Why Agencies Must Lead and Create Their Future

By Alex Romanovich, former Managing Director at Global Advertising Strategies and Founder, Social2B

The Challenge

Just as the fascination with all things Mad Men is at its height, advertising agencies themselves are undergoing a period of great change. The show, which follows a New York ad agency as it struggles to adapt to the television age and survive in rapidly-changing 1960s society, has many parallels with what ad agencies are going through now in our fast-moving digital age. This is a challenging and disconcerting time for ad agencies and their survival depends on their ability to embrace new media and adapt to a consumer-driven market. In this fragile economy, many companies no longer have the budgets to throw at big-name ‘multinationals’. A business model based on creating a witty concept and buying media space to disseminate it no longer ensures that the message is heard. Consumers are so overwhelmed by an abundance of information on myriad platforms that agencies must purposefully engage with their target market, whether it be through their cell phones, iPads, or traditional print media. The traditional ad agency thrived on its ability to produce ideas; but ideas are no longer enough. Edward Boches, of marketing blog Creativity Unbound, sums up the challenge perfectly: “we can no longer buy attention”.

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By Kent Huffman.

June 15th, 2009

Kent Huffman is the CMO at BearCom Wireless. You can follow him on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/KentHuffman

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Twitter. It’s all the rage in the social media world these days. But how can you best leverage it for tangible business-to-business marketing purposes? One way is to build your own community within Twitter.

Several months ago, I became interested in Twitter when a colleague told me about his positive experiences with the popular social media tool and insisted that I check it out. After signing up for an account and reading a few tweets, I immediately saw its potential as a community development tool. Being a long-time B2B marketer, I decided to build a group of folks interested in marketing who could inspire and help each other grow professionally by sharing ideas and information. But I didn’t know exactly how to go about creating that community.

I ultimately decided to treat it as I would any other important marketing initiative—by first developing a well-defined strategy and a set of related tactics. Over the next couple of months, I created and then tweaked the strategy and honed the tactics through trial and error. I then boiled everything down to a seven-step process that I’m sharing with you here in hopes that you can use it to develop your own B2B community on Twitter.

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I was recently asked – what is Social Media Marketing and Viral Marketing? How do I get started? I think it is important to start with basics, since there is a lot of ‘sophisticated Internet advice out there’ and everyone these days is a social media ‘expert’. As a B2B marketer of many years, founder of Social2B, and a member of The CMO Club, I have the privilege of reviewing Social Media ‘case studies’ all day long – there are numerous successes and numerous failures. This may sound very basic, but it works every time. First, decide on your target audience, and match the product or a service to it. Most importantly, you have to decide what type of content value-add you are going to provide – without compelling content, you are D.O.A. That’s your biggest investment. (more…)