I was doing some 2009 brainstorming for a freelance client recently. This company is ultimately a service business. It doesn’t sell its own product or have any proprietary technologies. One of my suggestions was to put branding over its process to make what it does more tangible. So prospects can say, “Aha. I get what you do and I understand what we will get from you!”

Agencies face the same exact problem. They’re ultimately service businesses. What’s a given agency’s process, though? What makes it different?

Go to a number of agencies’ Web sites and you often find the same language. The same services. The same promises.

The truth is there are few agencies that are actually alike internally. Also, that few agencies get social media. And they’re are few that are nearly as good at developing messaging around themselves as they are their clients.

I get it. Writing a biography for yourself is hard. But just as we tell our clients: Differentiate or die.

Even though themediaisdying, we must think deeper than integrating social media into our work to keep up with the movement from print to online and the hands of citizen journalists.

For the longevity of our agencies, we must develop novel ideas, systems and technologies that help us do a better job at what we do and communicate how we are different to (potential) clients. Then clients can look at us and say – “Aha. I get what you do and I understand what we will get!” They can preview an agency spearheaded monitoring technology, for instance, and say, “No one else is doing this. We will be five steps ahead of our competition if we choose you as our AOR.”

I truly feel that so much emphasis has been placed on social media the last few years that we have forgotten the basics (not to say social media isn’t important. It’s a huge passion of mine). We must put the air mask on ourselves before we can put it on others.

If we wait too long – helping others and not developing our processes and messaging internally – we are are putting our organizations at huge risk, particularly in a time when the same number of agencies are competing for a fewer number of available accounts.