Pig Ignorant Metacognition

I came across your blog .... saw your last posting and it just made me think that I struggle just to get through my client work, let alone keep up with all these blogs and articles. Tell me, how do other people find time to read them? .... do they really get that much out of them?

I don’t think this view is uncommon. A number of my acquaintances are very complimentary about the content here but represent the view that life is too short to fill up on too much blog reading. I started this blog for the very reasons that Seth Godin mentions in the extract below:



Yeah, right. It's all about metacognition! I just learnt a new word.

As to why I read other blogs and recommend this habit become a regular thing for those in client services and frontline client relationships, I would say the following to those acquaintances and the questioner above:

An agency is dead in the water if it does not keep its thinking fresh with its clients. More than ever with increasing time and budget pressures, clients expect more from agencies. Even if you just create the artwork rather than do the strategic thinking, you should be showing the clients that you know about their business and are thinking about ways to enhance your offering to them. With the other agencies on the client roster snapping at your heels, you are being forced to either drop your prices or show more added value. The way you can do the latter is by keeping yourself informed and making that knowledge relevant to your clients. I am not saying it has to be blogs but they are useful in giving you information or discussion in bite-size chunks. It then allows you for example to talk about using Brands in Public for your clients' brands, understand what's going on with consumers globally through Did You Know? or debate the latest development on the back of a TEDTalk podcast.

Stephen Covey talks about prioritising your workload in another way and that the focus should be on the High Importance, non-Urgent quadrant activities. This is because they deal with building relationships, long-term planning, prevention and maintenance and these activities deliver high impact, long term results. The way you can do this is keeping your mind open to new ways of looking at old problems. Also if you, as a client services person, rely on your planning or strategy department to have the ideas, you start to become just a project manager. You have the opportunity of keeping up with new developments and re-packaging them with an added relevance to the client situation. Consequently, if you feel that this information monitoring (whether it is through blogs or elsewhere) is just not intrinsic to your client relationship and is too much for your workload, I would strongly recommend sitting down and doing a radical review of where you are spending your time. If you can carve out 20% of your time to spend on things that really develop the client relationship, the 80:20 success rule will follow.

Also this goes for agency management who rely solely on their strategists to come up with the ideas. Or more critically, those who treat certain subjects as a “black boxes” and feel they need to get unnecessary specialist consultants in to advise them. They run the risk of getting generic recommendations as knowledge of a client context takes time and money. Better that you see new developments through the lens of knowing what is right for the client’s organisation and customers. Then you may avoid kneejerk reactions like the one below: