In 2010, by far my favorite conference was Retail Innovate, the first annual collision of NRF’s RAMA and Shop.org around retail marketing. You can read about last year’s write-up here. So naturally when it came up again last week I was determined to go, even though it meant coming straight off another conference with literally hours to repack and get to the airport to get to San Francisco.

On one hand, I was kind of disappointed. The content was good, but not as great as I remembered from the year before. The retailers were engaged, but not really as inspired as they were the year before. The venue was much more spacious, which was nice, but in some ways worked against building up the palpable level of energy that came from the cramped space of last year.

My favorite presentation of the event (aside from Guy Kawasaki’s closing keynote — he’s always such an engaging speaker) was a breakout session by Mark Logan of Barkleys, entitled in the program, “Closing the Circle on Social Shopping. “ In his opener, Mark left only the words Social Shopping on the screen, and then replaced his original title with, “How Social Shopping Let Me Down. “ He proceeded to tell a tale about how, in a search for relevant product recommendations (he was looking for inspiration for what book to suggest to his book club) he went to Amazon to find out that the recommendations were far less than inspiring.

Ah, that feeling of let-down. When you get so excited about something, and then you find out that reality is not what you had built up in your head. I had that very moment as I sat at a table during a break at Retail Innovate.

But then I realized something. Much as I have never really understood Gartner’s beloved Hype Cycle (what the heck is a Slope of Enlightenment anyway?), there is one item on there that I do understand: the dreaded Trough of Disillusionment. Social media and mobile in retail have definitely achieved that status — especially if you were able to see the faces of the retailers at Retail Innovate. The opportunity of the possible has run smack into the reality of the current state of the retail enterprise.

So while I was disappointed not to feel as inspired as I had after last year, I also realized that it wasn’t because the content wasn’t engaging. It wasn’t because retailers weren’t doing their best to move the ball forward against the onslaught of consumer demands — and it certainly wasn’t because speakers had nothing new to present. We’ve just evolved. The stories aren’t about experiments — they’re about implementations. They’re not about guesses or wild ideas, they’re about lessons learned and tactics and taking those early ideas to mass rollout. All in all, not a bad thing — and, in fact, an important step forward.

What were all these people talking about this year? Social Commerce and Facebook Commerce were bandied about with alarming frequency. While I think that retailers’ eCommerce sites getting embedded in Facebook Fan Pages is inevitable, I just can’t bring myself to define that as the height of social commerce. I still like TurnTo’s take on it the best, where the retailer’s role in commerce is to enable social connections between shoppers in order to make the sale — in some cases, complete strangers who happen to have a passion for the same product. This is what social sites do best anyway, right? Enable a lot of casual connections that might never have happened if not for the ease of technology.

Mobile was also very prominent — with a lot of interest in tablets. The side conversations around my table revolved around pilots of either deploying one tablet to each store, or outfitting one store with a lot of tablets — so I have a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot more of those in employees’ hands in the wild real soon. But there was also discussion about consumer-oriented apps designed for larger-scale tablets. I don’t think, even with the next camera-equipped generation of tablets, that a lot of consumers will be taking their tablets shopping with them in stores, but I can’t argue with anything that takes advantage of the multi-touch and interactive capabilities in the larger format — it’s an easy way to delight customers that are already in love with their iPads — I mean, tablets.

So back to Mark Logan’s disillusionment. What went wrong with his attempt to leverage what Amazon knows about him in order to find something inspiring to suggest to his book club? Amazon may know a lot about his shopping (and reading) habits, and it may know a lot about him personally, and it may even have a lot of information at its disposal to help Mark find a book club suggestion. But the one thing the company doesn’t have, and that Mark would’ve gladly told them, was context — what Mark was trying to achieve. All of these new channels, with all of the customer information and intent that they can collect and interpret — I’m willing to bet you that it’s still not good enough to beat a simple question to the customer: “What can I help you with today? “