I went to O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo at San Francisco’s Moscone Center today to check out one of the most important hubs of the whole social media phenomena. It was interesting, in some ways tremendously exciting, but also a little disappointing. A really mixed bag, for reasons I’ll explain. First, let me lay down the disclaimer that although I’ve spent a lot of time on the technology side, my frame of reference today is really more about marketing- -or, more precisely, bridging the gap between marketing and technology. The things that excited me today were seeing a lot of companies developing cool applications and services to leverage the power of technology to solve marketing problems. I’m going to profile a few of these companies during the remainder of the week, but I’ll quickly call out Baynote, CoreSpeed, Userplane and Unisfair.

 

The classic “Here. You Want My Card?” sales approach.

Baynote provides a content optimizing tool that watches how users access content on your site, and dynamically tweaks search engine results and navigation to serve up the most relevant content. Simple concept, great results. CoreSpeed provides a platform of modular applications that enable companies to build customer communities and optimize company-to-customer relationships around marketing, sales and support. Straightforward concepts, lots of power and flexibility. Userplane provides a platform for live communities, with video, audio and chat interaction. Unisfair provides a virtual reality for conferences, seminars and exhibits. Think of a SecondLife business universe without the gambling and porn. Sorry.

These were a few standout companies for me in a small sea dominated by ubiquitous fish like Google and Yahoo, who really gave off the impression that they were just there to be there. Yawn. Amazon at least showed some very interesting insights into how they envision the future of Web services and their impact on Web commerce. Much of the rest of the field was overwhelmed by far too many “me too” applications companies and social networking sites obviously chasing venture funds. That was the disappointing part. I can’t count the number of “online collaboration” companies, or “user generated content advertising networks”. It was shades of 1999, with eye-popping brands dressing up flimsy business models. For all the loud play that Web 2.0 is getting, I had hoped to see a lot more robust imagineering.

One side note that was interesting to me was seeing how much geeky engineering has embraced the business mindset. This is, after all, an O’Reilly show, primarily targeting the geek audience. But the focus on business applications and objectives–even the predominance of well dressed engineers, really brings home how much IT has integrated with the general business audience. But it also highlights how little ground marketing has covered in addressing and embracing that audience. Less than a third of the show’s exhibitors were really addressing a marketing audience, despite the dominant implications of Web 2.0 technologies for corporate marketing.

I came home with a stack of data sheets that I’m pouring through to try and find the gold nuggets. Unisfair is making an announcement tomorrow that I’ll cover here. It looks like there are at least a few standouts that will be worth it for marketers to get to know.