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Win­ning new busi­ness is always tough (and get­ting tougher). All that work, all that effort for the pitch, and you finally win! Then the work begins for real and it all becomes a blur of dead­lines, deliv­er­ables and more long nights.

And there’s no praise if you fal­ter in your tracks, fail to deliver and find your new client head­ing back to his pre­vi­ous agency or to the close run num­ber two… who said life was ever meant to be easy?

Win­ning is impor­tant but keep­ing a client happy over a sus­tained period of time is much more demand­ing and, unlike pitch­ing, con­ducted in the real world of blood, sweat and tears.

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IMHO from the old­est boy in media

Men­tion the term SLA (Ser­vice Level Agree­ment) in the world of adver­tis­ing and people’s eyes will glaze over and their minds turn to lunch (or the after work trip to the pub).

Years of expe­ri­ence have taught me what keeps clients loyal and pub­lish­ers deliv­er­ing that extra bit that turns a good plan into an excel­lent plan: a belief that suc­cess­ful rela­tion­ships are built on foun­da­tions of trans­parency, hon­esty and a mutual effort to succeed.

In my first blog post, I’ll address the very real need for the media pro­fes­sional to build and main­tain SLAs with their key sup­pli­ers.

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A year is a long time in social media. We held our first Social Media Hud­dle in Autumn 2009. Dur­ing the ses­sion, atten­dees learnt how Dell, IBM, Juniper and Salesforce.com were all using social media to drive mar­ket­ing success.

To see how social media has moved on, this year we’re host­ing a new hud­dle at the Ban­ner offices. In this information-packed after­noon, mar­keters will hear from senior tech­nol­ogy mar­keters and ven­dors about how they’re using social media to drive prov­able suc­cess for their brands in 2010 and beyond.

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At the Hud­dle you’ll discover:

• How to get the most from the avail­able media options

The Econ­o­mist has an inter­est­ing (and rea­son­ably uplift­ing) arti­cle com­par­ing the bright shiny new reces­sion of 2009 with the been there, done that tech crash of 2001.

In a nut­shell, the arti­cle describes how in 2001 the tech­nol­ogy indus­try ‘imploded’ going from 16% growth in 2000 to a 6% decline in 2001. In com­par­i­son, For­rester pre­dicts IT spend­ing to decline 3% in 2009 – and when cur­rency weight­ing is taken into account this could actu­ally mean an increase of 3%.

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