A New Marketing Service

“Anybody who pays big agency money to make blogs for them is either a fool, or is being ripped off. Just my opinion.” –Hugh MacLeod
While I tend to enjoy Hugh’s take on things, on the above point I couldn’t disagree more.
Time is money, even in this post-Cluetrain epoch. A well constructed marketing blog, in my opinion, would require significant investment, not in production values (like TV), but in time. Time to source the right writers. Time to research the market. Time to write.
Imagine a group blog for a client like Coca-Cola. Let’s say their blogging needs required a staff of a dozen writers. These writers might be spread out over a dozen blogs, or they might contribute to one central blog. Either way, a dozen highly skilled writers spending all day researching, writing posts, making comments, deleting comment and trackback spam, etc. is not an “on the cheap” proposal.
I believe one to five percent of a marketer’s budget put toward blogs, podcasts and other conversational media would do the job. One percent of Coca-Cola’s marketing budget is somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000,000. Public relations agencies are the first (in the industry) to truly grasp this new business model and act on it. Like it or not, ad agencies won’t be far behind.