Most recently, 451 Marketing announced that Brianne Bellefeuille will join 451's public relations team as an account manager. Bellefeuille will be responsible for developing strategic communications campaigns utilizing cutting edge PR 2.0 and SEO/PR "Search-Leveraged Public Relations" techniques for 451's public relations clients. She joins on the heels of 451's October 1st announcement that Thomas Lee, 451's Director of Public Relations, was named partner. Founding Partner AJ Gerritson cites Lee's vision and leadership as being instrumental for the firms bet on the Social Media space.

Traditional marketing agencies, having acclimated to the new media space, are now being forced to come to grips with social media. Particularly for clients who are looking to engage their their brands in blogging and social properties like Twitter and Facebook. Those agencies like 451 Marketing, staffed with young web-savvy talent who focus primarily on the web and interactive, may have an edge on their traditional counterparts. Thanks largely to shifting media consumption patterns and redistribution of ad budgets towards the web, smaller firms may be in the best position to take advantage of the trends and outmaneuver traditional agencies for an even larger share of ad dollars.

A number of recent campaigns, like this past summer's Twitter stunt for HBO's Mad Men, rumored to have been executed by Deep Focus, are signaling that brands are waking up the the fact that social media can be leveraged to generate enormous amounts of attention for a relatively small amount of ad spend.