By Reed Phillips on AdAge, June 9 – Social media shouldn’t remain solely the province of companies launched since Justin Bieber hit puberty. In fact, traditional ad agencies and media companies have the chance to catch the internet wave they may have missed by aggressively becoming players in social media.

Ad agencies of all sizes are already mobilizing to crack the social-media code for themselves and their clients. David Jones, newly elevated CEO of Havas Worldwide, recently disclosed that his firm now employs 2,000 people who are focused on social media. And, Jon Bond, a big-agency veteran turned CEO of social-media agency Big Fuel, believes that eventually ad agencies will use social media as the engine that drives the rest of their business, putting social media on the front-end of their offerings.

Smart publishers across the media landscape — general-interest, enthusiast and B-to-B — understood the essence of community a century before the term social media was coined. Moreover, the rich interactivity that digital technology allows between publisher and readers has advertisers clamoring for new ways to harvest that community. Read the full article