We announced it last Friday in Business7 but now it’s time to go wider with it: to combat the rip-off companies and the phonies out there who claim to be the Google Ranking masters or social media gurus we’re launching a £1000 traditional and digital/social media PR package aimed at getting Scottish businesses online and benefitting from 21st Century communications.

It was one of the core reasons for setting up Contently Managed – to offer an honest service with value with no hidden fees or  markups like so many agencies offer. It was also looking to give companies a chance to explore the new and – for many conservatively minded firms – unsettling areas of online PR, where you speak more to consumers than to journalists.

But it was also about showing how PR now has to evolve – it needs to offer a bit of marketing, a bit of SEO, a bit of design, some tech savvy and a lot of creativity – and combatting the companies who think it’s OK to charge £2000 to set up a Twitter account or £3000 for a Facebook account (no, I’m not naming names but they’re both based in the East coast of Scotland) – and don’t start me on the firms who say they’ll put you on the front page of Google and then just buy ads.

Now some companies may justify the high charge by pointing to their overheads and that can be appreciated, but others are at it. And their time is over.

Gordon Macintyre-Kemp in his excellent blog over at The Drum sums it up nicely in pointing out that the time is up for those who think they can just throw up a Twitter page:

Most social media training seems to delve no deeper than how to set up a Facebook page or a Twitter account (the stuff that you can learn by reading the PDF guides available from thousands of web sites) and this is counter productive.

If enough people get together and start to wise up, 2010 could be a year where we start to work on the positive and the creative and end the rip-offs that can give whole industries a bad name.

This is going to be a big issue over the coming months – and others will be saying plenty about it too.

UPDATE: Note, we’re not saying all PR/marketing companies are bad. We’ve worked with a lot of them and look forward to working with more, but there are a few out there who are, as said, at it.