In 2008, IDEA conducted a study about online experiences. The report (download PDF here) outlines key findings from surveys that explored factors that drive online experience which I quoted the following:

“Although over 90% of visitors say that they are able to find the information they are looking for, over 50% report that there is a gap between what they are looking for and what typical web sites provide, and 60% think that a personal guide would help them navigate web sites.”

That gab is about to end as real time contents is what every user will expect from your website. Static website is dead and dynamic website will be a commodity however who will win tomorrow is not static or dynamic but a real-time website. A real-time website is a web content management system that transform completely based on your previous online experiences such as tweets, checkins, checkouts, pictures, videos, comments, likes and all your interactions on the Internet. Not only that transformation BUT will also provide enjoyment experience to remember. How awesome is that?

I based my 3 predictions on many factors but mostly what I imagine as a web user.

1 – For all web users: The real time website will be transformed instantly to the consumer keyword or phrase used in the search and in real-time.

Example 1: If you are in the real time mindset, you know it’s about earning the prospects confidence in you. Earning trust is very difficult task and what if that online with brands you dont know about then you need a proof. Your business website should be transparent not vague.

The real-time website will collect the experiences, comments, reviews and all people interactions with the brand. This is what all we can get but if the website provide it for us, we will feel confident that this brand want to earn our business trust. Listing the text testimonials is not working as video or tagging the reference on Facebook or Linkedin. Providing real people who can give instant review about your brand will not only boost customer confidence but trust.

Example 2: You come repeatedly to Amazon because they provide everything you need. You track Groupon and Livingsocial because they provide good discount. We are looking for websites that connected us emotionally to our interests.

Online experience will be more fun because future websites will provide the ability to connect people together through mutual interests. Social media networks will be integrated into websites in a way that let people have the ability to connect with people with similar interests in the same geographic area. There is huge power in online community experience that can drive businesses forward.

2 – For new (unique) visitors: If you are in the SEO and marketing anayltics business, you know it’s not anymore about more traffic or clicks but it’s about leads. For businesses, new visitors is what you get after your work hard in contents management, advertising, search engine and social media optimization. It’s your opportunity to surprise and not just impress the new visitors.

Example 1: If you are looking for urgent care visit for travel vaccine, you want minimum waiting time, enough time with the physician for the consult, and overall happy patient experience. You can get a ton of information online about travel vaccine and what you need for each country you are planning to visit but what if the urgent care website provide all what you need. Let’s say you want to travel to South Africa, you start looking for an urgent care in your city, once you are in the website, the website will transform to show you only the services, prices, blog posts, tweets, and videos that related to travel vaccine to South Africa. A receptionist will interact with you online to give you the best time to walk-in with express checkin. Also, a nurse practitioner will interact with you live to make sure you are in a good standing for travel. Instant secure scanning for your insurance card and ID will be sent, a copay will be paid online and your medical records will be transferred (if needed) to the urgent care in minute.

Example 2: It’s more easier that ever to know your favorite dish. You already tweeted many pictures from inside the restaurant and shared your mom Turkey on Thanksgiving on Facebook or checkin on Foursquare at your neighborhood Sushi restaurant.

If you looking to experiment your next restaurant menu, you want to fell the experience online before going offline. I would tell you how?

Once you are in the restaurant website, a script will run to gather all your past online experience and in a second, you have totally different website with your favorite recipes. Having a free smoothie or desert dish will be a commodity. You will able to book your table, customize your view, pick your server from the selection, pick your ingredients and pick your TV channel to see your favorite football team. This is all will be ready for you but you just need to prepare your offline experience in advance via the website.

3 – For returning visitors. Based on your web history data and interactions on social media networks, not only the contents will show what you searched for before but will make you take action easily. All what the visitor need is triggers matching their interests.

Example 1: If you already added a book in Amazon cart and didn’t order it yet, you will get a notification that your book will be singed by the author or one hour free consulting with the author will be provided if you place your order now.

Example 2: If you tweeted that you are looking to buy a tablet, not only a customizable tweet/email you will get from Dell, Samsung or Apple but 50% OFF on the training course that you were planning to go for Project Management but couldn’t due to limited budget.

Online retail stores, hotels, restaurants, etc. will have more work to do to surprise the customer, their customer demographic and psychographic information need to be intensively study one customer in a time.

As we just entered 2013, I expect we will click smartly, look only on what we need and share what worth sharing to our social networks. Only those who provide happy online experience will stay in business and remember that providing online experience is as much important as offline experience as they both represent your brand.

