My agency was invited to attend Google’s “Agency Day” a couple of weeks ago at their headquarters in Mountain View. For anyone who has spent more than five minutes with me, you know I am a huge advocate of almost everything Google offers, whereas other marketers have just warmed up to calling them a Frienemy. To me, they help level the playing field for smaller agencies like Brandtailers, and for that I am eternally grateful.

We were there with another fifty-or-so people from agencies our size, all invited by Google to be schmoozed, thanked for our existence, get our business pulses checked, and to be trained on some new “agency tools”. After a nice but fairly basic keynote presentation, we were broken up into small groups for one-on-one time with their specific team experts. Twenty minutes into an update on some new AdWords tools, I had agency leaders in my group saying they really didn’t understand how AdWords worked. Some knew a little, some knew nothing. My agency knew much more. My head swelled.

Then we moved on to Google Analytics. That got really interesting. Turns out the agency leaders that didn’t know much about AdWords knew even less about Analytics.  Or AdSense. Or Google Maps. And they sure didn’t know about Wave or Chrome OS. By lunchtime my head was pretty big. But as I chowed down their five-star free-cafeteria cuisine I remembered my virtual mentors like Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott, CC Chapman, and a few guys named Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt. I quickly slapped myself back to reality. Compared to the people I study and learn from every day, I know nothing.

This trip to Google’s headquarters confirmed for me that it’s all relative. People’s levels of knowledge and understanding about the online world are as broad and varied as the businesses they run. In my world terms like Social Media, the Long Tail, and The Cloud are thrown around every day by the digital gurus I follow, but the vast majority of well-educated Americans don’t know what any of this means. Yet.

For now just knowing that you need to know it is a good start. The day will come (and I say it’s very soon) where the digital world will be the life blood of most businesses. The trick to learning it is not being afraid to ask questions. Yes, it can be intimidating. But yes, it does start to make sense pretty quickly once you get all the puzzle pieces in front of you. I get several people a week asking me, “So what’s this Twitter thing?” At first I think, wow, I can’t believe they’re asking me this. But then I say to myself, “That’s great. They asked. They know that they need to know.” It’s the first step.