgomery & Co. investor conference in Los Angeles this week, where 186 promising start-ups present their businesses to over 1000 potential investors. The companies are private, so they don’t give away too much financial information.

Entrepreneur – How Three Businesses Scored Big with Gamification

Ready or not, gamification is taking the business world by storm.

For anyone unfamiliar with gamification, it’s the application of game-like elements such as challenges, points, badges and levels to business and other nongame websites. An estimated 70 percent of the top 2,000 public companies in the world will have at least one gamified application by 2014, Stamford, Conn.-based research firm Gartner Inc. predicts.

Patrick Salyer, CEO of gamification platform Gigya, believes there are two keys to success with gamification. “One is making sure that all gamified elements are inherently social,” he says. “That is, don’t restrict engagement to the internal site community. Award points for activities that reach users’ social [networks] to bring in referral traffic.”

Forbes – Gigya Now Reaches 1 Billion Users Per Month

Startup Gigya, which provides a variety of social networking technologies for websites, now reaches more than 1 billion users per month, the company says.

Gigya wants to be a one-stop shop for websites by providing features such as social log-in, commenting, sharing features and gamification. In other words Gigya can add Facebook or Zynga-style features to websites that are trying to figure out how to catch up in a new social media world. CEO Patrick Salyer wants Gigya to be considered in the same class as the Facebooks, Twitters, and LinkedIns of the world. ”Our mission is to make every site social,” Salyer says. “We’re not going to stop until people think about us with those large social players.”

MercuryNews – Facebook IPO will mean big business for thousands of smaller companies

Patrick Salyer doesn’t work at Facebook. He doesn’t own any of its stock. But he’s one of thousands of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and around the world who stand to make a lot of money when the Menlo Park social network goes public later this year.

Salyer, 30, is chief executive of Gigya, a Palo Alto startup that helps clients such as Nike and Home Depot reach customers via their Facebook accounts. He said Facebook’s filing Wednesday to go public — which unveiled a trove of data about the company’s revenue and customer growth — will be “a wake-up call for businesses” to step up spending on social media and benefit companies like his.

Mashable – Can You Tweet Me Now? Verizon Gets Gamified

Verizon is joining the gamified millions by adding social login, rewards and other game mechanics to Verizon Insider, the company’s community hub and news site.

Verizon Insider has been around for awhile, but Verizon decided to take the gamification plunge as a way to give its community a stronger voice and highlight its social offerings. Verizon paired up with Gigya, a company that specializes in making sites social, to add game mechanics to its site.

Forbes – How Social Can Double Your Site’s Page Views

As seen with last year’s high-profile IPOs — such as for Zynga (Nasdaq:ZNGA) and LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) — social is generating billions in wealth. Of course, mainstream companies are also trying to get a piece of the action.

To help things along, a growing number of software companies are building social platforms to boost performance. One is Gigya. The company’s system reaches more than 700 million users across nearly 500 enterprises. Customers include Pepsi (NYSE:PEP), Verizon (NYSE:VZ) and Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO).

Investor Place – Exclusive: Taulli Talks With Gigya CEO Salyer

Patrick Salyer is the CEO of Gigya, which develops technologies to help companies manage their marketing campaigns across platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD). It reaches more than 700 million users, and clients include Pepsi (NYSE:PEP), Verizon (NYSE:VZ), Sprint (NYSE:S) and Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO).

IPO Playbook recently had a chance to interview Salyer. Here are some of his thoughts on social media and trends for 2012:

All Facebook – Facebook Plugins Keep People On Websites 50% Longer

Web surfers who log into third-party sites with Facebook Connect spend an average of 50 percent more time on those sites, and view twice as many pages. That’s according to research from Gigya, which provides social plug-ins for websites.

TechCrunch – Want More Stickiness? Users Logging In Through Social Networks Spend 50% More Time On Site

Site owners, administrators, web business owners, content producers, and everyone in between, are always trying to find the best ways to encourage visitors to spend more time on their sites. It’s hard enough getting people there in the first place, but keeping visitors and customers on the site once there? No walk in the park. Just ask Groupon.

Again, sites can live or die based on engagement. And as one might expect, there are a thousand ways to increase engagement, and there’s obviously been a lot of noise around social as a great facilitator of a stickier (and more enjoyable) user experiences for websites, apps, and businesses. Approaches to making sites and apps more “social” vary — whether it’s by focusing on creating more sharable content, adding comment sections, forums, etc., or by adding re-tweet buttons, “like”, or share buttons, etc. to encourage visitors to share on their social networks of choice.

