Is it really as cliche as Web 3.0?

I have been thinking for the last month about "Connected Commerce" - in my head, I was thinking about it in the context of eCommerce evolved in a world of Web 2.0 (a term I dislike, but get - and it doesn't seem to have wandered too far from its original meaning, but does seem rather broad). When the actual transaction piece of buying something online becomes unbounded by the website - so, available via mobile, or plugged into a social networking site, or even pulled into someone else's blog - then how do you define "eCommerce" in that context? Coming at it from the retailer point of view, I saw that as "Connected Commerce," but find the term lacking something (something even more than just the "e").

Then I encountered Optaros, who approached it more from the Content side of the web. They call it "W3CM" which is a play on Web Content Management, except the C is actually 3 C's: content, commerce, and community. They see a convergence across all three of these dimensions, and see brands and retailers struggling with this convergence - brands, who have content and are trying to figure out how it integrates with community and commerce, and retailers, who have commerce and are trying to figure out content and community.

In some ways, retailers especially have been looking at Optaros' 3 dimensions from a 2-D perspective. Retailers tend to discount content, either because they don't take it seriously enough, or because they tend to view it as an offshoot of products and thus wrapped into eCommerce. And those that do take on content, for example with their own blogs, often do it independently of the commerce function, almost as if they don't want consumers to consider the content to be tainted by introducing a commerce aspect to it.

But just as retailers are living in a plane with dimensions of commerce and community, and Optaros sees the world in three dimensions, with Content being the third, I think there is a fourth dimension at play as well, which is the physical world. The "real" world, which encompasses both product and brand location, as well as an individual's physical relationship to those things at a point in time. Maybe this can be summed up as "physical context."

The natural analogy would be, just as Web 2.0 in many ways freed the "Web" of the constraint of an individual site or even an internet browser, what we're groping towards in retail is a kind of Web 3.0 - where, thanks to increasingly ubiquitous hardware like mobile phones or kiosks, the virtual world and the physical world are continuously co-located. So while we have been thinking about the Web in all of its complexity as a 3-D object, it is an object that exists in relation to a fourth dimension: physical context, in all its glory and complexity. (By the way, TrendWatching just put out a fantastic piece about "Transparency", which touches on this topic and has some great examples.

As much as I dislike the term "Web 3.0" or even the more aspirational "Web Unbound," I cannot for the life of me think of something better. I've tried getting geeky: The Web/Context Continuum (analogous to the Space/Time Continuum). Contextual Commerce? ECommerce Unbound? Blech!

What do I call this thing? The closest I've come to is "Not Your Father's Internet"...

Web Developments Retailers Should Watch

TechCrunch released its agenda last week for the TechCrunch50, which starts today. They have helpfully grouped the companies into categories, which they will run through over the next couple of days. The companies are all fascinating, and I encourage you to check them all out. But what was really interesting to me was the categories themselves:

• Youth and Culture - basically a bunch of social networking sites that are targeted at the younger crowd. If they succeed, they will bring together a juicy group of targets for retailers and marketers. But brands will have to be careful how they approach these sites - if you think there was an uproar over Beacon, think about the privacy implications of advertising or diving in to sites that cater to tweens. That's going to be laden with a lot more landmines.
• Memes and News - the theme here is filtering or aggregating content in some way or another so that it's easier for people to wade through - either by creating a niche of some kind ("news about your friends instead of news by your friends"), or using the crowd to surface the most popular stories from within a world of "TMI". Product reviews kind of do the same thing, but ultimately I can see this kind of functionality melding in with another category - "Vertical Social Networks" - one of which creates a social network around shopping and fashion.
• Finance and Statistics - a bunch of sites that put analytics around either information on the web that relates to people or topics, or information specifically about a person or topic. For retailers, this could be turned inward to employees (especially frontline employees where it's hard to really do a thorough check on the person before you hire them), or turned outward as a service to customers. Safeway's FoodFlex program is a good example based on "closed" data (Safeway's clubcard purchases - Safeway offers to analyze the nutritional value of your past purchases and recommend ways to create a healthier diet), but as more of people's lives end up captured online, someone's going to think of a way to take advantage of it - including purchase or shopping/browsing history.
  

Also interesting to me was that the list of commerce-based topics and companies weren't really that interesting. The session on Advertising & Commerce Monetization had companies that create new ways of targeting (or ways to avoid getting targeted). The most interesting of that lot was Adgregate Markets, which promises to "turn banner ads into shop ads", basically by turning a banner ad into a widget that gets you closer to purchase from the first click.