If you are doing some of what I predicated, please share your website in the comment box.

“When consumers trust a brand and find it relevant, they may select the offerings associated with that brand over those of competitors, even at a premium price. When a brand’s promise extends beyond a particular product, its owner may leverage it to enter new markets. For all these reasons, a brand can hold tremendous value, which is known as brand equity.” ~ Wikipedia

Your brand is a collection of your customers’ experiences both online and offline. In today’s experience economy, it’s so obvious who can keep taking the lead in specific market or industry… who? It’s the one who create a remarkable experience for one customer in a time; both for happy and upset customers and remember, you have to create a unique experience for upset customers. #retention

One of the most important shafts of your customer’s experience is the brands associated or involved in creating your overall brand equity. It’s the experiences created by brands and people YOU have refereed or asked them to use or try. This is big so help when you can but refer wisely and extend only when you expect more value will be added to your customers because at the end, it will all back to you.

If you are a doctor or working in doctor office, you are mostly referring your patients to a specialist, radiologist or sleep lab. Did you experience going to these referral places? Have you ever read about their online  reviews? Did you ask your patients if they had a good experience? and the most important question: Have these extended brands added value to your customers?

Most of the grocery retail stores don’t realize that their customers like them because of the quality of variety fresh fruits and products they sell. Some customers could back to you for one quality product you sell even if you are selling higher.

We as a human should follow the same principle for our personal brand. According to Nielsen: 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family above any form of advertising. The consumers’ reliance on word of mouth in the decision making process, either from people they know or social media, has increased significantly. This means we are going to create a high trust circles of friends and communities and this is for sure will lead to produce more output than low trust communities.

In conclusion, extend your customer experience to brands which will add value to your customers. Just imagine your customers’ feelings if that product or person wasn’t at the same level as your brand. This is my 2 cents worth.

I was in Boston, MA for Inbound 2012 last week of August. I usually do some research before going to any event. What encourage me to go to #Inbound12 is that my company started using HubSpot to manage its inbound marketing so it was great push for me to pick this conference to be my 4th education event in 2012. I was lucky to be inbounder as it was the conference of the year.

I start my post by quoting the following statement from HubSpot co-founders & Inbound Marketing book co-authors @bhalligan and @dharmesh.

The bottom line is that people are sick and tired of being interrupted with traditional outbound marketing messages and have become quite adept at blocking marketers out!

To be successful and grow your business and revenues, you must match the way you market your products with the way your prospects learn about and shop for your products. And you do that by generating leads through inbound marketing.

Here are my ten takeaways from the conference:

1 – You have to adapt the mindset of NOW in your marketing strategy. What’s happening on your website NOW? What’s happening on your Twitter feeds right NOW? What are your competitors sharing on YouTube NOW?

2 – Shift your efforts from technology tools, tactics, etc. into your end user. Marketers should focus more on creating emotional language that customers understand. You win going forward if you understand where market shift going and what customer care about.

3 – We are living digitally, we are tracking, we are watching every move so on the web remember: You are what you publish. What did you publish today to attract customers?

4 -Your website MUST be Mobile optimized. Mobile version of existing site instead of having dedicated mobile site is less pain for administration but If you have enough resource then go with dedicated mobile site.

5 – How to wage quite revolution in 3 easy steps?

a) Rethink meetings

- Handing action to the attendees instead of following the meeting agenda

- Half way in the meeting, stop the meeting for a while and let people write their own ideas

- Brainstorm ideas electronically

b) Rethink office space

- Provide casual interaction work space

- Provide private space for creativity

c) Rethink leadership

- People who can rise to the top does not necessary be extrovert

6 – Now, we are creating remarkable content to pull people into our website, blog, social media sites, etc.. The upcoming years will be about how to use context to pull them through the sales funnel.

7 – Offer at least one free content without registration for your customers or fans. Make it 1-click download if possible. Surprise your customer all the time.

8 – Remove one irrational baise from your marketing strategy every month because this is what holding you moving forward. Ex: Do you agree that active link building is what all SEO about? No, the best website, the best links build themselves so STOP spamming sites and blogs with your links and comments.

9 – Inbound marketing is winning because it costs less than traditional marketing. This infographic highlights the differences between the two kinds of marketing.

