Trade shows are a great way to focus. Immersed in a single topic for a few days, surrounded by a fairly narrow range of information and ideas, with the ability to freely graze among the presentations, booths, and brochures it is a chance to somehow organize and make sense of a market or industry. Even if you already spend most of your time and energy in that arena, there’s something about the energy and collective that clarifies and solidifies a picture of what’s really going on and hopefully of what’s going to happen next.

I spent the first half of last week at shop.org in Vegas, and the last at the xChange in Napa. This double header confirmed an idea that’s been brewing for some time. As all of the basic elements of doing business online – as complex and as-yet-imperfect as they are – settle in as just the price of admission, the future of success is now about conversations and calculations.

Conversations are the world of The Cluetrain Manifesto, word of mouth marketing, and social media. It’s something that’s been building for years and is the result of the fact that people always had the power and desire to lead markets but before the internet they lacked the tools necessary to do it. In a world without efficient conversations, AOL could drop 200 gazillion CDs in your lap and get 35 million people to sign up for the world’s worst ISP. In a conversant world Zappos will sell $800 million worth of shoes in its 8^th year as a company that barely advertises.

At shop.org Kelly Mooney gave an amazing keynote based on her upcoming book The Open Brand: When Push Comes to Pull in a Web-Made World, very neatly summing up the current state and cumulative impact of conversations. She presents a compelling case as to why accepting and engaging in a conversation with your market is the best and smartest option.

Calculations are the math and science that take information about what’s happening in an increasingly measurable business world and turn it into smart (and even automated) actions. In online marketing today the vast majority of decisions are made based on anything but complete and accurate facts. But in at least a few areas (paid search as one example, multivariable landing page testing as another) we’re starting to turn the corner into a time when enough data and the right technology are available so that we can know the quantifiable ‘right thing to do’.

At xChange there was evidence of both the promise and the elusiveness of calculations. Many of the best minds and practitioners in web analytics were there and in the ‘huddles’ (this was a post-presentations-style conference) we heard about some remarkable examples of measurement and analysis driving smarter decisions. But far more commonplace were the ‘you can’t get there from here’ discussions and real world stories where the best of web-analytics and analysts produced nothing more than hints and clues.

Both conversations and calculations are hard. There is almost nothing or no one in a typical business either pre-disposed nor supported for a true conversational approach to marketing. It takes what still amounts to radical foresight and guts to really try, inevitably fail a little, and make honest progress. The idea of analysis is widely accepted but commonly aims only for ‘insight’ while the point of calculations is actual answers. Getting there requires a level of commitment to data collection, analysis, software tools, and their application that would get most marketers branded as fanatical or even deranged.

So the future champions of ecommerce are those willing to start down paths that others will see as radical and/or deranged. That sounds about right.