Retailers have never been keen to be on the cutting edge of technology adoption. It's one of RSR's fundamental "Paradoxes of Retail" that retailers must manage a heavy load of legacy technology infrastructure at the center of their business while consumers are adopting technology at an unprecedented rate - and forcing retailers to speed up or be left behind. The TechCrunch50, to me, shows that the pace of change isn't letting up at all.

My Theory on the Impact of Product Reviews on Toy Shopping

I have 2 young children – ages 6 and 3. Toy shopping is an interesting experience, because as much as parents complain that they spend a fortune on toys, if you look you’ll see that most toys are relatively cheap. Barbie bliss or Hot Wheel heaven can be achieved for less than $15 – cheaper than a movie or the zoo, when it comes down to it, and it lasts longer (usually). And when you have several out of state relatives that all send gift cards, it actually can be challenging to spend it all in one go. I realize this will change as electronics get added to the wish list, but for now, the toy budget goes a long way for us.

The trade-off against the cheapness comes with the quality of the toy. I’m not talking about breakage or even lead paint. I’m talking about the difference between a toy that sticks and a toy the kids play with once and then get more fun out of just playing with the box. As a parent, you buy a lot of cheap toys and hope for a success rate – where a toy is truly loved and played with all the time – of say, 2 out of every 5 toys purchased.

Product reviews, however, change the game. When I’m shopping for birthday or Christmas presents, I ALWAYS read the reviews (assuming they’re available). When shopping for toys, product reviews help me sort through which toys are going to stick and which ones probably won’t. And I have to say, so far that’s worked out really well. In fact, it’s probably raised my hit rate on toys that stick from 2/5 to more like 4/5. And when you get that kind of improvement in success rate, you don’t need to buy so many toys.

Does that mean we’ll see a decline in toy sales as more and more parents catch on to this money-saving tip? I doubt it – a significant portion of our toy budget still goes to buying other kids’ birthday presents, and other than a glance to see what my kids really like, I don’t honestly spend that much time researching those toys – and my kids get a lot of say in picking out birthday presents for their friends, and they’re not exactly savvy online shoppers just yet. But it does mean an interesting thing for toy manufacturers. If parents hash your toy, you better think about how to change it to address the complaints. Because Hot Wheels isn’t competing against Matchbox for my toy money – it’s competing with every toy ever made, and thanks to my fellow parents, I have enough information to make sure that I only pick the best.

The Role of Social Media in Retail Part 1

Will Beresford of Beyond Analysis wrote an article on Wise Marketer about key trends in advertising that will be driven by social media. I don’t disagree with a lot of them, but there are two that I take particular exception to: first, that social sites like MySpace and Facebook are fads, and second, that many agents or middle-men will find it more difficult to do business because people will rely more and more on their networks. I’m writing about this only because I think social media will play a hugely important role in retail – a topic I’ll probably take some time to explore more fully in the future.

So let’s tackle the first one: social networking sites are fads. Disclaimer on my part: while I have vowed to set up profiles on both MySpace and Facebook, I somehow have managed to avoid doing so so far. Yes, it’s true. You won’t find me on MySpace. But you will find me on LinkedIn, and Plaxo really does provide a critical service for me, because I’m horrible about keeping my address book up to date. And I’m probably responsible for getting a lot of the word out on Spock simply because I was a tad indiscriminate in sending invites out for that one when I signed up to try it out myself (sorry about that, for those of you who are still wondering what the heck Spock actually is. I’m still wondering that myself). While I have found utility in using these sites for business connections, I see no need for something like MySpace to manage my personal connections – I use other tools to do that, like IM and the old-fashioned but ever-useful phone. However, there are a few trends developing around sites like these that makes me think they are here to stay:

Openness. A funny thing happened to my Plaxo account the other day. It got eaten up by a “Comcast Universal Address Book”, and Plaxo now offers ways to tap into address books stored across a wide variety of sites – truly becoming a universal address book. And news pops up every day about how IM services are integrating into Facebook, or other social media-type sites are using API’s provided by MySpace and Facebook to automatically update profiles there. So if I post a blog, it automatically updates my MySpace page, or if I digg something, same thing happens. The more a user hooks things back into a profile space, the more valuable that space becomes. These high-profile companies are very much aware of the network effect – and are creating these API’s for that exact reason – to keep their relevance to users very high. There might be something that comes along that is “way cooler” than Facebook, but only because it takes the concept to another level, not because the concept loses its cachet.
Evolution. Part of the reason Beresford thinks these sites will lose favor is because people will realize that it’s not actually such a good thing to bare all to the world. But I see evolution happening with both Plaxo and LinkedIn, and I have to think it won’t be long before other social networking sites figure this out too: we all have many faces. In Plaxo, it’s overly simplified, but I have two spheres I can use to manage my contacts – personal, and business (and both). I can restrict business contacts from seeing my personal info, and I can restrict personal contacts from seeing my business info, if I really want to. In LinkedIn, you can designate the type of relationship you have with a person in your network – a colleague, a business partner, etc. Sampa, a personal website builder, lets you build a site that is available to everyone, or just to people you invite. So if you don’t want recruiters to see pictures of you getting trashed at a bar, you can restrict access to those pics so that only your closest friends see them (and then, of course, they will send them around to everyone they know in order to embarrass you).

