There were two days of interesting presentations and mingling with people from all parts of the web industry. Here is a sum up of the trends presented in the presentations and discussed during the breaks.

A temporary monopoly

If all the companies just mimic each other all the time, no one will be the big winner. To succeed in today’s business environment companies must find innovations and differentiate themselves from the rest to create what you might call a temporary monopoly. By constantly adapting to what customers are looking for and require and continually improving and changing will stand out and take market share from competitors.

The customer now knows more than ever

One thing that has also been discussed for a long time, and a topic that was discussed frequently during these days was that the companies must be more open and more transparent in their communication with customers. This puts new demands on companies and their employees. The new generation has grown up with mobiles, internet, Facebook and e-commerce and this generation stands for most of the transactions according to a recent survey by Dibs. This generation expects that everything should just work and that everything will be possible on the Internet. They have no understanding that they must go to the store and buy the product. If they want to buy it on the internet they do this. If you do not offer this option, they will go to a competitor and this without even blinking.

Micro blogs and Twitter is crap

Magnus Penker, CEO and senior partner at Qeep Group made the final presentation on Webbdagarna, in a very interesting and inspiring way. Instead of talking about obvious facts as many of the other presenters did, Magnus had strong views on the web and what companies should do and not do. The view which I thought was most interesting was that Twitter and Micro Blogs is crap, and do not have a business benefit at all. The most comical of this was that the presentation before had been about how companies can take advantage of micro blogs. Magnus said that a blog is not getting better because it is 140 characters long. A blog is good when it is honest, transparent and that it must earn the confidence of its readers which requires perseverance. Sure, I agree with his reasoning, but I am convinced that it is possible to create business value with the help of Twitter. A good example is Telenor which always listens to what is said on the micro blogs and responds and comments on all of the posts people make on Telenor. A colleague here at Brightstep wrote a question on Twitter regarding when Telenor would start selling the iPhone and it took no more than two minutes before he received a response from Telenor’s customer service.

Here is a link to some of the presenations from webbdagarna 2009:
http://bambuser.com/channel/internetworld/