Scottish PR and marketing types, if you only read one blog post today, this is the one. Go look at Digital Mud and say hi. These guys setting up is good news for anyone who cares about social media and customer engagement.

Digital Mud has been set up by Murray Cox and Becks Armstrong, who both know their stuff inside out in the digital arena and have the track records to prove it. But they guys aren’t just doing the usual social media training and mentoring that others, including Contently Managed, Holyrood PR and Blether, provide, they are focusing on the issue of Change Management, which is a crucial part of social media adoption.

You may scoff at that, but in four years I’ve been carrying out digital engagement in a PR sense, I’ve noticed that one of the biggest barriers is getting companies on board. HR, Marketing, PR, Sales – all of these depts have something to offfer, but if your IT department insisits on sticking you with IE6 and blocking access to Twitter and YouTube, then it’s quite hard to engage.

Also – and in light of the Bebo news last week this is even more relevant – social media is not Twitter, blogs or anything else. It’s a mentality, a mindset to engage with people, to respond and to improve your businesses for them.

The guys are also going to be looking at metrics and again, this is a contentious area as Stuart Bruce from Wolfstar and I discussed last week, so again good on them.

Hopefully Murray and or Becks will do a little guest post here sometime soon. In the meantime, congratulations to them for launching –  I know they’ve got some bigtime partners on board – and I look forward to seeing what they can do.

One quick last thing – and yes, mud in your eye would have been too obvious a headline – I’ve been asked why over the last week or so I seem hellbent on promoting other businesses that work in the same arena as Contently Managed. There’s a few reasons: 1) There’s enough companies out there for everyone decent in this arena to find work, 2) You may not like me enough to do work with me –  I fully accept that (and I may not like you) but given that we are in a recession it’s important that people are recommeding good workers instead of you taking a chance online and finding a PR company that claim to know social media inside out and don’t. There’s no point in you being burned that way.

Social Media is too good an opportunity to not want to see you do the best you can with it, either with Contently Managed or someone else. These are exciting times for companies. I enjoy this stuff and I want to see what others can do with it as much as the next person. To me it’s a bonus if that’s done with Contently Managed.

Anyway, this is a good day. The sun is shining and there’s a new proper, expert social media company in town. So go say hi to them.