Internet 3.0 is Here and it’s About Context. Be Amazed, Be Very Amazed!

This is part 2 of my excellent chat with Pelin Thorogood aka @PelinT, newly appointed CMO at Anametrix, a San Diego, CA based digital analytics company. During this chat we cover measuring the effectiveness of social media marketing and its impact on traditional marketing. Take a look below and let me know your thoughts in the comments section.

The interview, mainly focused on social media and ends with: “And we ain’t seen nothing yet Pelin…!” So I wanted to expand on that last part, because we truly haven’t seen a thing yet. And it might scare you or excite you just as much.

Welcome to the Internet 3.0! This changes everything again, and no this is not about the new iPhone.

Like a predicament à la Lord of Rings, Internet 3.0 was ushered in in three waves:

• Wave 1, the internet started and the Google and Yahoo giants took over to lay the land
• Wave 2, social media came along, with Facebook taking over while the previous giants struggled to catch up. Google may now have a shot at social with Google+ after botching Wave and Buzz and Yahoo has Marisa Mayer and we’ll see what comes out of that.
• Wave 3, mobile is now all the rage and, like clock work, Facebook as the previous giant again struggling to catch up, some saying it even is dying.

In a similar manner within mobile, Nokia had laid out the land with dummies, Blackberry brought about smartphones and Apple made them social, to change our lives. almost like people with eyes (camera), ears (mic) and skin (touch screen). Enters the contextual web or Internet 3.0, a sensor filled mobile web that promises to make better sense of our surroundings than we can, to make our lives… a dream.

by Brian Solis

Our new marketing world will thus now be about “contextual relevance”. Feeling overwhelmed? Feeling “digitally darwined“? Worry not, it is still about knowing your targets, just like in traditional marketing, but now in a more intimate manner, and new technology is helping to make this happen. @Scobleizer is reporting a new toy coming this Christmas that will entertain your kids and change depending on the context they are in (it will know it’s a rainy day, for instance, and will change their behavior accordingly).

This only underscore the importance of that first piece of strategic advice: “Focus on delivering value. Focus on being and remaining relevant. Focus on knowing who your targets are (…)“. That last part is where the buck stops, where the rubber hits the road and where everything starts… or ends prematurely. It’s now no longer only what they did or liked, it’s also where they are now and what do they want now, neither too soon nor too late.

Even Google is getting into the game. Its project is otherwise known as “Google Glasses”, a true wearable computer that augments your reality. It describes its “Project Glass” as:

“We think technology should work for you—to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t. We started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.”

To get an idea of what may call for a deeper revamp of how we approach marketing than social media brought on, take a look at the video below and witness how a $95 billion, San Diego, CA based company named Qualcomm is jumping on the opportunity.

I say “revamp” because so far with social media, we were playing socially aware roles, closely related to situations, usually replicable in real life: engagement, thank yous, conversations, empathy even. That’s not going away, but folks!

We’re now talking about playing mind reader, high-end butlers!

I mean super perspicacious, superpowers wielding, empathetic concierges!

There’s now no way to try jamming this into a traditional marketing model as  social medias so far suffered from. It would mean assured failure. Subtlety is now the word and the difference between thrive and irrelevance, may lie in whether a business sees butlers and concierges jobs as a chore or as an opportunity to dazzle customers.

This all, far from reduces from the importance of analytics and truly knowing one’s target.

Internet 2.0, the one of words, images and videos just shifted to the much larger, granular internet 3.0, one of things. Marissa Mayer, then still VP at @Google was already eloquently describing the phenomenon in this 2009 video, “The Physics of Data”. And for those of us worried about privacy, just know that Mayer reported the average person uploaded 15 times more data in 2009 than they did just three years ago.

The need for solid platforms in this  to help process and sift through this “Internet of things”, for businesses to stay relevant to their customers, will only go crescendo.

So? Scared or excited? But most importantly, ready? Let me know in the comments section below.