BizReport – Site Visitors Using Social Logins Stay Longer, View More Pages

If you’re looking to increase the stickiness of your website and up the number of pages viewed by visitors then social logins could be the answer.

According to Gigya’s recent research, illustrated with an infographic, those who log in to third-party sites using Facebook Connect spend, on average, 50% more time on a website and view twice as many pages.

Google – An Invitation to Social Sites to Integrate with Google Analytics

Every day, millions of people share and engage with content online. But most sharing doesn’t happen on the site where it was published, it happens throughout the social web. Marketers and publishers are looking for a comprehensive view of all interactions with their content – on and off their site – and so we’re working hard to make this happen.

Information Week – Pepsi Creates Private Label Social Network For X-Factor

Pepsi is demonstrating how a standard social software platform can allow a brand to quickly launch a private social website, in this case to augment on-air marketing.

The Pepsi Sound Off is a social TV experience, where fans of “The X-Factor” talent competition program meet to chat about the contestants and anything else they want to talk about. Members can login throughout the week, “but it really comes to life when ‘The X-Factor’ is on,” Shiv Singh, global head of Pepsi Digital, explained in an interview. “It functions as Twitter on steroids for all the X-Factor fans across the country, and for every action they take, they are earning points in the background that improve their rank on a leaderboard, so there is a whole game mechanics behind it.”

TechCrunch – Gigya Launches Platform To Give Businesses Access To Users’ Complete Social Identities

Many companies have begun to realize that social is not just a new channel or a new fad, it’s a new way of doing business. But learning the ropes, how to use social networks and social channels, and optimize and tailor social features for one’s business is easier said than done. This is where Gigya enters the equation. The startup offers a SaaS technology (or a social CRM platform, if you will) to help businesses make their websites social, integrating their online appendages with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. and consolidating the best social features into one solution.

Mashable – “The X Factor” Gets Social With Help From Pepsi”

Pepsi is diving head first into social TV with the launch of two digital platforms, Sound Off and Pulse, to accompany The X Factor, which is new to the U.S. this year.

Sound Off is a social layer where fans of the show can comment, share posts and gain points to earn X Factor-based rewards. Pulse is a visualization tool that collects X Factor comments, tweets and Facebook posts into a loosely searchable stream.

Forbes -  EBay’s PayPal Access Brings Identity – And Payments – Across The Web

PayPal Access, announced today at its developer conference, enables consumers to not only quickly log-in to any website–as they could with Facebook, Twitter or other authentication services–but it makes paying through websites quicker and faster. That’s key for online merchants…

Mashable - How Facebook’s New Features Will Affect Digital Marketers

With Facebook’s major changes set to roll out this week, little thought has been given to answering how Timeline and the revamped Open Graph will affect our interaction with rest of the web, and how websites stand to benefit. I believe that weaving Facebook even deeper into websites is going to yield a positive experience for consumers and sites alike. Here’s why…

ZDNet - Google+ Can Challenge Facebook with Customized Sharing, Social Tools

Like it or not, social networking is here to stay – and not just as a forum for people to sound off or share life’s update. Social networking sites, armed with far more data than any of us probably realizes, are tagging along with us for our daily strolls through the Internet – listening to our music, reading our favorite blogs, watching our favorite videos and shopping for that special something.

VentureBeat -  Your Users Have Multiple Online Personas — Can They all log in to your site?

Back in 1999, Microsoft took a first step towards creating a universal Web identity when it launched Microsoft Passport. While the product didn’t catch on in its original iteration, Passport helped bring a critical concept to life that would eventually change the internet: that identity would one day rule the Web. The next major development in online identity came when the OpenID standard emerged, offering the groundwork for a universal “single sign-on” for authentication across the Web.

Internet Retailer - Social Network Sign-ins Lead to More Sales for Giantnerd

Since Giantnerd.com’s launch in May 2010, the outdoor and apparel e-retailer has made sure to include social tools in its platform, offering consumers the option to Like products they find on Giantnerd.com and share them on Facebook, rate products with a thumbs up or down and write product reviews. Last October the retailer went a step further by making it possible for consumers to sign into Giantnerd.com using their login details from social networks including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Inc.com - 10 Cool New Tech Ideas to Help You Market Your Business

Facial recognition, eavesdropping apps, augmented reality…these aren’t security protocols but new ways for you to be able to market your business.

