Today at the Account Planning Conference, Aki Spicer from the Fallon Planning Blog and Ed Cotton from Butler Shine & Stern’s Influx Insights led an interesting discussion entitled “Blogging the Agency,” encouraging Account Planners to start blogs, use the blogosphere to find unique voices and encourage clients to take advantage of blogs and social networks.
But the most interesting thing I thought was meshly.com, a site developed by Fallon to track trends in the blogosphere and connect people. It’s a Twitter-meets-Digg type of method of posting your favorite links and articles via IM. So beyond just scouring the web for insights, Fallon is actually developing its own web tools to measure trends.
In true Account Planner fashion, Ed and Aki sent out questionnaires to the planning community to get their opinion on blogs in preparation for the discussion. I think they sent it out to hundreds of people. They got 38 responses, so maybe there’s not a mass trend towards account planners using blogs. And they did reveal that legendary planner Jon Steel hates blogs.
UPDATE (8/8) – The entire presentation is now available at the Fallon Planning Blog .
