OpenID is gaining more momentum these days. As a leader in IT at Bulldog Solutions, I find it an exciting prospect on many levels.

But I still have my reservations about its usefulness for BtoB marketing.
 
Developed by the open source community, OpenID is a platform attempting to simplify the online experience. The basic premise is that you create a single online identity managed by a provider of your choice, as opposed to one large entity that controls all data for everyone. This one online identity is, essentially, your very own URL. You use it as your single login for many sites across the Web and to prove your legal identity when required.

As beneficial as OpenID appears to be, it also presents some challenges and unknowns for consumers. I’ve listed the “Good, Bad and Unknown” in an article in the April issue of Marketing Watchdog Journal. And check out a great summary here of a SXSW Interactive panel on the topic.

Bottom line: I’m still reluctant to embrace it fully for BtoB.

About a year ago, we looked at OpenID as a possible solution to our own challenges with registration. Because Bulldog manages hundreds of Webinars and other online campaigns, we needed a better way to allow our audience to gain quick and easy access to everything we had to offer. After doing the research, we just didn’t see OpenID as a viable solution for two main reasons.

• The adoption rate is slow. We couldn’t risk losing people because they were not ready or comfortable with this technology. We did think about offering OpenID as an option at registration, but that would have opened up a whole new set of challenges on the development front.
• At that time, OpenID was not flexible enough to allow us to capture the data points we needed. Since OpenID is mainly consumer-focused, the standard data it can collect would not provide our BtoB organization with enough data.

Looking back it’s easy to see why we passed on the technology at the time, but I am not convinced that it couldn’t work in the future.

Now, let me know your thoughts. You can comment here or e-mail me at cparisi@bulldogsolutions.com

• What do you think  about the viability of OpenID in your BtoB organization?
• Just as social media has melded personal and professional identities, will OpenID be successful in creating a common identity useful for BtoB marketers?
• Would you, as a marketer, embrace OpenID even if it meant sharing data about your customers with other companies?