VentureWire -  Start-Ups And Corporations Alike Having Fun With Gamification

Gaming start-ups are all the rage, but a new crop of companies is putting a different twist on things–they’re turning everything into a game.

Mashable - HOW TO: Personalize Your Marketing With Social Data

The term “permission marketing” seems pretty self-explanatory. It encompasses activities like someone opting-in to receive emails from your company or promotional offers from partners. Simple enough. But evolutions in social data gathering have advanced the concept and opened a treasure trove of ways that brands can effectively reach and understand their audiences.

InformationWeek -  How Comcast SportsNet Plays The Social Media Game

For the past year, Comcast SportsNet’s social media program manager, Rick Racela, has been working to make friends for the cable broadcaster’s regional websites, both at home and away.

Fast Company -  Gamification: Why Sites Need To Simplify Social

“It just works”, Steve Jobs repeated ad nauseum at Apple’s recent Worldwide Developer Conference last month. He was talking about Apple’s new iCloud service but he just as easily could have been talking about an array of Apple products. Macbooks, as with most of Apples products, are Apple to the core. For example, my Macbook Air starts in just seconds, as my last PC took minutes to boot. It’s almost as if all the different parts just don’t know how to work together.

On the social Web, it’s much of the same. As the Web outside of Facebook continues to become more social, the problem is being compounded with the advent and growing popularity of game mechanics.

Mashable - 5 Best Practices for Applying Game Mechanics to Your Website

Conversations about game mechanics — the rules that govern how enjoyable a game is — are changing. Formerly a topic mostly discussed by game designers and gamer geeks like myself, gamification is now part of the business discussion as marketers look to apply it to websites.

Venture Beat -  Gigya Launches Gamification Suite to Make Web Sites More Fun

Gigya has made its mark by making web sites more social. Now it’s going to gamify them too. The company is announcing today that it will offer a Game Mechanics software as a service so that companies can make their sites more social and game-like as they seek to engage users who are otherwise bored with static web sites.

GIGAOM -  Google+: A Targeted Response to Facebook’s Shotgun Approach

The pressure is on for Google to develop a social strategy. With +1 Google is making a smart move by using its current power in search to try to gain traction in social. But Google can and should leverage the combination of +1 and its users’ Google identities. Google is still behind when it comes to the social graph, but with the concept of identity, Google starts from a much stronger position.

GIGAOM -  Why Google Needs +1 and Identity to Work Together

This week’s news from Google was the most exciting thing I’ve heard from the company in years. After languishing with social and its utter failures with both Google Wave and Google Buzz, the company is putting an intriguing product to market: a social network.

San Francisco Chronicle - Gigya Named ‘Cool Vendor’ in CRM Marketing by Leading Analyst Firm

Gigya, Inc., software as a service (SaaS) technology that makes sites social, has been named a “Cool Vendor” in the Cool Vendors in CRM Marketing, 2011 report by Gartner, Inc. The report, authored by Adam Sarner, Kimberly Collins, and Ed Thompson, finds that these vendors “make a cool contribution to empowering consumers. These technologies help companies to learn from, or make sense of, customer interactions so they can act upon those insights.”

DreamSimplicity Video Tour - Watch a Video Tour of the Gigya Headquarters in Mountain View, CA

Matt and Team visit Gigya to learn about their industry leading technology that makes websites social. Supporting more than 280 million users each month across more than 500,000 sites, Gigya is the largest provider of social tools! Watch as Matt meets Patrick and gets a personal tour of their Mountain View Headquarters.

Social Technology Review - Making Web Sites Social: an Interview with Gigya CEO Patrick Salyer

Gigya, what we’ve referred to as the “Swiss Army Knife” of social plugins, continues to offer new features for making websites social that align with client needs and the latest trends and innovations. Early to the social scene in 2006, the platform was a trailblazer in a sea of individual plug-ins and remains so today leading the social CRM pack with a lion’s share of impressive clients to show for it.

Utilizing SaaS-based technology and open standards, Gigya consolidates social features and provides a single API that aggregates social APIs for single sign-on and authentication on any platform. In layman’s terms, Gigya makes websites social by connecting them to social networks and providing sharing and engaging features, analytics and support along the way.

