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”.

Evolve in order to survive

Hybrid agencies – combining strategy, advertising, media, digital, social, PR, and analytics elements – are popping up all over the place. Many established ad agencies are also doing their best to transform their business models as quickly as they can into something similar. However, though the concept of the hybrid agency is attractive, not many typical ad agencies can implement it – you need to re-engineer the whole business, hire new people, and engage with your clients in a whole new way, all of which becomes a difficult and costly process.

Many ad agencies also lack a real understanding of social media – and the low-cost, low-overhead, analytics-driven viral approach that it entails. This is where hybrid agencies, that is, a traditional ideas agency with the ability to effectively utilize social media, enjoy a distinct advantage.

“We created a new model for how ad agencies can access and utilize new business development insights, realizing that a gap exists in the availability of actionable information” said Cheryl Burgess, Managing Partner, Blue Focus Marketing. This realization led to creating and packaging a suite of three ad agency new business reports in a convenient, downloadable digital format. Written for new business directors and agency executives, these new business reports provide an arsenal of insights, tools and actionable advice.

Edward Boches also predicts that “Applications, utility and platforms will trump messages as an agency’s most important creative output” – an understanding of technology, and the capability to implement it, is key. This means that traditional agencies already need to constantly turn to outside help, meaning that integration is lacking.

The entire ad agency model was built on a high margin, high-overhead, thought leadership model. Though clients still appreciate creativity as much as always, they also need to be able to be confident of a return on their investment through the use of metrics and measurements as consumers play an ever more important role and commentators and critics. Ad agencies’ survival will depend on their ability to use their creativity to embrace new media – social, interactive, consumer-driven – to hit an ever more quickly moving target.

Alex Romanovich

For the B2Bsector, marketing opportunities have always existed throughout the value chain – from logistics to marketing and sales. With the introduction of more pronounced and readily accepted Social Media Marketing techniques into the consumer marketing space, the opportunities for business to generate leads, improve customer service, and raise brand awareness in the B2B arena are becoming more pronounced. The most recent eMarketer polls, as well as B2B Magazine’s report titled “2010 Outlook”, indicate that Social Media Marketing (SMM) will become increasingly important to B2B marketers.

However, embracing Social Media channels requires discipline, and in many cases, courage – the hardest part is taking the first step. You have to learn to engage with your audience – whether that be in the B2B or B2C sectors – in a much more interactive way. Your approach to communications has to evolve. With the tools and analysis methods currently available, marketers have new power to provide insight and to demand accountability. These new technologies allow companies to ‘mash’ multiple channels into one cohesive, client-centric view. Inference engines, text analytics tools, and mining methodologies allow businesses to come as close to predicting performance as you can get these days. A company can not only predict sales performance based on historical and trend data, but can validate it with real, live, on-demand information sourced from user generated feedback.

As with B2C, B2B Marketing in general is about relationship building and trust. While B2B marketing shares some of its characteristics with consumer marketing, such as delivering value to meet customer needs through thought leadership, content, and product/service quality, it also has many unique aspects that differentiate it, such as reliance on the value chain intermediaries – dealers, agents, distributors and value-added resellers, for example.

When real time client engagement is associated with knowledge sharing and learning, it can be self-reinforcing, especially if the content is readily available and well distributed. Businesses should share all they can, enabling their clients to have access to as many smart and motivated people sharing practical and applicable strategies and tactics as possible. It is for this reason alone why Social Media Marketing, which lends itself well to segmentation and presentation of value through content and thought-leadership, is increasingly becoming the most effective choice for B2B marketers.
Additionally, traditional hard-coded hierarchical organizational structures will soon give way to ‘living, breathing’ organizations with visible and strengthened connections between employees, customers and partners across the extended ‘social value chain’, where ideas can originate from any point in the extended value chain and be realized with no limitations imposed by functional or geographic boundaries, enabling creativity to flourish and the company as a whole to deliver better results.

Social Media could be considered just another channel by some, but the benefits and opportunities it presents are something we’ve never seen before. It is becoming the connecting thread that links all points of the Value Chain.

Don’t do it!

In the age of Social Media and ‘doing more with less’ you don’t have to build a website anymore, nor do you have to improve it. You have to, and you CAN, build a marketing platform. So, what does this mean?

