An overarching theme of this year’s destinationCRM conference is Web 2.0’s Impact on the Next Generation of CRM Tools & Techniques. I’d be surprised if you could sit in on a single session without hearing mention of Web 2.0’s impact – whether on sales, marketing, customer service, or the customer experience. In his presentation “Beat the Half-Life of Web 2.0 Technologies” Lee Allen Scott proposed that at next year’s conference the phrase Web 2.0 will be obsolete. It will at least be Web 2.1 – or even Web 3.0. Predictions of the name change have been around for awhile. One thing’s for sure, Web 2.0 talk is becoming nothing but more familiar.

In this morning’s CRM industry address, destinationCRM chairman Barton Goldenberg listed common Web 2.0 tools that business should be adopting: blogs, wikis, video, RSS, widgets, podcats, and social networks. He then asked audience members to raise hands if they are using the aforementioned tools in their everyday business processes. Many hands raised for blogs, less for wikis and a fair amount for RSS feeds. Very few arms were raised for using widgets. “We’ve got to get those numbers up,” Goldenberg says.

Customers – especially Generation Y– are demanding that the Web fit their needs and evolve. So much so that they don’t even necessarily think about the Web functionality they use on a daily basis.

Example: Just over the weekend, I was talking to a friend from college who admitted to me that she didn’t think she had ever seen a blog. Shocked and a little appalled by this statement, I immediately started listing common blogs that I was sure she has visited. “Oh, I guess I do look at blogs, but I didn’t attach a name to the item,” she told me. The moral of this story is that customers don’t care about the label of the tool. They don’t need or even want to hear vendors saying “We have a wiki!” or “Now we are doing social networking!” They just want it there. No explanation necessary.

What’s a business to do? Goldenberg maintains that when managing Web 2.0 and people and processes, only 20 percent has to do with technology. It’s mostly about the people. And those for those non-techies – which is the majority of consumers – technology can be confusing, overwhelming, and unnecessary. It seems contradictory: Your customers want Web 2.0, but they don’t want to know about it.

I think Goldenberg has it about right. He says:

“The difference is knowing how to create that mix [among people, processes and technology] over time. Those that get the mix right have a much better chance of succeeding. The most significant mistake that companies make is the inability to appreciate the need to carefully integrate people, processes and technology at each stage of an implementation.”