GLOBAL, OCTOBER 11, 2010 – Would you like your agency to be on Twitter? How about only on Twitter? A handful of agencies have moved from a website to social networking and microblogging. It started with BooneOakley moving to YouTube, and using YouTube features to make an interactive channel showcasing its portfolio. Grey Stockholm took the more popular route, by making a Facebook fanpage for users to "like" work and comment on their page. Argentina’s Kamchatka recently took to Twitter, spreading its web presence over several Twitter accounts.
These major agencies taking the leap from the company web site to availing of web services seem to be moving into the new internet landscape. Once upon a time it was all about the home page, which served as a showroom for potential clients to browse and consider. As net content evolved into the blogs and social networks we know today, the basic home page was largely forgotten. This was punctuated by the closing of Geocities, which once built a dot com empire from giving out free webspace for homepages. When Geocities closed, it took millions of websites, a huge chunk of internet history down with it. Some websites were saved by the internet archive team, for those who wish to take a trip down memory lane.
Techies were quick to point out that the sudden shift from home pages to web services would be premature. "Why put all your eggs in one basket? Why sidle up to a third party company that owns your data?" Dave Allen comments on Adweek. The danger lies in the agency’s presence becoming nothing more than a teeny mention in a megasite. It is the equivalent of selling your own house to move back in with your parents for the heck of it. Sure enough, in the related videos column of BooneOakley’s YouTube channel, the first suggested video is clearly not ad-related: "To Pull a Boner".