Well, for starters, as a business you need to ask yourself – “What is it I want to do next? Grow my business? Generate Leads? Or establish or improve my brand?” Once you are able to answer this question, establish who your audience is and then select the appropriate marketing strategy – Social Media comes to the rescue!

Remember, as a business you need to solve problems and create value for your clients, while generating revenue, not the other way around! If you can deliver value, the revenue will come! And while you are adding value, you need to constantly improve your ability to do so.

Marketing platforms have been around for some time now. You are already familiar with many of them – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Yes, they are marketing platforms, because companies conduct campaigns and attract audiences, and even build brands, using these.

Except that many of these big names do not have all the necessary ingredients and tools to really answer some very important questions, nor do they give you total control. But even with limited control and hosted content, these ‘platforms’ give you the opportunity to target and select your audience, connect and engage with them, post content, and promote your products and services.

So why not build your own?

Here is what you would need to begin with:

• A database of contacts and the ability to manage this database using tools, such as a basic CRM system (even Microsoft Outlook, Mac Address Book, or Google Contacts will do for starters)
• An interactive and engaging website, providing an opportunity for your prospects or readers to review, engage, leave comments, interact, and other behaviors leading to some kind of engagement (purchase, content download, etc.). Social Media elements are great for this – they allow your brand to provide interactivity to other platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter
• * A simple and efficient email management system, capable of providing additional information to your ‘Opt-In’ audience – this function can even be outsourced to ConstantContact, Campaigner and others
• A basic management and analysis toolset to better understand traffic patterns, interest levels, ‘Likes and Dislikes’ and the overall sentiment – again, Social Media tools can be of help here, allowing you to initiate and then monitor the conversation, in contrast to Search tools alone, which are of limited use here
• A value-added set of functions or a content library for your partners – they are important in helping your business grow and expand
• Finally, the ability to be flexible in adding new functionality, as the need to engage your clients, partners and providers changes – you can scale with the growth of the business

Here is the exciting part: the above can be accomplished with well-designed WordPress blogging software (open source solution, which means it is FREE) and a few plug-ins, combined with an intuitive interface and a simple and inexpensive hosting solution, giving you the power to innovate, listen to your clients better, and create new marketing campaigns.

So next time, when you are thinking of building a website, think again.

Don’t build a website, build a Marketing Platform!

The word Crowdsourcing was coined by Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine, a portmanteau of the words ‘crowd’ and ‘outsourcing’. It is used to describe the phenomenon using group intelligence to solve problems and complete projects. A darling of Web 2.0, more and more companies are jumping on the crowdsourcing bandwagon, and even federal government agencies have begun to explore it, with the Federal Communications Commission crowdsourcing ideas on how to improve America’s broadband infrastructure.

The benefits of crowdsourcing are immense – not only does the crowdsourcing model have the potential to significantly reduce expenditure in the long term by not having to maintain permanent staff ‘on the bench’, it also allows companies to engage staff on a per-project basis, thus benefitting from having the people with the exact skills and expertise to fit each particular project.

However, it can be a double-edged sword. The skills and expertise that are so easy (relatively) to capture by assembling a temporary, specialized workforce are also easily lost, and cooperation is often short term. ‘Crowdsourced’ projects also need to be managed carefully – when working with unknown entities, it is vital that they are managed properly to ensure the most positive outcome is reached.

There is also a lack of stability. But in these days of financial turmoil, when even the most indispensible employee is worried about job security, we are naturally led to ask: is there such as thing as stability anymore? Employees are fast becoming a liability for some corporations. As well as take-home salary, there are taxes, training, insurance costs, and so on, and companies are being forced to consider entirely new ways of working in order to survive, including open source and crowdsourcing models.

But crowdsourcing is not just for startups – Google Summer of Code, an initiative which invites student programmers to compete for places on a scheme to develop open source projects for mentors, is probably one of the best known and successful examples of crowdsourcing.

Non-tech corporations are getting in on the act, too: household products giant Unilever has recently decided to drop its advertising agency of 16 years, Lowe, and will instead use the crowdsourcing platform IdeaBounty to source ideas for its future campaigns, by submitting a brief to the public and choosing the best among the ideas put forward. Naturally using Social Media to source talent, ideas and resources.

