Just finished reading the Shop.org Summit 2007 keynote by Donna Hoffman from the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing at the University of California, Riverside. The keynote titled, “The Evolution of Customer Experience: 10 Trends You Can’t Afford to Miss,” addresses the upcoming Web 3.0 and what it means to retailers.

“If Web 2.0 was about the consumer having control, then Web 3.0 is about augmenting that control with artificial intelligence,” she said.

In her talk, she stressed the top online consumer habits and what they mean for retailers today and in the future. Hoffman suggested social networking sites, virtual worlds and other types of interactive consumer-generated media as locations to look for consumer behavior.

Hoffman further spoke,

“Social shopping sites have the potential to make online shopping much more engaging,” she said. “Consumers are spending much more time on these sites.”

Move over, search engine optimization; and get ready, social networking optimization, says Hoffman. Retailers will have to prepare for how their sites link to widgets, like eBay has done. The online retail giant lets customers shop from their MySpace pages.

I have talked about Social Networking Sites and retailers earlier also, and to that post, Nick Burcher left a link to his blog post titled, 5 Great examples of retailers using Facebook where he discusses how Retailers are using Social Networking sites like Facebook. Social Networking sites provide a great and inexpensive vehicle to create communities of loyal visitors, that is if done well.