Now, on to the second point: agents will become disintermediated thanks to the power of personal networks. While I agree that the travel agent is pretty much going the way of the dodo, it’s wrong to think that forums aren’t serving an agent role. Even MySpace serves something of that role – there is too much information out there, and we all need filters to help us sort through it all. MySpace becomes the moderated, filtered, value-added collection of stuff about “me”. TripAdvisor is the portal to all things vacation-related. We’re not getting rid of agents and middle-men, we’re in an age where new sites are cropping up in order to take on that role by providing context and moderated, filtered content based on that context – thus increasing the value of information that honestly is already out there – if you can find it.

I’m not sure that Facebook, with Beacon, will become any kind of advertising powerhouse that has the ability to bring life or death to brands. But I do know that retailers should definitely pay attention to how this space evolves. As I’ve said before, as soon as consumers adopt a new technology, one of the first places they take it is shopping. How will social media impact shopping behavior? What a juicy topic! You’ll definitely hear more from me on that one.

This Social Networking Thing

After reading Matthew Creamer's article on Ad Age on the role that social networking sites play in search engine optimization, I decided to try this whole social networking thing. My search results on Google are pretty good - I sometimes have to compete with a high school lacrosse player from Canada, but when you Google my name, you pretty much get me.

But as I spend most of my time writing about the impact of technology on retail, and I spend a lot of time telling retailers that one of the first places that consumers bring new technology is to the shopping experience, I figure I better put my money where my mouth is. So I signed up for Twitter. With this post, I've moved from my company's blog site, which is still a work in progress, to this one. And I already do a few things in other sites like Linked In, Plaxo, Pandora and Second Life. Facebook and MySpace are coming soon, I guess, along with a couple mobile sites (I just need to figure out which ones). But as I spend more time talking about "me" and "what I see" and "what I think", the more nervous I get.

I was vetting survey respondents to my most recent retail survey on pricing, and in searching on a respondent's name to figure out if he was a legitimate retailer, I found his MySpace page, which had a ton of pictures of him out with his drinking buddies. Hmmm. And while testing to see where I came up on that Google search (I know, I need to check the others too, but there are only so many hours in the day), I found this site that aggregates content about a person - again, competing with the Canadian lacrosse player, it wasn't a complete reflection of me, but it was kind of disturbing to see quotes from me that it had pulled from articles, and there were tabs for pictures (empty, phew!) and a bunch of other stuff. I also just saw on TechCrunch the company Spokeo, which basically becomes an RSS feed for keeping up with your friends, pulling in pics they load on Flickr, their Facebook and Twitter postings and a ton of other sites - all without requiring their permission (it's all basically publicly available).

I know I'm late to this game (I'll defend slightly by saying that I've spent a lot of the last 4 years on planes, which makes it hard to keep up with the online world. The wireless card alone will make a huge difference.), but I can't believe the amount of information you end up revealing about yourself the more you get roped into social networks. I consider myself a relatively private person - I'll use some of my personal experiences in my work, but I do so carefully, both because just because I'm a consumer doesn't mean I know everything about consumers, and because it's just none of other people's business!

So as I embark on this journey, I find myself approaching this from a "public persona" and a "private persona" perspective. If it's publicly available info, the info I'm putting out there is going to be work-related. If it's personal info, then I'm going to be looking for sites that are invite-only, so that I can share with my friends and family and not the whole world. But, as usual, I think of my (still learning how to read, let alone type) kids: will they ever approach "the world" with that kind of distinction? It doesn't seem like today's kids do, as myriad Facebook and MySpace faux pas demonstrate. I guess I'm going to have to amend my mother's platitude: "If you can't say something nice - and professional, like it's going to be there for the rest of your life - then don't say anything at all."

As Twitter nudges me to make a post, I have to ask myself, I wonder how that's really going to work out?