Recently promoted to CEO from his previous position as VP of Operations & Strategy, Patrick Salyer took time out of his busy schedule to discuss how Gigya helps mid-size and large enterprises convert new users, build brand loyalty and capitalize on the social commerce trend.

Retail Touchpoints - Gigya Launches Social Commerce Integration With ATG, Demandware And Magento

The meaning of “social commerce” —a popular buzz phrase recently — is causing the retail industry to reconsider how socially-driven technologies are changing the way people shop. Shoppers are increasingly seeking ways to interact with friends while shopping on their platform or channel of choice, and retailers are challenged to keep up with the near-constant evolution of social technologies.

The value of social commerce is undisputed, but the need for education around related technologies is growing. A January 2011 survey conducted by Retail Systems Research (RSR) found that 98% of retailers view investing in social commerce as valuable, but an increasing number are “stymied” by their existing technologies.

Gigya is attempting to address these issues with the introduction of a suite of social plug-ins designed to integrate with social networks and e-Commerce platforms. Integrating customer reactions, ratings & reviews, sharing, social recommendations and social sign-on, Gigya’s Social Recommendation plug-in offers customers new ways to share products and opinions with their network of friends and the site community, and to see what their personal friends are doing — rating, reviewing, sharing, asking or buying — on a web site.

BizReport - Top 3 Social Commerce Tips From Gigya

Over the 2010 holiday season consumers pushed into the ecommerce space in droves, driving more than $32 billion in online sales. But more than sales, consumers began sharing information about retailers through their social networks. From out of stock notices to the best deals, social commerce made huge strides in 2010; those trends are expected to continue through 2011.

I recently had the chance to chat with David A Yovanno of Gigya about social commerce trends and what brands can do to monetize the social space.

MSNBC -  Your Online Business: Social Media

In this video interview, Gigya CEO Dave Yovanno talks to MSNBC’s JJ Ramberg about the trends driving the momentum behind making websites social.

SF Business Times - Companies Find Pay Dirt by Enabling Social Retailing

eMarketer - B2B Sites See Big Rise in LinkedIn Logins

PC World - 4 Ways to Make LinkedIn Your Company’s Best Friend

Visitors to Websites tailored more toward business professionals than consumers are increasingly choosing to log in using their existing LinkedIn identities, said social tool provider Gigya on Tuesday.

In fact, whereas only three percent of users to such sites chose to sign in using their LinkedIn identities in a Gigya study last July, that number had increased all the way up to 20 percent by January, the company reported this week in a blog post on the topic.

A big part of the reason for the growing use of LinkedIn for social sign-ons, Gigya believes, is its recent incorporation of a variety of social tools.

“They’ve really made some great moves over the past year especially to encourage more communication and collaboration among people using the service,” Gigya explains. “LinkedIn users can share content from sites in the same way they can to Twitter or Facebook, and LinkedIn publishes shared content in a prominent feed.”

Social Times - LinkedIn Social Sign-in Soars on B2B Sites

Other large sites which are not strictly B2B, but have a significant amount of LinkedIn connections using Gigya’s platform, areAnswers.com, Ask.com and Reuters.
The significant growth in use of LinkedIn identities on B2B sites started in June 2010, when LinkedIn updated its profile API.

ReadWriteWeb - The Rise of LinkedIn as the Login of Choice

Over the last year, Facebook has become increasingly dominant in terms of being used as the user identity and login on third-party sites. Last summer, we reported that Facebook had dominated as the third-party login of choice, surpassing sites like Twitter, Google and Yahoo in all realms but one – news. News sites saw users logging in almost twice as often using Twitter.

Now, it looks like another site is gaining ground in another realm. Career-centric social network LinkedIn is growing as the login of choice for business-to-business (B2B) sites, proving once again that users prefer certain identities for certain online activities.

So, if you’re thinking of taking your site the way of eHow and forsaking all other logins for the one, true Facebook login, you might want to take a gander at the following graphic and see where your visitors lie. Maybe you should be working on that LinkedIn presence a bit more and Facebook a bit less.

Wall Street Journal - Multiple Identities in Action: LinkedIn-Powered Logins Grow on Business Sites

Most of us play various roles in our offline lives–parent, employee, friend, etc.–and now it’s getting easier to express those multiple identities in the online world. (It’s a topic explored often on the pages of NetworkEffect.)

