Now more than ever, we agency professionals cannot afford to have cliche’ agency jerks among our ranks. There’s enough tension with clients and providers thanks to the economic hardships. So please, if you recognize any of these behaviors as something you or your colleagues do, please do your best to put a stop to it.

1. Do you sigh every time a client opens their mouth to offer criticism?
2. Do you say things like, “obviously, you don’t understand” when you fail to properly explain the agency’s thinking?
3. Do you pretend to understand digital terms like analytics, UI, and RSS then blow them off as irrelevant or below your pay grade?
4. Do you put more effort in arguing about the size of the logo than improving your knowledge base?
5. Do you think SEO is someone else’s job?
6. Do you think web video is just another way to sell your 30 second TV spot?
7. Do you discount the client’s ideas without thinking how to improve them first?
8. Do you spend more time thinking about how you look than the way your work makes the client look?
9. Do you think pitching the client another iPhone apps makes you cutting edge?
10. Do you constantly refer to the awards you won during the last Ice Age?

I am not so sorry to say that you’ve been outmoded. The future doesn’t need you. Please get out of the business before you bring the ship down with you. The client’s never liked you and they’re beginning to figure out they don’t need you, your sporty clothes and fancy way of talking. They need someone with a deep understanding of digital, social and branding – who wants to be a real partner.

OK. OK. So I’m having a little fun. But I’m sure you can name a few agency jerk behaviors that are hurting our business.

I’m just about over Flash forever. I once heard flash refered to as it as the “flashy gold chain of the internet.” I tend to agree – especially when it’s used for a site intro. But I am guilty of using it on sites in the past, some of which I would still defend.

I do have some caveats to my being over Flash statement. Flash video and banners are effective uses of media that’s not meant to be search able. It’s, served paid media after all. So if you’re browsing with a mobile browser, you shouldn’t be served it anyway. Also, some specific sites and applications inside a site that do not need to be searched and are not intended to be dynamic content are fine as long as it’s properly tagged and you have some other content to drive your SEO. But you just better be ready to live with the Flash content for awhile.

So where does this loathing of Flash come from?

Search engines still hate it.

It’s a pain in the ass to make changes.

It takes more time to execute most things in Flash which can be a real drag on making deadlines.

The biggest reason though is incompatibility with mobile. And mobile is more important than ever.

Some accounts have 1/3 of all internet usage on mobile devices. And mobile web usage is supposed to double in the next three years. So why the hell would you build a site that doesn’t work on mobile? Of course, you could just build two sites and have one served to mobile browsers. But why not just build one great site?

At Kilgannon, we’ve made the decision to use Social Radar as our new social media monitoring tool.

We did not take this decision lightly. We also scoured the blogs and websites. We also asked partner organizations which tools they were using and then decided on what criteria we’d use to evaluate the tools. Then spent several months looking at various tools – some we demoed and others we looked via webinar.

The tools we looked at included:

Techrigy SM2

Radian 6

Sysmos

BuzzMetrics

Visible

ScoutLabs

eCairn

Webtrends Social Measurement

Collective Intellect

Honestly, we gave all of them serious consideration. And many of them also would have been excellent selections. What it came down to was the before mentioned criteria. These are the main criteria we focused on:

Features: What the tool can do that will benefit our customers.

Training and support: Interestingly, some require more of this than others – as all tools do not allow you to create your own queries.

Cost structure: Notice I said cost structure and not cost.

Much of the discussion among bloggers has been about the wizbang features that these tools have and not the business case for choosing one over the other.

And some of these these tools make more sense for in-house marketing departments than agencies, which we are.

When talking to software providers IN GENERAL (this means not just social media monitoring folks)  I’ve found a reluctance to create a model that works for smaller companies, smaller agencies, and even mid-sized b2b companies. It seems they’re mostly interested in the big fish. That means, just like in media land, they’re catering to the non-niche, consumer audience. There is no reason that a b2b software provider should pay the same for the service as a consumer goods company – they simply do not require the same kinda of band width that Coke or Apple do.

I plan a follow up article with more detail about what I learned in the selection process that should be helpful to anyone looking for monitoring tools.

Update: Follow up here.

Finally got my Wave invite and I have a first impression.

Google has made the case that Wave is what email would have been been had it been built with today’s technology. But Google Wave strikes me more as a collaboration tool rather than a replacement for email. Frankly, I know a lot of people who would be pretty freaked out with other people editing their typing while they’re trying to send a message.

Why do we need to replace email anyway? I love email. Not Outlook or the the spam that comes with email. But I do love the call and response messaging that email provides. And I really love how Gmail provides conversation nesting for easier tracking of the back and forth. I find email very freaking useful. In fact, just a moment ago it got a friend of mine a job interview. Can’t do that with Wave. And did I mention my mother can use it?

But I am excited about where Wave is going. For geeks working with other tech savvy people, there’s a lot that can be accomplished with this tool. But for Wave to be more useful than email, we’ll have to wait for widespread adoption and be lucky enough to work with people who are pretty technologically inclined.