We Are Magnetic

The Times They Are a-Changing…

Today’s world has dramatically changed from that of the strict structures of the past. History tells us that the opening up of something as simple as ‘information’ quickly leads to a revolution, and the situation today is proving to be no different.

Revolutionary ideas are nothing new, but today’s shift in informational power systems – from the controlling few to the sharing masses – has changed us all, culturally, ideologically, and personally.

The impact of these shifting systems has resulted in the fact that we are all living through, and a part of, changing times. With the call for revolution currently hot in the air, it is, now more than ever, essential that we truly understand what it is that we’re trying to change, to ensure we realise the positive opportunities this ‘seizure of power’ can deliver.

The relentless growth of the commercial web has, to date, seen two major iterations. Today we’re at another tipping point of change.

Web 1.0 – The Informational Web

We started with the Informational Web – a simple way for brands to further communicate their offer, down a channel that the ‘new consumer’ was interested in.

We all remember the static ‘brochure-ware’ sites of the opening days of the world wide web. A time of the big brand controlling their communications, much like they always have, born out of the traditional mentalities of the old TV and print ‘way of doing things’, an easy shift to the newly born web.

Web 2.0 – The Social Web

Then came the Social Web (where we are, in the main, today) – a more complex mix of message and response, where the lines of communication flow in multiple directions – sometimes brand led, often consumer led.

This was a new and scary place for brands to live, a place sometimes out of ‘brand control’ with no where to hide. But the good ones are responsive and have increasingly moulded to this modern ‘collective’ way of communication, treating their customers as partners, equals in the success of the brand.

But time is never static, and we’re currently undergoing yet another transformation in the way we all interact online. Welcome to the Living Web.

Web 3.0 – The Living Web

So what will this new living digital environment look like? And how will it affect the way we connect with the brands we love and hook-up with the people we know online?

The first thing to state is the obvious – the Living Web will be highly mobile…

Mobile

Not only will we carry this Living Web around with us wherever we go, it’ll already be at the destinations we’re visiting.

With the dramatic rise of the smartphone we are now able, and very willing, to access the information we need wherever and whenever we want.

This fact has led to a seismic shift in the way companies are looking to operate, both in their bricks and mortar and digital spaces.

Take the Retail business for example, customer patterns have changed dramatically, forming two broad behaviours:

1. The customer researches product options online before going to the high street to purchase.
2. The customer browses the high street to ‘experience’ the product, before going online (often whilst still in store) to find the best price and make the purchase.

This seemingly simple adjustment in consumer behaviour, has forces retailer to revolutionise their entire business offer. No longer can you be the ‘king of the high street’ to dominate the market. But likewise, online alone is only half the picture. For the majority, a combination of the two, coupled with a genuine care for customer engagement will be the winning formula.

The Living Web will affect the way we all do business.

Connected

Once we reach our destinations (as well as along the way), we will increasingly find that the places we find ourselves will be digitally connected to.

Again, we will see the Retail environments leading the way. Already we have the concept of the ‘active fitting room’. With the simple swipe of your loyalty card/mobile phone, this ‘intelligent fitting room’ will be able to access your past purchasing history, assess the items you’re trying on and make further suggestions that will compliment your entire wardrobe.

Active displays will also play an important part in extending the shopping experience. With the Long Tail such a powerful concept, especially within retail, active displays are allowing customers to customise the products they want – allowing for infinite choice, and increasing the retailer’s ability to hold stock beyond the limits to its store room.

Even the humble poster has, in recent times, been transformed and extended by the addition of the QR Code. Once scanned by an enabled smartphone, the QR Code takes its viewer to a digitally enhanced experience that builds upon the communication capabilities of its holding poster – bringing richer content and more information to the viewer’s phone.

The Living Web will affect the way we all make our purchasing choices.

Intelligent

As we all get used to carrying this Living Web around with us, as well as interacting with it wherever we go, the systems that we connect with will intuitively know more about us on a personal level.

