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:

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

Gigya was founded in 2006 in Tel Aviv by a group of Israeli technologists who saw social media not only as the �next big thing� but as a permanent shift in how people interact on the Web. We began as a company that connected websites to social networks, allowing social-network users (at the time, mostly MySpace users) to share embeddable pieces of content in their social profiles.

As the social-networking space continued to mature and Facebook and Twitter came of age, we realized that connecting websites to social networks was going to be critical to whether businesses succeeded online. With the advent of technologies like Facebook Connect and Twitter for Websites, we began helping enterprises make that shift — and that�s where our business started taking off.

We began as implementers of Social Login, but then we saw the opportunity to add a suite of value-added applications to sites so that users could interact with content and each other without being sent away from sites to their social-network pages.

What do you see for social media in 2012?

I think we�re going to see social identity become ubiquitous across the Web. More and more people are bringing their social identities everywhere they go online, and obviously more sites are offering users the chance to do that. Some of this has to do with the advantages of Social Login — it�s faster than registering/logging in via tedious registration forms, and users don�t need to create or remember yet another set of credentials.

But we�re also really starting to see businesses understand how valuable their social customers are. Businesses are starting to wake up to the fact that when people log into the Web with their social profiles, sites gain permission-based access to their users� social profiles — and they can do some incredible things with that data. As social technology continues to proliferate on the Web, it�s going to be really interesting to see which businesses capitalize on that and which ones get left behind.

What major companies would you say are at the cutting edge of social?

I love what companies such as Spotify are doing with relation to the new Facebook Open Graph. On its own, Spotify is a great product. But with that deep Facebook integration, they�re experiencing hockey-stick growth because songs are appearing in people�s Facebook Tickers, and sharing within the Spotify app is amazingly easy. Obviously, they face some uphill battles in terms of getting all the major labels and bands on board, but so far, the breadth and quality of their catalog is pretty impressive.

I also really like what brands such as Pepsi are doing. Pepsi is working with us on a site called Pepsi SoundOff that allows fans of Pepsi-sponsored television shows to engage in a competitive yet communal environment. The platform is social from the ground up and utilizes technologies such as Social Login, Share and Comments and ties those all together through our Game Mechanics platform. The level of engagement on that site, particularly while those shows are airing (currently they are using the SoundOff site for the NFL playoffs), is stunning.

Tom Taulli runs the InvestorPlace blog IPO Playbook, a site dedicated to the hottest news and rumors about initial public offerings. He is also the author of��All About Short Selling��and��All About Commodities.��Follow him on Twitter at�@ttaulli.�As of this writing, he did not own a position in any of the aforementioned stocks.