I was talking with a friend and colleague about the webinar I’m hosting next Friday to familiarize communications professionals with chatbots.

“Why chatbots?” he said.

“Because the subject is blazing hot and communicators will be using them, probably sooner than they think.”

“Are you sure the subject is blazing hot?” my friend replied. “I’d never heard of them until you told me about the webinar.”

I wasn’t terribly concerned. He’s just one guy and I don’t expect everybody to be on top of a new trend, even if it is going to be an important one, maybe as important as the web and social media. When I briefly mentioned chatbots yesterday in my keynote to a group of internal communicators, I remembered my friend’s response. So I asked. “You’ve heard of chatbots, right?”

Silence.

So I asked for a show of hands: Who had heard of chatbots?

One hand went one.

One.

Starting to get concerned, I did a few searches. Here are the results:

I only searched these terms, not other combinations, like “public relations” and “chatbots” or “marketing” and “chat bots” (two words). Or “chatterbots.” Or just “bots.” But the trend is pretty clear. Advertising and marketing—our brethren on the paid media side of things—produce about 810,000 results. Three different searches on the earned media posts about chatbots deliver about 26,100.

That’s a stark difference. It’s not surprising, but it is disheartening. Around 1986, I tried to get people interested in desktop publishing. No dice. In 1994, when I was talking about how important email would be, interest was low. When I pointed out a conversation critical of a company taking place on Compuserve around 1995, the response was, “Only a minuscule percentage of our user base is participating in this discussion. Why should we care?” In 2001, when I started talking about the web, most of my colleagues thought I was nuts. Blogs and social media? They would never catch on, just people talking about what they had for lunch and taking pictures of their cats rolling over. Mobile? Nobody’s going to spend that kind of time looking at those tiny screens.

Our industry has made it a habit of being late to the game, then scrambling to catch up. Consequently, we make a lot of mistakes in the glare of public scrutiny, while our friends working in paid-media made their mistakes early on when everybody else was still figuring it out.

Whether you spend an hour with me next Friday or do your own legwork on Google and elsehwere, if you work in organizational communications, you need to familiarize yourself with chatbots, and do it sooner rather than later. (I’d be lying if I didn’t suggest you do both. Webinar registration)