At risk of drawing out comments like "open source marketing is no different" and "the ad agencies will absorb you open source consultants" I think that ad agencies and marketing consultants are leaving money on the table by not getting with the program.

There are simple, loose parallels that can be drawng to the lax approach that most IT consultants are taking to the open source software world. There's a huge land grab waiting to take place, and no one's moving on it.

Customers, yes your customers, are moving away from your cheezy TV ads, print flyers, direct mail campaigns and other ad-agency-revenue-generating paraphenalia and toward their taking marketing into their own hands. The problem is, most marketing consultants aren't there yet. We're not LEADING our customers/clients like we should be.

- Has your ad agency/marketing consultant provided you with a report on what's being said in the blogosphere about your company lately?
- Have they researched how you product is being portrayed via flickr?
- Do you/they know that the tone of the conversation is about your company in the marketplace?
- They should (but are they) using Bacons, Google News Alerts, Technorati and other services to monitor the pulse of the 'brand conversation?
- Do they know that once your RSS feed gets into a web based aggregator engine that your words can't be taken back?
- Do they (do you!?) understand the power of everything ever said about your company being archived forever on the Internet for all to see and dig up for years to come?

There is certainly room for marketing consultants to fill a void here in managing brands, reputations, conversations, buzz campaigns and the like. Yeah, I know, there are some that are doing this, but there are too many that aren't there yet.

The marketing consultants have all of the resources they need to provide this service, but they're not. We need to lead our customers through this world of open source marketing, and we need to start today!

A couple comments on your generally accurate and important post:

* Of all the products in the world, I'd guess that less than 1% of them are currently (or in the near future) portrayed on Flickr in a meaningful way. Trying to monitor Flickr beyond subscribing to a tag RSS feed with your product name is a non-starter, and a waste of time.
* Put simply, Bacon's service is a waste of money.
* Let's back up a step. Most companies don't have an RSS feed. They'd better get one first before worrying about the implications of its permanence.

Nice site re-design, by the way.

well said, it's an area I am focusing on.....i'd be interested in your views on my manifesto at:
http://www.changethis.com/14.OpenSourceMktg