Its been 2 years since we launched the Fallon Planning Blog and 2 years since Ed Cotton and I did our "Blogging The Agency" presentation at AAAA Planning Conference which tried to assess the value of account planners' blogging.
At the time, questions were just starting to arise about agency bloggers and the role we should be playing on the burgeoning social web. I distinctly remember some big name planners insisting that all this bloggery and twittering was a waste of our time and we should get back our proper surveys and focus groups like a good puppy. Interestingly, not a day goes by that a client isn't asking the Insight dept for a POV on social media. Then, social media was a hobby, now its become the job.
What prompted the Fallon Planning Blog? Fallon Planners were asking a philosophical question: Are we merely our work, or are we our ideas and thinking, too? And if we're ideas and thinking, where does all that get expressed and workshopped beyond our client decks? Younger planners were asking how might they learn and hear from experienced planners beyond the annual conference? Other questions abounded about what effect social media might play on us, our industry, our work, our clients? We were beginning to see the seismic shifts that social computing was having on retail, media consumption, music, creative production, distribution, etc. A partial answer to this conundrum was to participate. We started a blog.
The blog launched with little fanfare (or even official sanction) we simply started and assumed to sort it out as we went.
So years later, what has it gotten us? What have we learned from blogging and Brainfooding and Tweeting and social networking?
Highlights about Fallon Planning Blog
-Over 170,000 pageviews and over 27,406 unique visitors since launch in 2006
-Average 600 RSS subscribers a day
-Ranked #142 on AdAge Power 150 - top media and marketing blogs
-over 12,000 pageviews in Feb 2009, this year may be reaching a tipping point!
-Fallon Worldwide/Fallon Minneapolis receives an average blog mention every 11 days
-Fallon Planning receives an average blog mention every 12 hours
Highlights about Fallon Brainfood:
-over 52,000 total views of Brainfood on Slideshare plus countless live webcam views, blog posts, and Tweets
-over 4600 views of Brainfood in Q109 so far
-28,905 Twitter impressions
So you might wonder why all the reflective tone in this post? It probably sounds like something is ending. And well, it is...or rather, something new is soon to begin. But for now, consider the Fallon Planning Blog experiment successfully ended.
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