Today was the first day of Internet World the annual expo for all things web related held at Earls Court, London. There were two things that seemed to be most in evidence one was cloud computing with plenty of suppliers of cloud based services, all of whom gave slightly different versions of what cloud computing entailed and the other thing that was in evidence was queueing!

I did not attend any of the talks that I had originally planned on going to, but that was not necessarily a bad thing as I ended up attending five extremely interesting talks. The day was a little fatiguing due to the amount of queuing, on one occasion I queued for an hour to listen to a talk that lasted 20 minutes.

OK, enough of the moaning let me tell you about the good stuff. My first talk was “The Unsocial Web” by Siddharth Jhunjhunwala of Web Spiders. The crux of Sids talk was that individuals and brands can expend too much effort in chasing friends/followers on various social media networks thinking that high numbers must mean that they are doing something right. What Sid argued was that as numbers increase so engagement decreases. He claimed that as numbers increase so the value of the individual decreases. To emphasise the point he used the analogy that when in a city people will walk past each other and say nothing, but if in a jungle if one of those person came across another person they would start to talk. I think this was a great way to get the point across. Too many brands are talking and too few are actually listening, which in my opinion is very conceited of them.

My next session was Graham Wilkinson’s from Just Search. This was quite a short session and looked at ways that organisations can harness some of the free tools that are available on the web to help build up a content management strategy in social media. This was not a talk about using Facebook and Twitter. Rather it was how you can use tools such as Social Mention and Double Click Ad Planner to work out what people are saying about your brand or product and where your target audience hangs out on the web.

After a spot of lunch I headed to a talk given by Dave Edmundson-Bird from Manchester Metropolitan University. It was quite apparent that Dave is a lecturer as heis talk was the most interesting, not necessarily in the sense that the content was any better than the other but more in the way that it was delivered. Dave talked Emerging Trends in Digital Marketing. One of the main points that he made was that there is a convergence in design, search and social. That organisations need to get their advisors on these three disciplines together at the start of a project rather than following on from each other. This will enable the organisation to develop a co-ordinated strategy for their online activity and will also reduce costs and friction.

Webcredible gave a talk on designing mobile friendly sites. The talk was more than just using a browser detection script to present your site content in a narrower column than ususal. That you need to look at trying to minimise user input as mobile devices are not really designed for anything other than very light keyboard use. In case you were wondering I can confirm now that this article is being written in a hotel room but that the input device is a laptop and not a smartphone!

My final talk was possibly the most illuminating. It was given by Andy Henshaw, CEO of Vee24. I only attended the talk because another I had planned to attend had started early. With hindsight I am so glad that it did as Andy’s talk backed up many things that I already believe about online behaviour and also gave me a glimpse of what will undoubtedly become a very popular feature of e-commerce sites in the next couple of years. Andy was talking about live video chat on websites. The idea is that if you are on a site then you generally do not have the opportunity to quiz anybody about the products and services that are available in real time. Andy showed stats that online conversion is between 3-4% while in store conversion is between 15-20%.

This has set me to thinking. If you went back in time 100 years then your local grocer would provide you with a very tailored service. You would walk into the shop and receive personal service from an individual. In the sixties and seventies we saw the rise of supermarkets, here the service was less personal but the tradeoff was in lower prices. You still had somebody that you could turn to and ask questions. With the rise of online shopping at the end of the nineties this function of questioning disappeared. Yes you could email the company, but to maximise sales you need to engage with the customer when the interest is highest. With live video chat you still get all the advantages of online shopping but you can also get that more personal touch that has been lost over the years. The fact that it is video means that it is a lot more instant than when you take part in a live text chat, no matter how fast you can type I will guarantee that you can talk faster.

The show itself has hundreds of stands offering a wide variety of services. I am going to decide whose stand was the best, in my opinion, on Friday morning. One early contender is Eazy Tiger. Their stand was one of the smallest but they used an X Box 360 with Kinnetic controller to play a football type game, the palyer with the highest score at the end of the show will win a prize.

I would also like to mention Kyle and the team from BoxPay who are a company that provide a payment solution where instead of giving your credit card details you simply pay via a text message charged to your mobile phone. I think that this is likely to be a real growth area over the next few years. People are going to become more and more reluctant to hand over their card details to companies due to issues about the security of their personal data. We only need to look at recent events with Sony to see what can happen when things go wrong. BoxPay can also be used for recurring billing to subscription sites and is definitely worth considering if you are looking for an alternative way of charging your customers. At this time there is a £10.00 transaction limit but they are looking at increasing the maximum transaction value.

All in all I have had an enjoyable day, but now it is time to recharge my phone, my digital camera, my video camera and most of all myself. Night all, and I will see you at the show tomorrow.