A lot of my time is spent dealing with working with agencies: ad agencies, interactive agencies, media firms. Agencies do a lot of great work, but they have a bit of a *tone* when dealing with clients. Particularly, as I am finding, when dealing with clients in the oil and gas industry, an industry they don't particularly view as "Internet savvy".
I had a meeting with a new agency today, one that might be able to help us with a viral campaign. The sales guy was nice enough. But, h was late -- both for the time I had rescheduled the meeting to as well as the time that he thought it was at. He was also a little patronizing. Now, to be fair, when you go meet a client who "wants to do something viral", they may not be up on the latest thing. But a) he was surprised when I said I hadn't made a close study of his company's website and b) he asked me if I knew what blogs were.
Putting those two together ... I wonder how many times an agency biz dev guy doesn't Google the potential client he's about to meet. (And this isn't so much about an ego-bruising, but more about context. If he had had some context about my background, our meeting would have likely been more productive.)
A related thought inspired by the recent BlogOn panel "Markets are Conversations": 1) with the current focus more on transparency (particularly vis a vis corporate reporting) and 2) the trend that an exceptional individual's career will cross multiple-companies -- are these driving the trend towards authenticity? That *I* as a communications professional who might move from CompanyA to CompanyB to CompanyC need to protect my own brand reputation as an authentic and transparent blogger, rather than focusing on putting a "spin" on a company's message.
What does this have to do with my biz dev guy? For these folks, I believe they will have to develop a conversation with customers (in the same way they are advocating that their clients do). A good example, Organic's Three Minds blog. Are other agencies blogging?
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