B2B Online Marketing Blog

With the recent adoption of OpenID by 7 out of 10 of the leading social networks, as well as major retailers such as Sears and Kmart, we are now finally approaching the tipping point of mass adoption.  With this brings the benefits of OpenID to the general population: essentially a single click sign in process without the need for registering new user names or passwords.  And integration into your existing registration or sign in process is now streamlined more than ever, allowing the average novice developer to add OpenID to their site within 1 hour.

And the benefits to your website registration and conversion rates are enormous.  Did you know that for every extra date field of information you ask for at your website, you lose 5% to 10% of your visitors? Even if you don’t ask for fax#s anymore, many people these days don’t even like to use email addresses for user IDs anymore, due to the risk of SPAM or overzealous email marketing.

1. Social Visitors Don’t Do Anything

If you’ve signed up for any of the leading social networks, then signing into an OpenID enabled website is a breeze. As of September 2009, participants in OpenID included most of the social networking big guns : Google, Microsoft, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo, AOL  (LinkedIn, Bebo and Friendster are not yet onboard). And now with major retailers like Sears and Kmart, as well as open source software leaders such as WordPress: if you don’t implement OpenID, then you are missing out on a huge opportunity to improve your web service adoption rate.

2. No More Passwords…

The best thing about OpenID I think is that passwords are now obsolete.  At first, it’s hard to get your head around this, since we are so ingrained with a username/email and password combination implying security. In fact, I remember the days of Automated Form Completion software (Gator) which saved lots of time with filling in usernames and passwords.  Then came more intelligent browsers such as IE 8 and Firefox 3 which automatically prompt you to have this sign in data remembered. Well, now with web 2.0 sites requiring usernames and passwords, the amount of registration data you have to hold onto is ridiculous.  Thankfully, OpenID solves this by allowing you to sign in by simply choosing which social network service you are already signed up with, and then signing in using their login data without even having to renter that username/password.  If you already have that social networking service live in a browsing session, then you will be able to login with only a single click.

3. Improved Registration Rates

The OpenID foundation website provides all the resources you need to get OpenID up quickly on your site.  That said, this is not for novice developers to use, since there are a series of programming language libraries and scripts to load onto your server prior to doing so.  The fastest way I’ve found to add OpenID to your website sign-in process is via JanRain’s hosted OpenID service.  They allow you to quickly offer a friendly user interface for letting your site visitors securing sign-in via up to 6 major social networks for free.  It took me under 1 hour to integrate OpenID into my blog discovery site.  I also used their support forum, and quickly addressed a specific PHP issue I was having within the first support reply.