Checking-in is becomings an important part of our digitally connected lives. Letting our friends know where we are at the tap of a screen, has led to the growth of opportunistic location based solutions. Foursquare, Facebook Places, Google Placed, O2′s You Are Here and many more deal based systems, are looking to entice the local customer to their location based on your proximity.

For ‘the system’, and brands in particular, this customer intelligence based on location offers huge benefits both in targeting and ‘helping’ customer choice. This powerful mix will play a big part in the evolution of the Living Web, where information consumption happens, at a personal level, not only across devices, but also across locations.

Online the Living Web is gaining more and more knowledge about us as individuals. Clever advertisers know that we simply don’t look at their ads, so they’ve turned to the Living Web for a smarter solution.

Ad Retargeting identifies you as an individual, tracks your web activity and dynamically builds ads based on your recent online activity. So, if you’ve been online, checked out a couple of products, but then moved away without a purchase, the system network will present you with tailored ads for the products you’ve shown an interest in – all the way until you purchase.

With, perhaps an unfounded, dubious reputation, this type of smart advertising will grow as we give ourselves more and more to the Living Web. The positives will start to out weigh the negatives within the minds of the average consumer, mass take-up will follow naturally.

And it’s not only online where advertising will become more intelligent. The growth of the Living Web will see greater targeting of the messages we see everyday. It’s often quotes that we see more that 3,000 marketing messages a day – most we simply don’t notice. I predict that with the growth of the Living Web this number will be dramatically reduced. We will still be exposed to the same number of places a marketing message can appear, it’ll just be that the messages we see will be highly targeted toward us as individuals – not blindly hoping we may be interested.

We’re already seeing a growing number of digitally enabled display points, the Living Web will ensure their intelligence is heighten. Already some smart billboards have the ability to identify key attributes of the people passing them by, such as height, gender (predictive), skin colour etc. they then target their messages based on the resulting criteria.

With the prevalence of the mobile web, advertising will not only be able to target generic groupings of customers but specific individuals. Smart mobile advertising techniques allow for the identification of device, since we almost always carry our devices around with us where ever we go, individuals can, and will, be targeted by the technology they carry with them – we now are just a number! and a unique one at that, one that can be tracked, identified and targeted.

The growth of this Living Web’s ability to act intelligently, whilst at first treated with some scepticism, will be wholly accepted as the way the web should be. In fact consumers will demand, more than ever, that the messages they receive be relevant and timely to them as individuals. In the future web, as now, brands will have to keep up with the demands for relevance. Brand must ensure that their marketing lists are both fully up-to-date and appropriate collated. Knowledgable data capture followed by accurate segmentation of targeted customers, will define those that are good and bad within the Living Web.

Along with mobility, intelligence will be one of the defining attributes of the Living Web. Both in brands abilities to be smarter at targeting their customers, and customer demands for brands to be smarter at delivering relevance and meaning. Intelligence will be a key factor in the success of the Living Web.

The Living Web will affect the messages we all see.

Trusted

Trust is something that has always had to grow in the mind of the community. In the past trust has been a key ‘battle ground’ in the war of technological advancement.

Right from the very start of technology, people have always feared the potential outcomes, be it TV corrupting the minds of the viewer, robots taking over the world, or hackers stealing our identities, fear has gone hand-in-hand with the drive for technical growth.

But this fear has always eroded over time, the ability for technology to make our lives easier has always resulted in trust, at least with the masses – who hasn’t happily bought something off Amazon these days?

With the growth of the Living Web there will be greater ‘trust’ in the systems we use and the digital interfaces we connect with. Moving on from simple eCommerce solution, a greater reliance on technology will bring many more opportunities for the monetization of our digital devices.

As the mobile web grows, in both popularity and coverage, more and more of us will be spending our Pounds, Dollars, Euros and Yen through this portable channel. Already we’re seeing the first ‘million pound months’ for some of the leading mCommerce sites. Inline with consumer behaviour, greater levels of both brand investment and customer spend will be through fully mobile, fully transactional web sites and application.

