A great blog: Organic's ThreeMinds
ThreeMinds has been publishing interesting observations about the digital world since 2005. Instead of focusing inwardly on our own industry and what we should be doing, the blog takes a more general look at the digital world to identify and comment on anything from mega-trends to little blips on the radar you may have missed. With multiple contributors, ThreeMinds isn't intended to represent the "official" agency position so much as to be a watering hole where people from divergent backgrounds can gather and share ideas.
Demonstrating deep expertise: Razorfish
I hadn't looked at Razorfish's site lately, but in my memory it was an aesthetically pleasing but rather expected collection of the usual content. Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised to find a lengthy and informative research study, "Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report." This 58-page study is reminiscent of the kind of work traditional agencies used to do back in the day; that is, perform a piece of consumer research, publish the findings, and use it to generate PR and new business inquiries. Of course, this also establishes credibility in the area of the study.
A solid presence on Facebook: Sapient, AKQA and others
Creating a Facebook fan page for your business is nothing new, but it's interesting how some are more useful than others. By looking at Sapient and AKQA, among many others, one gets a sense of what's going on at the agency, since the content is mainly from the agency itself. These pages are not meant as general introductions to the agency -- that still makes sense to do on the agency's website -- but instead almost as a real-time diary of what people are doing and talking about.
However, some fan pages -- Razorfish's falls into this category -- are just cluttered with irrelevant posts by non-agency personnel such as job-seekers. Who knows exactly why Razorfish allowed its Facebook page to become a repository of extraneous posts and even spam.
A valiant effort to redefine the website: Modernista, CPB
When Modernista!, an agency self-described as "not for everyone," relaunched its site a couple of years ago, it was no surprise that these iconoclasts had tried something different: a view of the agency "through the eyes of the web." The site is mostly links to Modernista! entries on Wikipedia, YouTube, and the like. So, in theory, the viewer is getting a wider perspective on Modernista! than he would by simply reading the agency's own self description.
Crispin Porter + Bogusky has a new beta site that acts more as a content hub than a traditional agency website. On the home page is content bubbled up from Twitter, YouTube, and other sources, but there's nothing else. If you wanted to find out about, say, the backgrounds of the agency principals, well, you'd have to dig around elsewhere for that.
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