You're one of the largest retailers in the country of a particular luxury item, yet when management finally allows you to venture into cyberspace they provide resources for all of two bodies worth of internal staffing, and when the internal IT team get ahold of the site design produced by a major outside agency they refuse to even discuss the project with marketing until they deliver it - full of changes.

Or you're in marketing at a major software company and your job is to share great pre-sales content with your online retail channel - only they won't take it because if you give it to them they want to be paid as if it's advertising.

How about this one. You head a large equipment and apparel retailer and find the quality and suitability of the e-commerce platform licensed from one of the two largest software providers in the world is so problematic you have to slowly replace each component with open-source and 3rd parties components, leaving a system with far from the power and flexibilty you really need.

These are just three of the stories I heard last night at one Shop.org cocktail party. What we now call Online Marketing (i'm committed to replacing that term) has some serious issues. Yes there are billions of dollars being transacted and earned, great strides have been made to build a stable and workable environment over the past 10 years.

But a look anywhere inside finds that what looks like a maturing industry is really something of a troubled pre-teen. The body is changing in strange and unexpected ways, clothes that seemed to fit when we got them now look silly and out of place, heads are filled with a strange mixture of brilliance and confusion, we just aren't prepared for the situations we find ourselves in, there are a lot of stupid things being done in the name of making friends and being popular, and our parents just don't understand us.

I attended three panels yesterday, including the one I was on, and I don't think they helped very much. Heading back right now hoping to find more parental guidance. More thoughts tonight.