10 – I would like to end these takeaways with Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary inspired us at #Inbound12 even he pump his famous “F” more than 20 times (Guinness record!). He said: “If you do not care about your end user immensely, your brand will die.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8PxCSqe3sc

After meeting Seth Godin in Tribeca in NYC, I attended America’s Small Business Summit 2012 in Washington, DC which organized by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce celebrating its 100 year anniversary with more than 700 small business owners from across the nation. The links above have all the details about the event, it was informative and fun.

One of the reasons to attend the summit is to meet Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary is inspiring and hit the bottom line always. I will share 10 advices from his speech to small business owners. Share, add, tweet, or just say hi if you like the post.

1 – “If you are not going to twitter.com/search every single day of your business life, you are doing a big mistake. twitter.com/search is the single most important website on the Internet.”

2 – “Innovation doesn’t care about one person in this room, Innovation doesn’t care about anybody, it just move and run you over.”

3 – “People aren’t looking at the billboards. They aren’t even looking at the f**king road.”

4 – “Marketing just get hard, one on one marketing is the new marketing.”

5 – “We are living in the biggest culture shift of our time; the Internet is the baby, I am not taking about Facebook, Twitter and the tools that built on top on it. I am talking about the web, these social network sites are over thrown governments that has strength on their society for 40 years and you have the audacity to sit in this room right now and nothing impacting your bottom line, shame on you.”

6 – “We are going back to small town rules, we are going to a place where our parents and grandparents lives. Technology is bringing us back to a hyper-local marketplace … context is king.”

7 – “The majority people don’t see the right side of the website because they know that where the ads are. We are not looking there, our eyes trained to not even see it.”

8 – “I am not a tech enthusiast, I can less for Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinerest, etc., I have no love for the gadgets, none of it. The only thing I like to do is sell stuff.”

9 – “We are shockingly good to each other. We are an amazing people. Data shows few bad things actually happen.”

10 – “This is big! and in 20, 30 years you gonna wake-up… and it will be bigger! This type of wave doesn’t stop. We are going to different places and If you are not marketing on Facebook pages and Twitter, If you want to reach females and you dont have Pinterest board … you are in a big trouble.”

When Seth Godin call his tribe to gather, we can’t give an excuse! well, as for me as proud member, I have to respond the call.

Looking at $950 per ticket is kind of a big deal in NYC especially in spring so the best option is to build or join tribe of people mostly I don’t know and this is what happen with me. I jumped into the online forms and tweet looking for a tribe that get me $300 ticket. After few weeks, I found someone from Breckenridge, Colorado who was really a great communicator to grant his 6 packs tribe. Seth Godin was testing his tribe to see if they gonna “network” and build a trust with people they don’t know.

No way, there is a city that can drive any entrepreneur crazy like New York City, everything is brand new. I enjoy the experience every time I go. On May 16, 2012, linchpins started to gather at BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center and Seth opened his Pick Yourself event by talking about his trip to Chile.

Let me highlight to you some of what Seth Godin said in the seminar however feel happy to add yours if you attended.

1 – “Revolution change the perfect and destroy it and then replace it with something we thought it was impossible before.” Example is music industry that changed in 5 years from perfect “bands sell records to thousands of fans” to impossible “every record delivered free to your home with 1-click.”

2 – “Marketing has shifted from me marketing at you to you marketing to each other.”

3 – “I am asking you to figure out where is the edge that you can dance on? because we just get bit of all the excuses! you cant say: I don’t have enough money to build a factory! You can’t say; I couldn’t hit 1M records! etc. It’s not about waiting for someone to hit you, this is not an action. It’s about you building your profile so go and pick yourself.”

4 – “Marketers has so abuse our trust over and over and over.”

5 – “It’s OK to work on something until it intercept the market and fail but it’s NOT OK to get to the depth, get to the painful part and then say I am gonna work on something else.”

6 – “Find a group that you want to create value for then let the group split the value with others. Remember, every business succeed because its create value.”

7 – “You don’t need MBA “label” unless it’s required by the industry. Instead, do some art and ship.”

8 – “Marketing is getting people who care to tell your story so hire people who care and give them the freedom and responsibility to actually act on.”

9 – “Always check-in here: “What’s important to you?”"

10 – “If you ask me what’s next? I tell you: “I don’t know”, follow the revolution and change as needed.”

I am happy to enrich my knowledge during the 1st half of 2012, first; I earned Certificate in Franchise Management from Georgetown University. Second, I met Seth Godin in NYC and third; I attended America’s Small Business Summit 2012 in Washington, DC organized by U.S. Chamber of Commerce celebrating its 100 year anniversary with more than 700 small business owners from across the nation. Alhamdallah!