Indeed, people do seem to be separating their online professional identities from their personal identities more than they used to, now that the tools are available. Web users increasingly use LinkedIn to sign into business-oriented sites, according to the social toolmaker Gigya.

LinkedIn started offering its credentials as a Web sign-on system early last year, and many business-oriented sites now offer users the option of authenticating using their LinkedIn account in addition to other options like their Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Gigya has seen a major increase in LinkedIn log-ins to sites it identifies as business-to-business. Twenty percent of social logins on such sites used LinkedIn credentials in January 2011, up from three percent in July 2010.

LinkedIn accounted for 26.6 percent of social sign-ons in January on the stock market news site Seeking Alpha, 20 percent on the Harvard Business Review and 14 percent on the Internet Advertising Bureau site. (The rest of social sign-ons were through Facebook and Twitter, mostly).

Mashable -  Why Permission Marketing is the Future of Online Advertising

Privacy challenges by public interest groups and the FTC are threatening to dismantle or seriously curtail the behavioral targeting model of interactive advertising as it stands today. Fearful of damaging relationships with their readers, many publishers are removing third-party widgets and other technologies when those technologies are found to capture and sell user data without the user’s express permission.

Even Facebook itself has cracked down on unauthorized data scraping. Recent “Do Not Track” efforts are trying to move choices about data sharing from publishers to the people via browser technology. But these are merely symptoms of a larger problem with interactive advertising: a lack of transparency. It’s a problem that new social tools will play a significant role in addressing.

Rather than an endgame where consumers completely block any sort of data sharing, I see a future where marketers take the high road and both sides benefit from better quality data, advertising and content.

ITBusiness.ca - Game Developer Hits Players on Diverse Social Nets with Single Shot

“Thanks to Gigya, a social optimization firm, British Columbia-based online game developer Inspirado Games is able to ‘write once and connect to all’ social media sites”

Early on, the team realized that the nature of their game required tapping into the social media connections of potential players. However building interfaces for the frequently changing APIs of a growing number of social networks was taking its toll on Inspirado Games’ already stretched team that also had to focus on game development. That was when company turned to Gigya, a social media optimization firm headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif.

eMarketer - The Future of Social Shopping

Retailers are exploring a new frontier in social commerce as they go beyond simply offering Facebook pages and Twitter profiles for their customers to follow.

Fueling this trend is web retailers’ quick adoption of social sign-on, which allows consumers to log in to their Facebook account instead of registering on an ecommerce site. Social sign-on gives retailers access to rich profile information for targeting customers.

“Bringing Facebook profile data into retail sites makes sense because it influences consumers when they are close to conversion,” said Jeffrey Grau, eMarketer principal analyst and author of the new report “Social Commerce: Personalized and Collaborative Shopping Experiences.” “In contrast, many consumers on Facebook are mainly socializing with friends and further removed from making purchase decisions.”

Over half of online retailers who responded to an August 2010 survey by Gigya, a provider of social sign-on applications, had either implemented the feature or planned to add it in the near future.

CNN - How Facebook Eclipsed Google in 2010

The first area in which Facebook has bested Google is online identity. Remember the days when trying out a new website required entering your name, username, password and other details into a form? Now sites can opt to use your Facebook account for one-click signup, making life easier for both websites and their users.

Facebook was able to make this move because the service was founded around the principle of real names. While this may have slowed Facebook’s growth in its early days, the company now owns a massive database of more than 500 million identities, most of them real.

As a result, Facebook is becoming the de facto identity system for the Web. The social optimization service Gigya claims that Facebook accounts for 46% of website logins versus Google’s 17%.

Internet Retailer - Have a Social and Mobile New Year

Industry leaders also say social commerce will gain more steam in 2011. Social commerce refers to using social networking tools to boost retail sales. In 2010, social network leader Facebook launched Facebook Connect, a series of plug-ins retailers began using to integrate the social network’s Like button on their sites. It also allows e-commerce operators to give consumers the option to sign in at e-retail sites using their Facebook log-in information, which means consumers can feed information back and forth between the e-retail site and Facebook. Two-thirds of online retailers said they offered or planned to offer visitors the ability to use their Facebook log-ons on their e-commerce sites, according to a survey from social media optimization firm Gigya.

