In my line of work, it’s easy to for­get that often the most of basic of ter­min­o­logy is lost on the aver­age man in the street as Google recently found out when it car­ried out a ran­dom sur­vey of people in New York’s Times Square with the ques­tion “What is a Browser?”

Watch the video sur­vey for your­self below to see the responses.

Now whilst this video is enter­tain­ing in itself for geeks and career web surfers like myself, the res­ults (only 8% answered cor­rectly to the ques­tion); indic­ate the uphill struggle that Google has in try­ing to get people to adopt its Chrome web browser against the major incum­bents of Microsoft with it’s Inter­net Explorer browser and Moz­illa with it’s Fire­fox web browser.

Even allow­ing for levels in know­ledge between our Amer­ican cous­ins across the pond and we Brits, I sus­pect a sim­ilar res­ult would be obtained over here if the same sur­vey was con­duc­ted in London’s Pic­ca­dilly Circus.

Watch the video for your­self and you’ll see that many people in the sur­vey not only don’t know what a web browser is, but also demon­strate their ignor­ance regard­ing the dif­fer­ences between a search engine, the Inter­net and ‘the Yahoo’.

It’s Not Sur­pris­ing Really

To be fair to any­one who’s read­ing this and doesn’t know the answers to Google’s ques­tions, it’s not sur­pris­ing really.

I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that the Inter­net world is one of those areas that is fraught with ter­min­o­logy and TLA’s (Three Let­ter Acronyms) and whilst many “I get by” Inter­net Users may have got to grips with some of the basic phrases and what they mean (I’m talk­ing terms like “Link”, “Web Page” and “Broad­band” here), the con­tinu­ous expo­nen­tial devel­op­ment of the web, its new tech­no­lo­gies and trends; means there’s a con­stant stream of new ter­min­o­logy to learn if you want to make the most of the plat­form. As a con­sequence many people just don’t bother — or for that mat­ter, care!

Try it for your­self; ask your col­leagues “what is Bing?” or “explain a Tweet” or “what are RSS feeds are for?” Unless they are geeks or linked into the web industry in some form, I’ll eat my hat if they know! Yet these three items are prom­in­ent trends and tools that are hap­pen­ing on the web today and are worth know­ing if as a busi­ness, you want to cap­it­al­ise on the Internet.

Don’t Put a Geek in Front of a Customer

It’s for this pre­cise reason that I feel it’s import­ant that you shouldn’t rely on a “geek” to develop and pro­mote your busi­ness online. Just because they know all the ter­min­o­logy, what it does and how it does it; doesn’t neces­sar­ily mean they know how to trans­late such fea­tures into work­able bene­fits for your business.

Yes, you need spe­cial­ists in their fields to design and build your web­site, pro­mote it on the Inter­net and to deploy the needs of your busi­ness using the appro­pri­ate tech­no­logy; how­ever what you don’t need is someone to bam­boozle you with mean­ing­less ter­min­o­logy or someone who doesn’t under­stand the needs of your business.

That’s where someone like myself as an exper­i­enced Inter­net Con­sult­ant who has a foot in both camps and as such can work with a busi­ness by inter­pret­ing their needs and can then trans­late them into a lan­guage that the tech­ies can under­stand and work with.

So if you’re look­ing to work with a web con­sult­ant that talks your lan­guage, lets get together for a cof­fee to talk about what you want to do.

I’ll buy.

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