In a whirlwind couple of weeks of travel, I found myself in San Francisco at the RAMA/Shop.org Retail Innovation & Marketing Conference (RIMC) last week. It’s rare that I get an opportunity to sit in on a lot of sessions, but frankly, it’s been about four years since I’ve felt that I was missing more in a session than on an expo hall floor. Until now. While every meeting I had was fantastic, I wish now that I could have seen all of the presentations at the event, because not only was every single one I attended very insightful, but the buzz about the ones I missed was just as big.

What is RIMC? It’s a combination of forces — RAMA’s RAIC conference, and Shop.org’s Digital Marketing conference. This is a telling convergence of forces, bringing traditional marketing together with digital, but even more important, speaking about it not in terms of advertising, or even marketing, but in terms of the customer experience and innovation in how that experience is created, delivered, and supported. No wonder NRF was turning people away at the door.

The conference was organized around 5 themes: Mobile, Social, Cross-Channel, the New Customer, and Creative. Mobile by far received the most buzz, and had the most interest on the first day. The second half of that day was spent on some social media examples and use-cases, but as much as they were fascinating, they were a sort of no big deal kind of story — it seemed they had all been heard before.

Personally, I find social media difficult not because it’s a so what? story, but because it takes more attention span, sustained over time, than I have to devote to it to do it well. I “dabble ” in a medium that others have wholeheartedly embraced. But even among people who have embraced it, I didn’t see a lot of wowed people, and that surprised me. Has social media peaked already? I didn’t believe it.

I found out the answer to my question on day two, when a panel of venture capitalists took the stage to discuss what they are investing in and what they think the future holds. According to them, social media has not peaked, but it has arrived. From the VC’s perspective, social media has a business model, has proven use-cases, has an audience with reach, and while its depths have by no means been plumbed, from their point of view, they can at least see the bottom of the well. A perfect space for VC money.

Mobile, on the other hand, is a farther off thing for the panelists. They felt that Android would eventually have the greatest market share, simply by having the most and cheapest devices available. But they were quick to point out that the market share of smart phones, even in the US, is still not significant enough that retailers should run out right away and build an iPhone app — unless they have a significant, well-defined reason to do that today. They objected to use-cases that would ideally lead to conversion — to a transaction — on mobile, arguing that the screen is just not conducive to that type of relationship. They also felt that no one has yet developed compelling use-cases outside of general brand building — which does not really have a business model that VC’s are all that interested in.

In RSR’s research on commerce channels, we found that online retailers were more interested in social media, and store-based retailers were more interested in mobile. It makes sense — if you’re online, mobile with all of its location-based and physical context is not a valuable medium. You may need to be there, to take advantage of price comparison opportunities that might happen in a competitor’s store, but social has much greater connections into online, and so it is a bigger opportunity for online retailers. The reverse is true for store-based retailers. With the opportunity to make connections between the physical world and the virtual world, mobile poses greater opportunities than social — assuming you can define the right use-cases.

The interesting thing for me is that mobile and social target two different types of customers, so ultimately, the choice will not come down to either/or. Among social-engaged customers, there is some small population — as small as 1-3% or up to 20-25%, depending on who you ask — that are your most engaged customers, and social media become a way for these customers to not only influence you and you them, but for them to infect other customers with their same level of brand engagement. You can’t buy the level of engagement that would lead a customer to die her hair pink to match Sephora’s latest ad, for heaven’s sake. That is the value you get from social media, but it requires more engagement on your part to reap the rewards of engagement with your customers.

I would be surprised, however, to find that mobile turns out the same way. The value of mobile is context — you have the ability to understand more about what your customer is trying to achieve depending on where she is, and location-based services will help with that. But that is equally as true for a relatively unengaged consumer as it is for one that changes her hair color to match your ad campaigns. So while the use-cases are less known today, because we don’t know a lot about which shoppers will take to mobile engagement (other than the base assumption of kids), the number and diversity of use-cases may well end up being greater in mobile than we find for social media, because it is engagement for the masses, rather than social’s current status of engagement for the engaged.

Either way, I will fall back on my long-time mantra, one that served as one of the jumping off points for the founding principles of RSR: It’s not about how retailers want to sell. It’s about how consumers want to buy. And if you think you can ignore any of these new ways of engagement, simply because you don’t see it or don’t understand how to get value out of it, then I will leave you with a warning: watch out! Your customers are already talking about you, using these media, whether you participate or not.