I read a post on Mashable earlier today about an interview with Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and now a big venture capitalist.
The post dealt with the evolution of the web and Hoffman’s assertion that whilst Web 2.0 was about social networking, Web 3.0 will be all about data. In the article, Reid explained that “data will come in two forms: explicit and implicit. Explicit data is data users willingly give to social networks, blog posts and tweets, while implicit data is data collected in the background, such as geolocation”.
I completely agree with this sentiment, and it is further evidenced by Salesforce.com’s recent purchase of Radian6, a major player in the social network monitoring space.
But, I think it goes further. The next few years is going to see businesses placing a massive emphasis on integrating consolidated measures from every channel within their operations to allow for real-time measurement and enhanced responsiveness to customer experience issues. Data that will be obtained from web channels, social networks and other online and mobile channels will only be one element of the new Measurement 3.0 phenomenon. In addition to this, I believe we will also see tighter integration with internal business intelligence platforms and EFM (Enterprise Feedback Management) solutions to create a complete picture of the customer experience value chain, delivered through dashboard mechanisms to empower business decision makers with easy to consume, real-time, actionable information.
The coming years are certainly going to be interesting for people in my industry…