Social Times - What Every Social Media Marketer Should Know About Gigya

Gigya is a software-as-a-service technology for scalable social CRM, deigned to unify the most popular identity and social providers including Facebook, Twitter, PayPal and LinkedIn and bring social sign-in features and benefits to corporate websites.

Gigya provides ways for brands to enable and utilize social registrations to obtain better information on customers in order to increase customer value, open new communication channels and improve social engagement.

GoMo news -  ChaCha Chats on all Major Social Networks Through Gigya

This is a great move from ChaCha, and the latest step in a long-term strategy that is really paying off. First of all, it built a great community-based knowledge system that really worked. Now it is working towards making sure that as many different people can access that system from as many different channels as possible. The deal with Gigya is a big step towards that, but perhaps more importantly it could really help with advertising the service. If someone posts a particularly fun or interesting Q&A to their social network of preference, it can provide really good viral spread for ChaCha.

Mashable - 3 Tips for Maximizing Engagement With Facebook “Likes” and Shares

When it comes to Facebook, if you’re uncertain where and when to place a “Like” button on your site and when to use “Share,” you’re not alone. Social sharing technologies have evolved significantly in the past several months, but it’s not as complicated as it may seem. Used in concert, “Like” and “Share” are some of the best tools around for driving referral traffic from social networks, opening new communication channels with customers and prospects, and building relationships with your best advocates.

Here are three best practices for applying them together.

iMediaConnection - 6 Social Sharing Best Practices

Wondering when to use the Facebook “like” button on your site and when to use “share”? You’re not alone. Used together and in the right combination, “like” and “share” are powerful tools for driving referral traffic from social networks, opening new communication channels with customers and prospects, and building relationships with your best advocates.

eMarketer - Intuit Socializes Reviews with Gigya

Intuit’s TurboTax product line is the leading brand of tax preparation software. The company’s innovative approach to customer reviews has not only helped improve its product but has also aggressively enabled review content to go viral and social to reach more prospects. Seth Greenberg is responsible for both offline and digital media buying and optimization, including its interaction with earned and social media campaigns. He spoke with eMarketer’s Tobi Elkin about Intuit’s experience with customer reviews and the opportunities presented by them.

Mashable - 4 Winning Strategies for Social Media Optimization

Social media optimization (SMO) is the process by which you make your content easily shareable across the social web. Because so many options exist for where people can view your content, the content model for the web has shifted from, “We have to drive as much traffic to our website as possible,” to the more pragmatic, “We have to ensure as many people see our content as possible.”

You’ll still want most people to see your content on your site — and if you’re doing it right they will — but helping people view content through widgets, apps and other social media entry points will accrue positive benefits for your brand. The more transportable you can make your content, the better.

If you’re ready to get started with a social media optimization plan for your organization, read on for an overview.

eMedia Vitals - Is Social Media Optimization Part of Your Digital Toolkit?

SMO efforts are paying off for some digital publishers. Salon’s social media referrals are up 720% from a year ago. Facebook referral traffic has increased by 250% for ABC News and 80% for Canada’s Globe and Mail (according to Facebook).

The referral growth is not surprising, considering how consumers’ online habits increasingly revolve around their social graphs. New research from Nielsen shows that Internet users spend 23 percent of their time online on social networking sites and blogs, a 43 percent increase from a year ago. Online games were a distant second, with 10 percent of time spent online.

Not surprisingly, there’s a growing ecosystem of developers and service providers – including some publishers – offering tools and SMO services. Tech publisher IDG recently added social optimization to its custom media service offerings. A startup called Gigya, founded in 2006 as a developer of widget tools, has repositioned its business around social media optimization.

Beet.TV at Paidcontent.org - Connecting Media Companies with Social Networks

Palo Alto-based Gigya, which started out as widget company, has become a “social optimization” solution for media companies seeking to connect their content into several social networks.

Late last month at the paidContent Mobile conference, we spoke with Ben Pashman who heads business development at Gigya.

Click the blue text above to view the video interview.

E-Commerce Times - Social Registration May Come with a Few Surprises

Communicating the value of registering with a social identity not only improves the user experience, but also can increase the number of people who participate in pre-checkout activities such as creating wish lists — as well as boost the quality of product ratings and recommendations.

