The Seattle Post Intelligencer runs an interesting vox pop on awareness of Web 2.0. Most people sampled (and it’s a small sample, but I’d put it to you that it’s largely representative) have no clue.
I’m not terribly surprised at this. The vast majority of my non-geek/IT worker friends, and frankly many of my co-workers would have no idea about things such as Web 2.0 (although I am presenting on the topic at our work Summer School in a couple of weeks, so I live in hope), del.icio.us, social networking, Ajax or even anything Google does apart from search (and that includes Gmail and personalised home pages). They aren’t excited by technology, or the possibilities that Web 2.0 technologies and thinking might bring to their business.
We web workers need to remain (painfully) aware that a lot of what we do is massively obscure to the general public and our clients. We need to learn to walk a mile in their shoes so that when we’re pitching work to them, or trying to describe how we can implement the latest cool widgets on their site, we do it in such a way as to make them understand.
Back at the start of October, pro-blogger and Web 2.0 pundit, Om Malik had the same awakening. I’ve been stewing over this since then, looking for a way to talk about it.
For those of you lucky enough to work only in the tech world, I’m jealous. Most of the clients I work for are conservative, risk averse Federal Government types. And, hey, that’s cool. Government by its very nature is risk averse and slow to adopt new technologies. It’s very much a matter of softly, softly - introducing the concepts and technologies slowly and incrementally so that the need for conservatism isn’t too deeply challenged.
I’m interested in your opinion and experiences. Let me know here how you introduce your clients to these concepts and technologies and what you do to get traction for them in your projects.
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