I’ve worked with several ad agencies who waited until their clients demanded counsel from them regarding social media. Each agency had almost no social media presence (which means no social media experience) to use as a basis for understanding and communicating. One agency in particular had a robust research department that could have established that agency as the leader in emerging tech. Instead, they spent all their time researching and promoting the Net Promoter Index.

To be fair to agencies, I guess we can’t explore every new thing that comes along. Still, we do need to be in front of our clients, leading. If we want to be that “trusted advisor,” then we’ve got to take some risk to explore the unknown and even the things we don’t believe will work. We have an obligation to help our clients avoid wasting time, energy, and money.

Now, back to your main point, we probably need to be nice to others online. I love Seth’s post today: just because we CAN throw a brick through a window doesn’t mean we should.

Twitter’s Investors Missed the Cluetrain by Tim Beyers of FastCompany.

Somewhere recently (I’ll look it up and post later), someone referred to this time period as the Paleozoic Era of Interrnet development. Whiile this time period has been a wild ride (to me, in smacks of the American Wild, Wild West of the 1800s portrayed in B movies), this is at best a transition period.

In the meantime, thought leaders will develop out-in-the-open and then gradually move behind PayPal buttons. Hopefully the rash of social media books will subside and we’ll push toward meaning and significant in the commercial world.

Just a thought.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it already has – look at the migration to Twitter, Posterous, FriendFeed, and other light formats. The longer form content is still out there – but with many thought leaders I know, most of the good stuff has been moved behind a paywall.

This is a culture change, not a marketing tool gizmo. Consultants that didn’t want to tackle that big beast and flew in with quick fixes are now trying to figure out how to reframe the expectations.

For this stuff to be more than “Green Direct Mail” it takes guts, vision, and a commitment to be better. And not just me (my company) getting better, but also you and other companies getting better.

I have had occasion to listen to an interview I did with Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He captures what being social means, and more importantly, the depth to which the culture of an organization can improve. Can improvement occur without social media, of course, Levy contends. The fact, however, that the ugly and painstaking process to become is shared with others is one of the great benefits of social media which helps expedite the process.

On the other hand, there are simply too many people passing themselves as marketing experts, publicity experts, writing experts, publishing experts, video experts, and on and on and on, just because someone retweeted something they produced. Sadly, these folks are taking money from clients who have no way of verifying expertise.

Part of it is our own fault. The agency world pooh-poohed social media, stuck our collective heads in the sand, made fun of the emerging technology, and in the same spirit of the former Digital Equipment Corporation who pontificated, “I see no reason at all for anyone to own a computer for their home,” wrote off an entire sector without doing due diligence.

The real professionals not only shot ourselves in the foot, we shot ourselves in the other foot, and then in this hand, and then in that, because we were too sophisticated with what we already knew to take time to learn something new.

Even more shocking, is, I think what we really did was display a colossal fear of the unknown and an unwillingness to learn something that MIGHT turn out to have been a waste of time. We wanted the sure thing, the measurable thing, and here’s the kicker, the thing we didn’t have to explain and sell to a hesitant client.

We threw our clients to the snake oil salesmen and they are giving us our just comeupance.

We have to stop chide the shysters and do the pioneering scientific work to prove or disprove strategies and tactics for our clients. It is simply shameful that a whole new silo has developed within the enterprise and a whole new industry in small business.

We did this to ourselves. BMA, PRSA, AAA, etc. COULD have taken leadership. Instead, they all laughed and played with stuff that was safe.

So, who’s going to step up and provide the leadership?