Nearly every website launch I have witnessed and / or been involved in is LATE.  Some VERY LATE.
Here’s a new trick to ensure you launch on time.

Public humiliation + embarrassment + fear of failure = near-guaranteed success or commercial suicide

Take a look at WAA the creative advertising agency’s site….it is the classic holding page… with a difference.

New Website Coming 4th June 2007

Can’t wait!

Happy days in sunny Chiswick for my florist client, Pollen Nation.  They have been on the BBC Breakfast show this week - showing how to tie a gorgeous wedding bouquet.  Here’s what Alison said about it.

Last week as part of Chelsea Flower Show, Pollen
Nation were invited to appear in a bridal bouquet feature on live BBC
Breakfast. In true Ready, Steady, Cook style 2 top London florists -
yes one was us - had 30 mins to design and create a bridal bouquet
during the show. Alison’s creation of white phalanopsis and fresh green
roses proved a great success, with the weather girl almost insistent on
taking it home!
Catch it again at:
http://s17420.gridserver.com/pollen-nation_bbc.mov

Pity Pollen Nation didn’t get the on-screen credit the other guy had!

Catch them next at the Grand Designs Show at Excel next week.

The ultimate scare story for a PR agency?  Corporate giant JNJ too irritated with mis-quotations by journalists who write without declaring their bias, revealing their sources or repeating what they’ve actually been told are in the process of launching their own online-press-office-blog-equivalent.

SITUATION
If a journalist brings down a corporation  his career is made.
The company provides context and content and the journalist writes skewed articles.
SOLUTION
Put the stuff online and publish the backstory so the reading public can make up their own mind about the journalist’s angle, attitude and orientation.

Working with the internal communications team "J&J By the Way" will be an online resource to migrate the press office online.  Turn the press release into a shell article which can be adapted / used and if (when) abused, can be linked to the blog which gives another viewpoint / detail of the briefing given to the journalist and explains the context.
Advangages? 

1. You can declare your bias online,
2. the bland public press relase can be backed up with proper detail for the public
3. the journalist and the blog has an audience wider than just the journalist writers.

Thanks for the story!

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Brain dump following the event this morning.

BTW Thanks to everyone who came, particularly Adriana who doesn’t do early mornings (see photo!)

1. Digital Agencies are toolboxes not communicators
2. Internet = Customer Power
3. Americans are more willing to pay for ideas than Brits.
4. Two business modes for the new world 1 - Opensource.  2 - The Long Tail.  these are organisational structures not business models.
5. Employment and autonomy means no ‘boss’ but you need an infrastructure - a project manager / PA in one.
6. Communicators relay messages to audiences who supposedly have demand for the product.  But when the demand bypasses the communicators……:-)
7. The internet is permanent space, not fleeting.

A bit of a rant from Daniel Riveong.
He highlights two interesting and apparently conflicting trends that have the same outcome:

two trends will continue heighten the
“commodization” of client-agency relationships, resulting in the ever
more common “break-ups” between major brand and agencies:

1. Increasingly ROI driven Marketing/Advertising decisions
2. Increasingly integrated approach to Marketing/Advertising

These two approach drives the pressure for both parties to have
increasingly control over the marketing strategy, creative direction
etc - driving up the potential for friction (while also collaboration)
in the relationship.

Thanks to the boys at Web Liquid for their insightful and blissfully short post on Consumer Generated Content.

Key thoughts
1.  Among the many points of difference between the broadcast and online
models of marketing is the notion of service over solicitation.

We are here to serve you the customer or potential customer.  We aren’t trying to sell you stuff.

Question for your business…. online can your customers find out about your service, product, ask questions in public and get timely, accurate answers.

As an agency, what could I put up to enable this for my website? 

• How we treat our clients,
• Our service level commitment to our clients,
• What happens when you are not happy with our work or our service,
• Public places for new brand ideas - got an idea for our clients’ brands? Post it up and come and work with us as job experience to put it into practice (we pay you if your idea grabs our client),
• Ideas we have pitched and failed on - but we still think are good ideas.  Help yourself - but please credit us under creative commons license.

2. CGC presents a valuable research opportunity CGC is Word-of-Mouth
but online it’s also a public record of those conversations and
consumer sentiment relative to your brand and that of your competitors.

An ideal point-in-time temperature gauge of your brand and its relationship with key audiences.  What could your agency be doing in this area?

• online poll of viewpoints - latest campaign, cool employees, what the MD said at a conference, hiring policies, graduate training scheme,
• If you are only as good as your last campaign - how is that measured and reported on?  By competitors, by clients, by staff?
• What was the killer reason you won your last pitch?  Be brave and publicise.
• Looking for a brave brand on which to exercise your talents - ask for small brands to challenge your creative juices - the deal is they run with one of the campaign ideas you have and you use it to showcase a new service / new approach / new or young team

3.  CGC presents the opportunity to engage customers and potential
customers at the most critical time in the purchase process - right
when they’re looking for the information about a product or service.

• How to find a brand when they are looking for an agency?  Get known as the place that posts up ideas which others’ can take and use as long as they credit you.  See David Airey who regularly posts business card ideas
• it’s more than testimonials, it is the real grit of the day to day work that should shine through and be available to be seen.
• Post up questions that you WANT clients and prospects to ask you.  Really Hard Questions.  And have some honest answers ready.  Extend that playing field onto your territory.

4.  For a brand to engage in this conversation with a strategic approach
including a deep understanding of what’s being discussed online and its
influence, there is a great opportunity to more effectively reach
qualified consumers and position the brand as an authority on the topic.

So there you go.  It is possible for an agency to do this.  Who’s gonna be first, guys?

Forrester surveyed US agencies and clients and found divergent views of influence and success.

1.  Agency executives 93 percent thought their efforts "drive their clients’ marketing success," while just 63 percent of the marketing executives contacted agreed
2. About 95 percent of agencies thought that they were well positioned to adapt to changes in Internet advertising while only 45 percent of clients agreed.
3. Of the survey participants, only 15 percent said their agency compensation was tied to business results. When those who did not have such an arrangement were asked why, 43 percent said they never considered it while 36 percent reported it would be too difficult to truly measure the results.

Yikes.  If we are hired because of the results we drive for our clients - this sort of perception mismatch has only one ending.  It would be interesting to know how long the agency:client relationship had been in existence at the point of the survey.  Do these things tire after a couple of years "familiarity breeding contempt"?

I work with a range of businesses and business owners.  There are three ways to hire me:

• Retainer for set days per month. This is usually best for project implementations and change programmes.
• Project / day hire. For a short term project or brainstorming facilitation.  Use this to kick off a new project or delve into my ideas and experience for your business.  Also useful for mentoring and public speaking.
• Success fee.  When you are investing or seeking investment; merging or seeking to acquire or sell.  I will work on a part-success fee basis.  Ask me what it could mean for you.  Works well when you want access to my ‘black book’ of contacts, or use me to front the sell-in of your new pitch to a new audience.

My clients since September 2006

Wave Creative Communications
Gabrielle Shaw Communications
Investment Property Databank
Cascaid
Munro & Forster
JFDI Win New Business
Adriana Cronin-Lukas
Lexis Public Relations
141 Worldwide
Buffalo Communications

Charlie Hoult sends me an email after I publish the Web 2.0 research

Thanks for this.

The report is a very accomplished piece of work - only lacking a quote from me.

And so here’s what he wrote about it on the Brand Karate blog
But because it’s password protected, I’ll reproduce the whole text below.  Shame that some great bloggers are hidden from the world they need to be capturing as an audience by only being hosted on one media site that’ password protected. 

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Dave McLure says it all to back up the earlier story