I watched an interesting Webinar last Thursday put on by internet thought leaders Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle in advance of their Web 2.0 Summit coming up in October.
During the Webinar, the two discussed the content of their fantastic white paper, “Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On,” a main focus of which was the rise of real-time data and how companies must begin to harness it to be competitive. According to O’Reilly and Battelle:
Collective intelligence applications depend on managing, understanding, and responding to massive amounts of user-generated data in real time. The “subsystems” of the emerging internet operating system are increasingly data subsystems: location, identity (of people, products, and places), and the skeins of meaning that tie them together. This leads to new levers of competitive advantage: Data is the “Intel Inside” of the next generation of computer applications.
One example of how we at DecisionStep are helping our clients harness the collective intelligence of its consumers is our ShopTogether Crowd technology. ShopTogether Crowd is a social application that displays the most popular products being viewed or purchased by customers in real time. The application can show the “hot” products moving in and out in a dynamic format, or show the crowd move from one section of the store (e.g., from electronics to home furnishings) in an animated “floorplan.” Since the demographics and interests of a store’s shopper typically change from the morning, into the workday, after school and then in the evenings, the products they want tend to change along with them, and ShopTogether Crowd illustrates those changes.
Beyond just a fun way for shoppers to see what’s hot now and push otherwise hesitant customers to purchase, the application gives our retail customers an opportunity to automatically merchandise and market the products most likely to sell right now and respond in real time to shifts in consumer demand. We believe this unique capability will be both a brand differentiator for clients adopting the technology early, and a way to increase online order sizes and sales.
Here is a link to how our client Charlotte Russe is using the technology, and we’re looking forward to showing you some of the exciting ways we’re working with other clients to apply the technology in the future.
Tags: collective intelligence, john battelle, ShopTogether, shoptogether crowd, social shopping, tim o'reilly, web 2.0 summit, web squared