It seems easy enough – take your business and throw it all online. But a direct transfer isn’t the answer. Translation is.

The online experience is much different than an in-person one regardless of industry. It’s not better, it’s not worse, but it is different.

Customers will have different needs, different challenges and different opinions once your business is digital. And they will know right away if your business understands that.

A tour company decided to have one of its tour guides give an online presentation to its customers thinking that it could help keep customers interested in its products. The tour guide was knowledgeable, but what worked during a live presentation wasn’t working in the online format.

The jokes that may have entertained a live group didn’t have the same effect through the computer screen. This was bad enough, but the tour guide also tried to hold up paper maps in front of her computer camera. This obviously was a poorly thought out idea.

However, the tour guide wasn’t the one to blame – the tour company should have better prepared her for the presentation, given her tools and resources to make it more engaging for the customers watching, and discussed in advance how she wanted to present the information.

Simply slapping an in-person experience online isn’t a good idea as the experience generally doesn’t transfer well. But if you translate the concepts for the online medium, it can produce brilliant results.