Marketing Technology

Following the coverage of Ketchum’s
Personalized Media service, I have been asked by a few people why Hill
& Knowlton hasn’t done something similar yet. My response can be
summarised as follows:

1. We haven’t needed to
We’ve been creating
online communications strategies for our clients for the last ten
years. New communications tools like blogs, podcasts, RSS and wikis are
a natural evolution of what we already do, so we’ve just found
ourselves doing more and more in this area as client interest has
grown. Being based in the UK, we’ve also had mobile marketing for at
least three years already.

2. We aren’t completely ready
As Ketchum are already finding out,
you have to get your own house in order before you can go to
market with a big song and dance. We’ve made a start with our employee blogging guidelines and our business blogging community,
but we’re still sorting out our own RSS feeds (included in a
redevelopment of our .com website). We do not believe that we can
credibly advise clients in all these areas until we have been through
the ‘pain barrier’ ourselves. We learnt so much from the mistakes we
made during the guidelines creation process – I doubt many clients
would want to pay for us to use them as a guinea pig.

3. It’s not about the tools
The tools are just a
symptom of the wider trend. Trying to simplify consumer generated
marketing down to a set of five marketing tactics is not what we want
to do, nor do we think it’s what our clients want. Whilst we need to
help clients understand what these things are, the value is in guiding
them through the process of deciding which ones are relevant/important,
prioritising them, and utlising them alongside their existing marketing
discplines.

This is not to say we won’t package what we currently do a bit
better in the future, but good luck to Ketchum – the more agencies we
can get talking to clients about this stuff, the better it will be for
us all.