But mobile commerce will only be one side of the coin, there will be a much greater demand for ‘cashless’ shopping.

Already most leading mobile phone manufacturers are developing, or already have, the technologies to allow for payment to be takes directly from their new smarter devices. Operators to are getting in on the act, O2 and Orange both intend for their Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled handsets to become ‘cashless wallets’, with the ability to replace cash, payment cards and travelcards.

This technical jump, together with a more trusting community, will revolutionise the way we purchase the items we want, and manage the cash we have.

With the concept of micro payment now fully established in the minds of the community – paying small amounts for individual content streams such as mobile apps, music, TV shows etc – the giant leap towards swiping your phone across a NFC reader, to get the goods you want, will become simply a small step.

The ability to instantly check our accounts wherever and whenever we want, coupled with the capability to avoid the cash point, or even the wallet itself, together with the trust this will require, will be another defining facet of the Living Web.

The Living Web will affect the way we all manage and spend that which we hold most precious (for most!) – our cash.

Reactionary

As the Living Web encompasses both the Informational Web and the Social Web, it will remain educational and informative, as well as allowing comment and interaction, but it will also be highly reactive towards the feelings, mood and viewpoint of its highly targeted audiences.

Transcending the ubiquitous Content Management System – the tool of brand control – new corporate content streams will ebb and flow in direct reaction to the ‘feelings and mood’ of their audience.

With the Living Web, we will see how real-time data will alter the way corporates communicate with their communities. This fundamental shift in the physicality of corporate sites will finally fulfil the ‘brands must listen’ mantra.

24/7 customer service will become the normal state of things, instant updates and reactive content will flow through the very heart of every business website. Tracking transactional data and consumer comment – and then reacting to it – will become an essential tool for every smart business.

The living Web will bring about a need for us all to be much more data-savvy. No longer can we simple install Google Analytics and hope this will show us a clear direction. We will need to understand the data we mine, and make intelligent insight from its riches.

We will see great developments in intelligent ‘agents’ – computer systems that react to changes in data and build both useful and relevant content streams. These could be as simple as ‘alerts’ or as complex as intelligent rule-based systems that are used to interpret a world view on our behalf.

The Living Web will affect the way we all react to the views of others.

Conclusion

Technology has always been about making our lives easier. Communications especially, have benefitted from its relentless strides forward. Ever since Samuel Morse thought up an innovative way to send messages across wires, we have felt the unstoppable force of progression.

Today, our world is a product of the innovations of those who have lived before, and we’re all shaping the lives of those to come. From the time the first call was placed or flickering image was viewed, life changing advancements have changed the lives of the masses and radically transformed the way we all think, feel and act.

Although this powerful force for change has always been strong, technical revolutions are, in the main, peaceful. They have always looked towards advancing the current – aggregating that which is good and finding an even better way.

Throughout the development of the web we have always seen positive leaps forward, the past has been enhanced, improved and upgraded, hardly ever simply destroyed. So it will be with Web 3.0.

As the Social Web added innumerably to the Informational Web, so the Living Web will augment the experience of both it predecessors. The Living Web will drive revolution, but a revolution that comes naturally into our lives, seemingly obvious and everyday. Its impact is soon to be felt.

What is clear, is that the Living Web will be more personal, more available and more relevant to its audience. The Living Web will integrate itself seamlessly into the fabric of our lives.

Whether it’s the global acceptance of behavioural targeting, the ‘always on’ mobile web, the emotional nature of a more video based net (led by advertising), or the mass take-up of emerging technologies, such as 3D printers – revolutionising the way we purchase products by allow the digital download of any product ‘DNA’ ready to be ‘printed’ into its constructed parts, the Living Web will bring about change, on a still to be realised level.

We are living in exciting times, the Living Web is, more than ever, about to enter every aspect of daily lives, and with it we will have a much greater emotional connection with the technologies used to transmit it.

In true revolutionary tradition, the Living Web will have a dramatic impact on the lives of us all. So get ready for changing times.