Glasshouse, which helped G-14 with the project, thinks these trends will accelerate over the next decade driven by pressures from politicians and Civil Society to engage more actively in dealing with social issues (look at the European White Paper on Sport). As well as this external pressure, professional sport, especially football, will seek to build relevance and esteem with their newly expanding fan bases across the globe. To read the BITC / G-14 report, go to G14.com and dig through to News ‘New Report Provides Insight into…‘

AdAge reports:

Ad/marketing-services sectors have rebounded from the ad industry's January 2004 post-recession employment nadir. Advertising/marketing services has added 106,000 jobs since then; marketing consulting accounted for nearly half (48,200) of those gains.

As murketing puts it, ‘In the future, everyone will consult’. Could the data from AdAge be a sign that the marketing industry as a whole is waking up to the fact that our clients don’t just want to get stuff in the papers these days? I suspect this is probably a little over-optimistic — even aside from the fact that there’s going to be mileage in the efficient publicity shop for a good few years to come. After all, there are plenty of market sectors (fashion retail is one which springs to mind) where media coverage is a critical component of short term sales strategy.

Glasshouse Partnership, on the other hand, try to help our clients move beyond this machine-gun approach to selling. As Tim said the other day:

We do corporate marketing. We help design and evolve organisations which meet actual stakeholders needs. We advocate changes that should leverage existing relationship systems as a source of competitive advantage. We try very hard to suggest changes that may actually be deliverable and may actually have an impact. We want strategies that multiply; not divide.

Stakeholder collaboration doesn’t just have to be for the big guys, though. Anyone can set up a wiki or a Skype public chat, open a Flickr group or — if you’re doing things the old fashioned way, get a group of mates down to the pub to talk about some new product ideas.

Getting to know the people who care about what you do is important stuff, and so this sort of dialogue (even though it’s a horrible word) is good. Also, the people who understand how to make dialogue work are the people who’re getting hired these days, it would seem.

With blogs for Skype and the management systems community at BusinessAssurance.com part of our current portfolio, we’re at a stage where sharing our experiences has become an integral part of our own learning process. Through open discussions like these, we’re well placed to draw on the insights of our peers, as well as demonstrate our own strengths.

We believe that blogs are a crucial weapon in the armoury of an organisation which values transparency — an open, honest, and most importantly human mode of communication, valued by stakeholders and search engines alike.

Further reading:

• There’s more on the value of blogs in marketing over at Blogopreneur.
• Murphy’s Law has a good round-up of some recent corporate blogging discussions.