Hello blogworld …… is anyone listening? I suspect not many right now. At this early stage in development, I guess a blog must rank as one of the most egotistical activities known to humankind.

But for all those supportive friends, relatives and mystery shoppers out there, I am standing on the quivering high board, staring at the blogspace between me and the shimmering depth of the internet below. The plunge is about to be taken.

Splash. Still breathing. Which is a good sign.

The title of my piece sums up my current feelings of self-righteous professionalism. Forgive me for a temporary feeling of superiority, but it’s true. We have done what clients tell us to do: we have put shoes on our own children’s feet. Like the proverbial shoemaker whose offspring arrive barefoot to school, many agencies seem incapable of getting their own marketing done on time. In just 8 weeks, we have designed and created our own site (with the most excellent expertise of our good friends at Skunkworks - Jordan take a bow).

Meanwhile, we have been feverishly setting up a business the Canadian way: registering the business, getting insurance for everything, finding premises, cleaning the windows, having inspectors call to check our plumbing, having an inspector call to check our fire alarm, having an inspector call to check that the other inspectors have called. But no inspector called to check that we have a website. That we had to do all by ourselves.

Perhaps North Vancouver and other far-sighted municipalities should institute a marketing inspector to insist that all new businesses have suitable web presence as well as emergency lighting and fully functional watertraps in their washrooms. It would certainly help to drive business to the marketing services sector. Somehow I don’t think it will happen. The free market spirit would rebel and find something else to do that’s more important. I have had stints at agencies where there was something more important to do every day for more than a year.  So 8 weeks, for me, is a triumph.

Although for the moment, it appears that it may be just me, Roy and Christine who know about it. But our site exists. Needless to say a well-oiled marketing machine is about to be set in motion to drive traffic to the site. (I only said that our children have shoes. I didn’t say they were being driven to the school in Dad’s Maserati. So for now, we are walking from the old school to the new school.)

My point is that you need to act to get marketing done. You can talk and plan, plan and design, design and talk. But you need to act, make tough decisions and then face the world with what you’ve got. Sure, not everything is perfect. The agency I worked for withheld permission for the use of imagery on creative that I had produced. Fair play – they don’t want me claiming their clients as my own. It leaves a few holes in our little site.

Nevertheless, it’s no excuse for not getting our act together. I suspect that the proverbial cobbler always wanted to make sure that the shoes he produced for his children were perfect – perfect materials, perfect design. And then he would think, as many agencies do, that perhaps what he had in mind would be out of date as soon as he did it. Couldn’t he get ahead of the trend? Better wait for the perfect idea.

The outcome, of course, is the worst possible. He does nothing. Children go barefoot. Not good advertising for a shoemaker – or an adman. In agency summertime, when the billings are high, you can laugh it off as putting clients first. But come wintertime, when the clients aren’t spending …

I rest my case. Perfect is the enemy of good. We’re an agency that believes in testing to see what’s better, not what’s perfect. Perfection takes too long for mere humans and is sometimes never finished. So our site may not be perfect. But it’s on time and on budget.

Now … how do you get out of this blog? Are there steps? Or do you have to keep swimming until it turns to butter and you can climb out.