Large corporations have always used occasional freelancers; crowdsourcing is merely an extension of this. If properly coordinated and planned with legal and human resources, the crowdsourced environment is a tremendous vehicle for communication – a way to massively increase knowledge, and by extension, the ability innovate and increase production. Yochai Benkler, of Yale University, in his book The Wealth of Networks, sums it up extremely well: “The world is becoming too fast, too complex and too networked for any company to have all the answers inside”. Crowdsourcing as a concept is still in its infancy, and the company that is able to effectively harness its power now will without doubt be in a superior position to benefit in future.

This concept is proof of why Social Media and Crowdsourcing are seemingly becoming synonymous. Many ideas, case studies, and even human resources are gathered and distributed using Social Media. There are a number of examples where large brands and small start-ups are using ‘crowdsourced’ models to feature new products, solicit opinions on new features and improvements, and form groups of affinity, or professional social networks.

Examples such as LinkedIn Groups, TheSocialCMO, The CMO Club, Social2B, Experts Exchange, and many others, provide fertile ground for thought leadership, member exchange, aggregation of expertise and ideas, and channels for distribution of content, thus ‘crowdsourcing’ content and user feedback.

The CMO Club, one of the fastest growing social professional networks of leading top marketers worldwide, is yet another example of a well integrated model, with ideas, research content, online and off-line conversation leading to an improvement in the quality of the marketing discipline. “I was really tired of low quality marketing conferences and ‘vendor-centric’ presentations and decided that leading marketing executives could do better”, stated Pete Krainik, Founder of The CMO Club. “The crowdsourcing of ideas and conversations, leading to action and improvement is what we are all about.”

And through my participation with The Social CMO Crew which continues to emerge as a thought leadership and digital marketing collective, again joint participation and action are leading to the creation of new marketing ideas, models, roles and channels.

@JeffAshcroft who founded @TheSocialCMO and The Social CMO Crew in August of 2009 shared the following. “As we migrate further into this realm of social collective communications and action, new models, performing well beyond the sum of the parts, will continue to emerge and evolve resulting in exponential increases in reach, quality, effectiveness and social impact.”

Marketing expertise group Social2B is an example of the crowdsourcing model on an international scale – with associates and experts based around the world, including the US, UK, Russia and Eastern Europe, and Argentina, they leverage a bank of multilingual, multicultural experts to call upon when needed. This new way of doing business allows even the smallest of companies to harness the power of a large group of specialized talent.

The above entities demonstrate how Social Media and Crowdsourcing are integrally linked and at the same time how these new modes of organization are leading to an acceleration in the development and refinement of new ideas as well as the generation of new business models and positive social outcomes.

However, the evidence reported by the study does not support this, with 60% of those seeking health information online saying that they or someone they know has been helped by following medical advice found on the internet, and just 3% reporting a negative outcome. It also affects how patients manage their own healthcare: 53% say it led them to ask a doctor new questions, or to get a second opinion from another doctor, and 24% have consulted rankings of hospitals or doctors online.

The study also highlighted the increase in the percentage of people using the internet to look for information on exercise, diet, and other preventative health measures, citing an 88% increase since 2002. This is an unmistakable sign that people are becoming more engaged in looking after their own health and wellness, especially given the ever-rising cost of health insurance and uncertainty over healthcare reforms. Health tourism, the rapidly-growing practice of traveling abroad to receive healthcare, is one consequence of this – the industry has been growing rapidly and Deloitte predicts a 35% year-on-year increase in the future.

While 39% of those who use the internet for health purposes (‘e-patients’) use a social networking site like Facebook, of those, only a small portion have followed friends’ health updates or posted health-related comments online, perhaps due to privacy concerns. However, the study states that “it is clear that the pursuit of health information does not happen in a social vacuum.” Many people use social platforms as sources of news, utilizing them to get informed about advancements in research or new treatments through specialized support groups. Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook frequently act as portals, drawing people to online communities focusing on conditions ranging from cancer to mental health disorders to diabetes, and other much rarer conditions where the person may never have met another sufferer otherwise.