The Agency World: Under Construction

Death to the agency! Long live the agency!

Lots of talk about agencies out there in the blogosphere and the twittersphere and the Galaxy of public relations professionals, social media consultants, events coordinators, brand managers, sponsorship experts. The reason there is so much talk, much of it pabulum by the by, but the reason there is so much talk and speculation is that the very idea of what an agency is, is changing, rapidly.

Right now if you are a business owner you are dealing with a whole new set of rules. You don’t have the bandwidth to focus on your business and keep a stern eye on developments online, as well as manage your current marketing efforts. You have a PR firm that you are either straight-up unhappy with (but don’t have the courage to fire) or you have one that suspects is taking too much for what you see as just an OK job.

You know there are new marketing channels like Facebook and Twitter, Foursquare and Groupon that weren’t around when your business started. But being the smart person that you are, you are fairly confident that if given the proper attention, you could find a way to leverage these new tools and channels to increase your business. Maybe you’ve asked your PR firm about these new tools but the answers you’ve gotten back haven’t amounted to much.

Furthermore, your website needs a redesign but you are tired of getting overcharged by web designers who don’t speak your language and you suspect that spending another 10k on a website that you won’t be happy with and that you won’t have control over is not the way to go.

What’s more is that you’ve been wanting to do some co-branding with other business and perhaps get involved in some local events. You want to foster the community but you don’t know where to start. You’ve heard the buzzwords like: community, conversation, content. You think locally. And you want to support that locale. But again, bandwidth, you don’t have enough of it. You know that you could do a better job of building your business for the long haul, a sustainable business that adds to your life, that removes the drama, that cuts the tension.

This is the sum total of the conversations I’ve had with over 100 small business owners from a dozen industries since September.

So what is the answer?

Build A New Agency

Building a new kind of agency from the ground up is the only real solution. Current PR firms are catching up. In fact they’ve surprised me with how quickly they’ve been able to. In the end though, they are catching up to something that they still don’t understand. So catching up becomes moot. Any social media value that your PR firm can bring you right now is suspect.

A new agency that brings together the following is really what we are talking about: Traditional PR, Social Media Marketing, Events and Co-Branding, Technology, Business Development. These are the cornerstones of the New Agency as I see it. You have to integrate it. You have to be a one-stop shop for businesses. Most clients won’t need it all. They’ll simply need PR and Technology, or Social and Events. But having the ability to provide deep expertise and value in all of these silos is really what businesses need. Integration is the next step.

Why should businesses need to to five different vendors to satisfy their needs. They are all after the same goal. Try finding 5 vendors you want to work with, or that you can afford to pay properly. An agency that already does everything a business might need is the best approach I can see.

Image Source: USACE Europe District on Flickr

Tagged as: PR Firms, Reformed Marketing, Social Media Agencies, Social Media for Small Business