This and That: 03.28.10

+Having my first vacation of the year since last October, I've spent a bit of time thinking and being the most offline I've been in ages. The last day or two I've spent trying to catch up and here are some interesting things I've been reading/checking out.

Razorfish's Fluent: Social Influence Marketing Report - Some of the information in here is interesting. Some of it is a bit of blather turned on its head to sell the agency as experts by making things like comparing "Social Ads" to "Display Ads". Social ads are just rich media ads that engage by pulling information like reviews or other dynamic content. It's not necessarily something new, although the talk as if it is. Additionally, one writer started their piece with "Years ago I penned an article for MediaPost..." - Do I care? No. Stopped reading it right there. There is some good stuff in here if you can weed through the self-promotional crap which seems a bit heavier than prior publications from "the 'Fish".

8 Ingredients for Blog Post Success - Focused at ad agencies and has some good tips on how to structure your blog posts.

Expand your Agency by Narrowing your Focus - Also by the same author as above but he brings up some good points. It seems we're always in a constant swing from generalists are best to specialists being the hot thing. But at the bigger piece that's interesting is if you've got a lot of narrow focused agencies working for your brand, how do you keep them integrated? It can be a challenge, but then again, when an agency tries to be everything to everyone, just like a brand, it becomes nothing to no one.