ADOTAS – If you’re growing increasingly frustrated with being prompted to register as a new user on a website, if you have so many logins and passwords at this point you can’t keep track of them all, and if you notice your password fatigue is leading you to leave a site altogether if you can’t log in after a couple cracks, now there’s a study confirming you’re not alone. Social media user management platform Janrain has released the results of its second Social Identity survey (conducted by Blue Research by surveying over 600 users across the U.S.), in which 86 percent of respondents said they were bothered enough by the need to create new accounts across various websites that they’d change their behavior in one way or another rather than stay and complete registration. A full 54 percent said they might leave the site or avoid it in the future (though just 6 percent said they definitely would), and 26 percent said they’d just go to a different site if they could. The percentage of people who said they had, at one point or another, forgotten their login info and left a site instead of answering security questions or resetting the password doubled just in the past year — now 90 percent of all respondents say they’ve had that experience. And that registration data may not be all that reliable, anyway — 88 percent (up from 76 percent last year) said they’d given incorrect information or left a form incomplete while creating a new account.
Obviously this is problematic for advertisers, who lose opportunities for consumer engagement with every user who chooses not to enter a site. Janrain suggests here that one easy solution would be the option to log in via social media, and according to the survey, the number of people who are receptive to the idea of using social media is on the rise: In 2010, 66 percent of respondents agreed social login should be offered across various sites, in lieu of setting up a unique account at each, and in 2011, 77 percent agreed to the same. Among that 77 percent, 78 percent said they’d posted a comment or sent a message via social media about a product or service with which they’d had a positive experience, and 83 percent said people in their networks influenced them to consider new products or services.
Since Janrain actually provides a social login tool, the company has something of a vested interest in that particular solution to the password problem. But marketers will have to weigh the social data they could access with a social login against the ability to collect the specific kind of data they want through a traditional login. The whole study is available at Janrain’s website.
