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.

The Dangers of User-Generated Content for Retail

So McDonald's has been holding a contest to update the iconic Big Mac jingle, and they announced the finalists - including one guy who was previously arrested for holding up a McDonald's at gunpoint - and served 12 years for it. While content aggregators like YouTube have been fairly vigilant (some would say overly so) about making sure that the content users post is legal to use, there is also the question about whether the user themselves could be damaging to a brand. Something to think about before you highlight a user product review...