Whether you think digital agencies are "ready to lead" or not, failing to bring a digital mindset to marketing and communications challenges is no longer an option.

Yesterday, Ben Malbon tweeted a quote by Garrick Schmitt from the Razorfish FEED 09 Report (PDF): "Brand marketers neglecting digital is akin to showing up to a cocktail party in sweatpants."

This reminded me of the Shel Silverstein poem and illustration above (which Johanna helped me to track down).

The digital age is here. And it's permanent. This means that regardless of whether your career has been labeled digital or not, it is essential that you bring a digital mindset to all of the work that you do.

This is beyond tools, platforms, and capabilities. This is a new way of understanding our world that changes every aspect of our work.

Investment must include time, not just money.
Achieving a valuable return on your investment now requires a commitment to time as well as to money. It's not enough to purchase entertaining experiences and attention through advertising. In a digital world, people expect every channel to offer a dialogue. If no one has the time to respond to the people you engage, then your efforts are wasted.

Strategy must be part of the execution, not just a set up for it.
Planning no longer ends when the creative brief is presented. By the time ideas become a reality, the people we're designing for have changed, the culture around them has changed, their behaviors have changed, and the way we connect must change as well. Strategists must be constantly involved, guiding and readjusting the execution as it goes.

Process must be agile, not all-at-once.
The experiences we design must be ready and able to evolve once people start interacting with them. In a digital world we expect the experiences to learn from our interactions and improve as we use them. The structure of the client-agency working relationship needs to reflect this necessity.

Efforts must be continuous, not intermittent.
If you spend a lot of money to capture people's attention, bring them together, and hopefully give them something compelling to do, you better be prepared to stick around and foster the relationships you start. If you think of it as a campaign, and walk away when it's over, the people you engaged will find someone else to love and you'll have to win them all over again when you come back.

Measurement must happen during, not after.
In a digital world we can measure and report on our efforts all the time. This means that measurement can be ongoing. We can use measurement and monitoring to give us constant feedback about what we're doing right and what we need to change. Measurement is no longer for cooked-books backwards-looking proof that we didn't waste our money.

Basically, there's no on/off switch, no beginning and end, no start and stop. Just like our own connections to each other enabled by digital technology are always on, brands need to be always on for the people that they aspire to do business with.

You want to read about a perfect example of this? Read Jane McGonigal's case study on the I Love Bees ARG (PDF). (This was way back in 2004, by the way.)