So you were able to communicate value to your client on general online marketing concepts.  Now, how do you introduce Youtube, Digg, Squidoo, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Eventful, Flickr..etc..and explain to them this wide-ranging concept of online marketing.  It’s a tough sell if the client is not familiar with this landscape.  But for marketing agencies, it is our job to stay on top of these things and ensure that our clients don’t have to do all the leg work to understand these concepts.  Furthermore, it’s our job to go out, find out what works, what doesn’t work, what works at the local level, national level, the best drivers of online traffic, viral potential...the list goes on.

Then, there is the question of driving traffic.  Traffic to a website (or social networking site) is great, but the value comes from traffic that is needed - or falls in line with the target demographic - something that makes a customer do what we want them to do. 

So the question remains, how do we introduce these new concepts?  Is it our responsibility to educate them?  Perhaps.  But at the same time, our goal should be to deliver results.  In the end, there are many businesses that don’t necessarily care about the what and the how (assuming the methods are white-hat), as long as you can deliver.  So a refresher/overview for the client? Yes.  Days worth of consulting at no charge? No.  Small details about the best practices that you’ve learned over the years which have made you the expert?  Naaahh.  Developing your relationship, cutting some corners and saving the client a little money? Maybe.  De-valuing your services by charging way below market rate when you can outpeform most agencies.  Not.

The online world moves extremely fast.  It isn’t going anywhere.  Agencies that have aligned themselves to adapt to this ever-changing environment will benefit over the long run.  One of the keys to leverage our knowledge, I think, is to find a way to fuse our expertise and effectiveness within our services offerings.