MARKETING AND DRUPAL

EXCELLENT ARTICLE BY RICH ZAMOR COPIED HERE FROM...  http://richezamor.com/blog/post/2011/07/28/role-drupal-marketing-agency-...
Following up on a post I wrote yesterday on the future of marketing agencies, I wanted to drill down into  how agencies "create things". Often times, agencies rely on proprietary platforms to deliver technology solutions for clients. While there are many reasons why off-the-shelf solutions are the way to go, which are often dictated by the client's needs, there is room for adoption of open source platforms, such as Drupal, to meet client's often demanding technical requirements.
Drupal, as well as other open source platforms, are innovating in the content management and social media space. Many proprietary vendors are unable to offer the breadth of features that are available using a system like Drupal that has a full pluggable architecture. While there are drawbacks to using open source software, which I will cover in a later post, the benefits often outweigh the risks.
Drupal provides the perfect combination of platform and a content management solution that can help agencies develop innovative solutions to drive user engagement. Here are some of the advantages Drupal provides over other content management systems and platforms:

  1. It is social out of the box: Drupal is an online community platform. More and more brands seek to develop communities to engage their customers online, and existing enterprise content management solutions are not keeping up with the pace. Drupal is able to meet all of an organization's content management and social media needs in one platform.
  2. It is a cost-effective platform: Agencies are more and more taking on the social business, as well as the social marketing, needs of clients. Costs, scale and flexibility are often considerations when brands consider what software to use in powering social experiences they build online. While the up front development costs of a proprietary system are often the same as implementing open source software, open source platforms provide often have an overall lower cost of ownership.
  3. It lends itself to agile strategy and development processes: Many agencies are adopting "lean agency, or agile methodologies, for delivering both strategy and technical services. Drupal is among the most flexible systems, in terms of it's modular architecture and breadth of options available for customizing the platform. Strategists and developers can easily modify the system to meet their (rapidly) evolving needs for content management and user engagement by quickly adding or modifying existing templates and modules having full access to the source code.
  4. It can deliver content across multiple platforms: A consistent user experience across platforms is often expected by your audience. If someone can upload user-generated content from your desktop website, they should be able to do so from your mobile website. Drupal is able to serve content across platforms, adapting your design to fit the specifications of the device using either media queries or browser detection.
  5. It can serve as a product development framework: In recent years we have seen agencies develop products that help them better deliver services to their clients. Companies like 37Signals, which started as a design firm, Hootsuite, which was created by Invoke Media, are perfect examples of companies that have released very popular products that scratch their own itch. Drupal can be used as a platform for developing products that can both improve agencies' service delivery and generate additional revenue if offered on a SaaS model. Think, if your product scratches your own itch, it will most likely scratch the itch of many others.

What other uses do you think Drupal has within the marketing agency setting? If you work for an agency using Drupal, in what ways are you leveraging the system?