Gigya Revs Up B2C Data Management

As social identity data continues to attract interest from marketers looking to provide personalized offers and recommendations, Gigya, a company that builds social infrastructure and registration-as-a-service solutions for 700-plus brands, moved forward with a launch Wednesday of the Connected Consumer Management Suite.

The social data management space is ripe with action. This week brought Salesforce.com's acquisition of email and social marketing software company ExactTarget, with the intended goal of mixing traditional email campaign management with the social capabilities afforded by Salesforce.com's other Marketing Cloud fixtures, including Buddy Media, Radian6, and Social.com.

Similarly, Gigya's launch of the Connected Consumer Management Suite seeks to turn cross-channel, permission-based consumer data into intelligence that powers content and product recommendations, on-site advertising campaigns, and targeted email campaigns.

"The idea is to provide a complete platform to access, manage, and take advantage of this modern consumer identity data," Patrick Salyer, CEO of Gigya, told CRM. "For us, that means, of course, traditional consumer registration data, but also social login data and then behavior data that comes from our various social plug-ins and gamification tools too."

In addition to accessing social log-in data, Gigya's cloud-based registration system allows marketers to control the growing crop of social data that can range from consumer likes and interests to favorite activities. And, the key thing about social data, Salyer said, is its inherent changeability—for instance, if someone changes their marital status on Facebook—it will be incumbent upon brand and campaign managers to alter offers and messaging on the fly.

"We found that clients didn't have the capabilities," Salyer observed. "Their databases tend to be relational—like an Excel spreadsheet and seven to nine pieces of data. Now you're asking your IT team to do three hundred pieces of data that are always changing and you have all these compliance rules."

Gigya recently added 21 social and marketing technology partners to its NEXUS Partner Ecosystem, putting the total number of CRM, e-commerce, email, and content recommendation vendor-partners at more than 50. The company has also retained Paul Farmer, formerly of Silver Tail Systems and Narus, as chief financial officer to strengthen Gigya's position with "large, international businesses with thousands of clients," Salyer noted.

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