An agency and its own website. A Catch-22. Or is it?

At first take, it feels like the tale of the old cobbler and his childrens' shoes. You know, the one about the shoemaker who is so busy mending and making shoes for customers that he has no time to make them for his own barefoot children?

Too often, that is the case with agencies and their self-promotion tools. Especially their websites.  We preach day-in and day-out to our clients about the critical importance of fresh, relevant online content. So, what’s our excuse?

The truth is, we don’t have one.

Granted, when you spend weeks, even months or more building (among other things) websites for some of the nation's greatest brands, it can be a challenge to do one for yourself. Especially one that is a true reflection of the agency’s thinking, passion, abilities, and innovation. Add to that the agency’s typical collective inability to come to consensus on design, content, and case studies. It can be the perfect recipe for a classic agency disaster—over budget, missed deadline, outdated content the day after it launches, and so on.

We’re striving to break that trend.  We want our kids to have great shoes.

We’re proud to launch www.planitagency.com for so many reasons:

 It offers us the opportunity to showcase our abilities as an industry-leading agency not only with design, but with functionality and content as well.  We’re proud to showcase our clients’ work (and our work on their behalf)  We strive to lead by example. Play around our new site and you’ll find that this website is so much more than just a website; it leverages the talents of our whole agency, from strategy to creative to PR to search to social media…  It puts our money where our mouth is by demonstrating how RELEVANT content is really king—how we have a responsibility to share content, opinions, thought leadership, ideas, complaints, even recommendations to our peers. In real time. Honest and unedited.  It offers a forum for us to entertain, inform, and include our friends, peers, clients, and prospects.  It makes concrete our passion to open the eyes of current and potential clients to the power of an integrated communications strategy.  It gives new friends a peek inside Planit (and therefore inside our culture) to learn about what it takes to be a member of the Planit team—because people hire people, not PowerPoints or RFP responses.

If we do our job right, this site doesn’t get old. I challenge my team to be sure it doesn’t have outdated content, or last year’s case studies or old news. I challenge them to bring new thinking to the table. The site should challenge you to challenge yourself. If we do our job (and I’m confident we will), it won’t become that Catch-22 that so many other agency sites are.

Take a look around. Tell us what you REALLY think.

Then join the conversation, disagree, challenge others, reap the benefits, learn something, grow, share it with a friend.

I hope you enjoy your visit. Come back often.