Why is it that the morning after a presentation, I wake up with ideas about how I could have got the message over better? It’s like those moments you wake up in the night with absolute clarity about something complicated and if you don’t write it down, you’ve lost it forever. So this is my note-to-self scribbled in the early hours so I don’t forget.

I woke up thinking about a particularly complicated slide and how I could have articulated a story to illustrate its importance - because, let’s face it, it’s a pretty boring slide!

I began thinking about the “Wow”. The something that really good websites and services have that make them so special. I was thinking in terms of a charity - a Catholic Diocese - and why this slide was important in delivering that Wow!

What would be the Wow? Well, great visual design, superb navigation, well written and engaging content, Web 2.0 stuff - you know recommendations, tag-clouds and the like…but would that be the Wow? I thought not - the Wow would be in the User Experience (UX) and that it would be personal to the individual. To deliver a great UX, you need to know as much about that user as possible…and the Wow would come from something as simple as saying “Thank you”.

Imagine if Mrs Wowee has donated money to the Diocese - it could be in church, through a standing order with her bank, in a cheque to one of the big Diocesan appeals, or online through their website. Well we’ve got that information captured. Imagine if Mrs Wowee uses her parish microsite to look up local events and to subscribe to a Diocesan newsletter.

Wouldn’t it be great to say “Thank you” and to let her know what else was happening that might interest her? Putting what is important to Mrs Wowee in front of her - wouldn’t that be the Wow?

This is where the boring slide helps out. Without all the boring applications and the boring databases, the APIs and the web services, and the interoperability of them all, could you say “Thank you, Mrs Wowee…and here’s what’s upcoming in your local church (and these things might interest your kids)” when she uses the Diocesan website or her parish’s microsite? No. You wouldn’t know enough about her. You couldn’t tell she was from Edmonton parish, that she’d donated over £1,000 this year, and that she also supported other causes. You might know she subscribed to the Diocesan newsletter, but that’s hardly rocket science.

It’s the architecture, the foundations, the machinery behind everything that gives you the ability to build the picture of the user, and the picture for the user. You need to be boring to deliver Wow!

According to a study by Forrester Research, technologies that let people carry their online identities around with them (Hooray! - the death of the registration page) will transform the way companies (and hence all organisations) approach online media and marketing.

Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang foresees the Web evolving from separate social sites into a shared social experience.

“Consumers will rely on their peers as they make online decisions, whether or not brands choose to participate. Socially connected consumers will strengthen communities and shift power away from brands and CRM systems”. Eventually this will result in empowered communities defining the next generation of products.

The key challenge for organisations at the moment is that information about people – the information they need to understand and access their customers and donors - their profiles, and their friends is locked away in separate networks.

But this is set to change according to Forrester report. “Portable” social identities and the changes they enable will almost reverse the traditional way that consumers, brands, and social networks interact. The social Web will evolve from a few social network sites into an ever-present environment in which every online activity occurs. The boundaries of social networks and traditional sites will blur, making all sites a social experience.

OpenID and Facebook Connect are technologies that allow people to wander the Web with their social connections able to come along with them for the ride. This is starting to happen now.

Ultimately, new browsers and identity technologies will let people see what their friends have visited and what they thought of the experience.

Forrester predicts that from 2010 we will see sites customising their visitors’ experiences according to their preferences, their behaviours, and who their friends are – not just with a particular organisation, but across the web.

Pretty soon social networks will become more powerful than corporate Web sites and CRM systems. Now that presents some pretty exciting challenges!