Carrie Johnson, VP and Research Director, Forrester Research began by putting some definition behind the term ’Web 2.0′.

Web 2.0 definition and examples

• Interaction with people
• Facebook  
• Interaction with content
• Burpee seed  
• Interaction with data
• QED  

The majority of web 2.0 development at companies is being done for internal consumption (57%)  vs. customer facing (13%). Even so, it is having a profound impact in the customer channel and we are seeing Web 2.0’s enabling technologies spawn new core applications, which are in turn driving behavioral shifts/new social behavior.

Online social activities

• Listen to me
• Blog, social network
• Listen to us
• Wikis
• Find people like me

And people like the new capabilities. 70% of web users agree/strongly agree that Highly interactive sites enhance the online experience. But, you need a strategy for sucess, so here are a couple of guidelines.

Success criteria of web 2.0 tools

• Your customers like and use them
• They solve a problem
• Product discovery
• Collective wisdom
• Product visualization

Right now the web is great for people finding what they want (are specifically looking for) and new navigation helps them narrow their choices down:

• Customer reviews
• Tags
• Rss

Web 2.0 can also provide new ways for product discovery

-Etsy find a product by color
-Collective wisdom

Customers helping customers; content created by customers to help other customers shop

• Ratings and reviews
• Tags (social tagging Amazon, Buzzillions)
• User Generated Video
• Wikis

Product visualization
Another killer use is to help customers more effectively explore a product and it’s features. Two examples of this are:

-The User Generated Video on expo television
-How Zappos provides photos from every conveivable angle of the shoes they sell

To grow sales online, it is important that we continue to find ways to mitigate the limitations of the web as a shopping tool.
 

Next up was Doug Mack, Vice President of Hosted and Consumer Solutions, Adobe, who stressed that great digital experiences are the exception, not the rule. Doug then presented what he believes are the next 5 themes for the future (3-5 years out)

1. Content is king
    ·The interface is the barrier to the customer getting where they want to go
2. Make it personal
    ·Not only is the Experience tailored to the person, but the person is customizing their own experience and products (check out  MTV video remixer or Zazzle)
3. Empower your customers
    ·Doug demonstrated a special version of the Anthropologie .com store for the desktop (powered by Adobe AIR ) where the user can load a picture of someone, select a color on their outfit and display products that match it.
4. the internet, accessible anywhere
    ·Time to get your pervasive strategy in order
    ·It’s for brick and mortar too; use it to provide product info at Point of sale
5. Create an experience, not a website
    ·Amgen started with “what is the biking racing experience we want to create?”
    ·Provide live updates on a map of all racers with live video feed of the race
    ·Chat rooms
    ·Additional Photos pop up live from the course when available
    ·Detailed course profile showing terrain, slope and grade.

Last up was David Daniels, VP and Research Director, Jupiter Research. David let us know that 85% of web users visit retailer/vendor/manufacturer sites like Amazon, google, etc… while only 25% currently use social sites. However, this is an important and growing segment and vital to your strategy moving forward.

Consumers are more likely to give feedback after a good experience than after a bad one. 31% will tell friends about a good experience vs. 21% who tell friends about a bad experience. Either way, it’s a good idea to focus on taking care of your customers to generate positive buzz about your company. Use the email you get to ID brand ambassadors and involve them. This will improve both your offering and your customers loyalty.

A certain percent of your customers are going to be ‘Super Communicators’.

Super communicators

• 20% of online shoppers
• 12 purchases, 9 product reviews
• 32% of online spending (skews male)

Customers trust what other customers say about your products as much as what you say about them – they look for peers to validate product claims (more so in tech or other categories where there is not as much general knowledge).

So there it is then. Emerging technologies will allow us to vastly improve the online shopping experience, but at the same time we need to go back to the fundementals; listening to and taking care of our customers.

This spoke to a major theme of the session – many online retailers are selling much of the same product, so how do you differentiate? (and it increasingly isn’t about best price and free shipping). Also, you need to get your content out there (videos on YouTube, photos on flickr, etc…), don’t restrict it to your site because potential customers are searching for information everywhere!

We are also experiencing a shift online. Looking for content has just surpassed communication as the number one activity on the Internet. People want to connect to others who have the same interests and who want the same stuff (think ‘digital Tupperware party’). Social content lets people fall in with ‘similar others’, and social networkers (facebook) are evolving into social researchers (like digg, but for products). 

Mitch was also adamant to stop thinking about the Long Tail and instead get on the Long Road of content, voice, conversations and ratings. You need a strategy for how your products can rise to the top. At the end of the day, Social Shopping comes down to making it easier for the customer to buy. The average online conversion rate remains at 2%, and social shopping is the only way to crank it up. 

Next up was Carrie Johnson, VP and Research Director at Forrester. If you’ve seen Carrie present before, you know she’s very analytical and covers a lot of data; fast!

There’s a lot of hype around social shopping right now, and many new sites are popping up like kaboodle, meebo, shopwiki, stumbleupon, etc… Don’t get distracted; the trend is more important than the technology. 

What the social shopping trend really means 

• It defines a social structure in which technology puts power in communities, not institutions 
• Social media increases the purchase options available to buyers 
• Networks expose unpopular, hard-to-find products and services (often free!) 
• These same networks create new suppliers of products and services 
• In the mean time, it erodes advertising effectiveness of traditional brands 

Social media will expose more products (than mass media does now) resulting in increased niche sales. 

What do you do about it? 

• Maybe nothing! Create a strategy based on your customers, now what you want 
• Start with figuring out what kind of social shopping profile your customers have then create an objective 

This requires a difficult deep dive on your customers (current or desired) and their participation levels in social media: 

• Who are they? 
• How engaged are they? 
• What is the frequency of their participation in social media? 

Lastly, as we move forward with this emerging media, some of the earlier experiments are beginning to drop off. Second Life, a former poster child has not held up to the hype and is no longer seen as offering any long-term value.