Enabling people to register and check out using an existing identity from Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo  or other provider is one of the most powerful tools to emerge in the last few years.

Signing people in through an established online identity not only streamlines the process, but also gives your business a head start on building deeper relationships with customers and prospects.

Following are five best practices and some surprising benefits

SF Business Times - Facebook’s Orbit May Start to Rival Google’s

Mashable - What Identities Are We Using to Sign in Around the Web? [INFOGRAPHIC]

The days of having a separate login and password for each online service we use are behind us. Now, you can log into most sites and services using your social network’s ID.

The most popular social identities are Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Twitter, but are they always being used in the same way? The infographic below, courtesy of social optimization platform Gigya, shows that users trust different identities on different services. For example, users are most likely to log on to entertainment sites via Facebook, but when it comes to news sites, the login of choice is Twitter. Furthermore, the infographic shows what profile data is available to services after users log in using various online identities.

Check out a bigger version of the infographic here.

All Facebook -  Facebook Captures 46% Of Third-Party Logins

What’s becoming increasingly clear is that despite Facebook’s dominance, providing a variety of third-party login services is important to capture all new visitors to a site.The bottom line is that Facebook has a dominant position when it comes to the digital identity race, however the race is nowhere near being over.

Inside Facebook - Gigya Releases Stats On Social ID Use, Talks About Facebook’s News Feed

We spoke with Gigya CEO David Yovanno to get some more context about what’s happening in the Social ID ecosphere. He explained that as social becomes a larger source of referral traffic, sites will need to optimize for it in the same way that they have for search in the past.

Read Write Web -  Facebook Dominates Third-Party Logins For All But News

More and more, we’re logging in to websites using our credentials from sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google or Yahoo. But who’s leading in the battle of the third-party login? What login do we chose when it comes to entertainment sites like MTV? How about news sites like Reuters?

According to Gigya, a provider of tools for social sharing and third-party logins, Faceboook leads the pack in all realms but one – news sites.

Chief Marketer -  Reviews Nice to Share for TurboTax

The Next Web - Microsoft Demos Messenger Connect, a New Social API

Yesterday in Brazil Steve Ballmer announced the next generation of Windows Live Messenger. Today at The Next Web Conference Microsoft announced an API to accompany it – Messenger Connect.

One of the key aspects of Facebook Open Graph’s appeal is its integration with third party sites. In order to compete, Microsoft is incorporating Messenger Connect into Gigya’s social plugin on sites including CBS with more likely to follow.

Search Engine Watch - Optimize Your Brand for Sharing and Social Search in 11 Steps

Yesterday, we focused on how to make your brand findable and shareable in social media. A white paper by Gigya validates the shift to, and resulting importance of, social search and its dependence on crowd participation. Online businesses must optimize in order to earn referral traffic from social networks.

With the advent of social feeds — a live stream of friends’ activity shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter — consumers can more easily rely on trusted personal relationships to determine what’s worthwhile to read, watch, play and buy online.

Honestly, there are too many top 10 lists, and I subscribe to the Spinal Tap school of numeration, so this list will go to “11!” Here are 11 steps for optimizing your brand for sharing and social search.

Multichannel Merchant - Three Steps to Add Social Techologies to Your Site

With the latest generation of on-your-site social technologies such as Facebook Connect, Sign in with Twitter, Yahoo Open Strategy, and LinkedIn, among others, your e-commerce site can allow customers to interact and share with friends. Customers can also register using an existing identity, making the on-site experience as seamless and social as it is in the physical world.

But to achieve these goals, you’ll need to meet rising expectations that a relevant, real-world experience will be available to people whenever they shop at or visit your site. Fortunately, the social networks all view this as the future and provide the necessary technologies. It’s just a matter of applying them effectively.

Here are three steps for applying social technologies for real-world advantage

Mashable - Four Ways the Entertainment Industry is Getting More Social

Now that most social networks are supporting functionality on third party sites — via Facebook Connect, Sign in with Twitter, Yahoo! Open Strategy, MySpaceID, and other similar technologies — entertainment companies are experimenting with a variety of approaches.

While movie promotions on Facebook, top sports moments on YouTube, and MySpace music pages remain key fixtures, many entertainment companies are also now actively focused on how to apply social strategies to their own sites to deepen relationships with fans and become more relevant. Here are four ways on-site social features are benefiting both fans and the entertainment industry today.

