Here's someone who knows there are things she doesn't know that she needs to find out about. Picture by: koratmember

Sitting at your desk today, you know that you need to improve your understanding of a few key areas of knowledge related to your job. But you don’t know that you need to learn about the things you haven’t heard of yet.

Sounds obvious, huh?

However, if you are a fire protection engineer, for example, that wants to know more about ‘fire alarms in deep mine applications’ you can type that phrase into Google.

But what if you are a fire engineer who doesn’t know he needs to know about mains standby solutions as an alternative to engine driven generators in mines?

You can’t type into Google, ‘tell me the stuff I don’t know I need to know about fire safe power provision for mines’, because you don’t know that’s a question you need answered.

Of course, as soon as you realise that’s a gap in your knowledge, Google will give you plenty of answers.

But you need to know you don’t know the answers already.

So what’s the answer if you’re company sells a product that people don’t know they need?
Well, there are complicated search engine strategies you can use, like optimising for analogous answers, or you could go down the old fashioned route.

You could do some PR and appear in some magazines. They aren’t dead yet and, as long as people don’t know what they need to know, they won’t be.

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