As web 2.0 is just starting to take hold I’m envisioning what’s next.  We have more information than we ever have about our customers and prospects.  How are we going to use it to make each experience unique? Get ready for web 3.0, it’s coming faster than you may think.

As a marketer who likes to push the envelope on creativity and innovation in the field, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what is going to be the next “big thing” in the industry.  I’ve also worked on many extensive web projects and have been watching the latest trends with web 2.0 and social media integration.  Well, MLK Jr. put it best, “I have a dream.”  I envision that my website experiences will be customized to me and provide me with the information I want – when I want it, the information I need – when I need it, and the information I don’t know I need or want – when I don’t realize I need or want it. I want every web experience to have an “A-ha” moment for me and extend that to my customers and prospects.

Today, we all pretty much start our web search at Google.  We type in a search term and review the organic listings which are comprised of a few things: Business listings with relevant content, Individual blog listings will relevant content, and Business sponsored content provided by individuals, think reviews etc, and then we might move over to peruse the paid search options.  If your company comes up anywhere in the organic listings(first) or paid results (second) then we’ll take a look at you.  If not, we quickly determine that you aren’t swimming with the big dogs and aren’t worth our time or the risk of our professional reputation to investigate further. Once we get to your site, you have either pointed us to a page that provides content based on our search term and/or we find ourselves needing more information. So our typical web experience may start by checking out the navigation on the page and see if we can find what we are looking for. If I’m really interested I may resort to the little search box on your site.  We type in a word that we think will deliver the result we are seeking. Depending on the sophistication of the website it either delivers a relevant result and we take a look or it doesn’t and we leave. I could get into an even lengthier discussion on what stage I am in the buying process and how it changes this, but I’ll leave that to another day.

With the advent of marketing automation we can now track every action a prospect and/or customer takes on our website and respond based on their real activities rather than information provided on a form or what they tell us they want.  This is the first step towards being able to provide relevant and actionable content.  The days of site visitors being lost in the black hole of the “unknown” are dwindling.  Through progressive customer profiles we can now collect information in little bits and reconcile it back to who you are and act accordingly.  As a marketer it truly is a beautiful thing!  Now, I have the ability to truly test, monitor, and refine campaigns and content based on your activity in ways that were impossible as little as 5 years ago.  Even more beautiful is that I can measure the results in terms of action/inaction and ultimately the Return on Marketing Investment, put simply the revenue that is returned to the organization over the investment that was required to generate that revenue.

These are huge steps forward for marketers, steps I honestly never even considered a few years ago.  At the same time, it opens new doors and new avenues to truly be able to satiate the known and unknown desires of people who WANT and NEED what my company has to offer. But as my husband would tease, like any woman I am never satisfied! I want more…I want to take it to another level…I want to drive us into a web 3.0 world now!

Why?  Because we are on the cusp and with today’s technologies it is possible.  So why wait? As Marketers we are all shifting to become content producers for our companies as we are learning that content is king, so why not take it to a new level?

Imagine producing content in bits, chunks, and larger heaps but giving it to people in the serving size that suits them best? To put it into context, perhaps you would produce an excerpt that leads to a blog post then to a mini e-book then to a technical white paper. Okay, so maybe you do it backwards and start with the  most extensive and build backwards, whatever suits your fancy.  The next question is, “What do I do with this progressively expanded content?”

Remember, those progressive customer and prospect profiles that marketing automation is allowing us to create and all the previous web activity that we are reacting to? What if we could turn that into a concept similar to a tag cloud so that we understood what truly drives THAT customer? Sure we can look at an entire segment, but the actions of the whole do not tell the story of the individual.  And web 3.0, well I’m hoping it will focus on one-to-one marketing. What does that mean? It means that the real estate  of your website can be divided into dynamically generated sections of content based on the profile of the individual and the activities you have logged for him or her. It’s Amazon’s personalized recommendations concept flipped upside down, spun around and thrown at you in a website that changes based on what you say you want, distilled by who you say you are, and refined by the actions you take over time.

What a web 3.0 site might look like

Hard to picture? (Well, don’t knock me for my lacking graphic design skills but look at this in terms of dynamically generated content buckets that would obviously look a heck of a lot better with a web designers touch.)

As you can see, the concept is that each bucket has content that changes based on what I know about you.  I allow you to tell me if you like the content either through rating or by watching your activities and if not I try something else until I find content that you are responding to and clicking to take a deeper look.  If I find out that you really like e-books, I may show all e-books on the left side, etc.  If I find that you like 3rd party blog posts and product reviews, I may focus on showing you those.  Every time you answer the customer profile question, the next question appears.  Bits, pieces, chunks, of your “Digital Body Language,” as Steven Woods coined, add up to deliver a custom one-to-one web experience.

Now, I’m not a techie so I don’t know how to tell you to do this.  I certainly have some ideas from my web experience.  But I know it isn’t as hard as it sounds.

I certainly could be wrong, but I’m hoping that this is the direction web development starts moving and I’ll certainly be pushing it that way.  And if it finally catches,  I’ll be a customer for sure!

Where does your company stand on Web 2.0 adoption? [polldaddy poll=1657249]