WebProNews - Social Media Lessons from the Big Brands

When asked what technologies the company has implemented to help it maximize word of mouth traffic, he says, “The work we do with Gigya, is an example of applying technology to connect to Facebook and Bazaarvoice with our customer reviews. Live Community is an in-house technology that leverages community, where TurboTax users and experts ask and answer questions.  It is free in all products, but also to anyone that has tax questions through our website.  These are some of the ways that also lead to great SEO results.”

TechCrunch - Gigya says Facebook is 44% of Social Sharing

To get a sense of which services on the Web drive the most sharing, I asked Gigya for some stats. Gigya powers sharing widgets on more than 5,000 content sites, including ABC.com. NBA.com, PGA.com, Answers.com, and Reuters. Consumers can click a share button on these sites and send an article link, photo, or video via a menu of different services including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and AOL. Over the past 30 days, people have shared almost a million items over the Gigya network. Facebook and Twitter dominate with about three quarters of all shared items between them. Here is how the services break down (note that these are relative numbers)

Read Write Web - Gigya’s Gamble: The Feed Will Surpass Search

Perhaps we were a bit premature in saying that Facebook was going to become your “one true login“, as services like Gigya will make sure that you’ll be able to continue using any number of social network identities to sign in and share. In the end, we find it more likely that the number of logins will continue to grow and Gigya’s gamble will ultimately pay off.

SF Chronicle - Facebook Directs More Online Users than Google

Some experts say social media could become the Internet’s next search engine.

“People are spending less time navigating the Internet on their own and are now navigating the Internet based on their friends’ recommendations or their friends’ activities,” said Dave Yovanno, chief executive of Gigya Inc., a Palo Alto firm that offers social-media services. “That’s one of the big trends we started picking up on probably four or five months ago.”

For years, Web content creators had to worry whether they had the proper level of search-engine optimization to make sure search engines listed them among the top results. Now, they have to consider what companies like Gigya offer – social-media optimization.

Mashable -  Help Haiti Live Chat: More Engagement, More Donations

Live chats managed by Gigya — the same company that did the MTV/Facebook/LG Avatar webcast with James Cameron — will accompany the MTV, VH1 and CBS webcasts.

Gigya told us that MTV Networks is working with them again to recreate the “lean forward” level of participation they achieved with the Avatar webcast. The live chat makes the donating experience public; folks in the chat will probably encourage one another to donate, and people will be more likely to donate if they know they can impress their friends. They’ve found that these webcast chats drive more traffic and more word of mouth promotion, which will in turn lead to a greater volume of donations.

PaidContent.org -  Haiti Telethon Will Stretch Across Platforms, Countries

Tuesday night, CNN raised more than $7 million for Haitian relief during an quickly planned telethon on Larry King Live. That was small compared to the massive effort led by George Clooney and MTV Networks (NYSE: VIA) will reach across the world. Star-studded telethon Help for Haiti Now will air live for two hours from LA, New York, London, and Haiti Friday night at 8 p.m. ET across more than a dozen sites, at least 30 U.S. networks (including all four major broadcasters), several Canadian networks, multiple mobile carriers and several international networks. [Update: Gigya will power live chat across the sites; Facebook and Twitter are official social media partners.]

ReadWriteWeb -  Compared With Twitter & Myspace, Users Choose Facebook Login 2-to-1

Gigya provides a number of widgets, from tools to share Web pages on social networks, to logging in to third party sites with your social network identity. Their widgets can be seen on sites like the Disney Store, ABC, Turner and Audible, and reach more than 250 million people each month.

Gigya also shared with us the numbers when two major email and search providers, Yahoo and Google, are thrown into the login mix. Facebook still comes out with a majority, 53%, of the logins, while Twitter takes second place with 14%. Google and Yahoo! sneak in with 12% each and Myspace stumbles in with only 9% of the take.

In their note to us, they made sure to mention that when a site offers more options for logging in, more people do, providing a greater variety of data on its customer base.

Social Technology Review -  Gigya: the Swiss Army Knife of Social Media Plugins

Gigya is to social media what the Swiss Army Knife is to camping—a lifesaver. While there are hundreds of other plugins to choose from, Gigya offers a centralized service with a GUI-interfaced console and analytical tools. Their scalable services have been implemented by the likes of ABC, ESPN, Reuters, Time and Turner.