I met Adam at an iMedia Agency event and took an instant liking to him. He’s smart, funny and passionate about his work and his amazing roster of clients. This interview is a ‘get to know’ of one of our industry’s up and comers as well as a look into the mind of the ceo of a next-generation advertising agency.

Here’s the full audio interview on DishyMix with Adam. You can stream it from your browser or subscribe in iTunes to listen from your iPod or iPhone.

Enjoy!

San Francisco Agency and B-to-B Magazine's "Agency of the Year"

Adam Kleinberg, Traction on the Best Book He Never Read, Tai Chi and Building a Successful 21st Century Agency

I met Adam Kleinberg while speaking at the Agency Summit at iMedia. This was the presentation where I led a room full of digital agency executives through “mindfulness-based stress reduction” meditations.

Worried that they’d think I was some kind of California trippy dippy, Adam was in that room, giving me his full presence, awesome eye contact and appreciation. I liked him immediately and appreciated him playing full out during the presentation.

Later that night we had a chance to hang out and I learned more about the story of Traction, his full service SF-based advertising and branding agency. (Traction just won “Best Agency” from B-to-B Magazine.)

Adam started as a Flash developer, quickly ascending through the ranks at SF shops and ultimately launching Tribal DDB’s first SF office.  Since starting Traction, he has landed some amazing accounts including Apple (no small feat), Adobe and recently, Alibaba, one of China’s largest sites.  Adam brings a passion for the agency business to his conversations about his work. It’s refreshing to hear him talking about his hope to be remembered for the legacy he builds at Traction.

I had the opportunity to go to Traction’s headquarters, right near the California Street Cable Car line to record our episode of DishyMix together. As always, with DishyMix, the conversation ranged from agency talk to the latest in social media strategy to more personal issues such as stress management and life goals.

If you are an entrepreneur, in the digital marketing space, or you work with agencies in your job – this interview with Adam brings a level of humanity to the field that you’ll surely appreciate.

Click on any of the buttons below to listen now or add it to your iTunes line up.

Adam Kleinberg, Traction on the Best Book He Never Read, Tai Chi and Building a Successful 21st Century Agency

- Posted using MobyPicture.com

- Posted using MobyPicture.com

- Posted using MobyPicture.com

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- Posted using MobyPicture.com

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

This week’s DishyMix interview is with Chip Conley, founder of the delicious chain of California boutique hotels called Joie de Vivre Hospitality.

Chip’s latest book, PEAK:

Here’s a short video clip of Chip and I. Listen to the whole audio interview below.

Chip Conley, Joie de Vivre on Creating a Culture of Recognition, Potka’s Scorecard and Finding Your Calling

Chip created a boutique hotel chain of niche targeted properties and is the author of several books, including “PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow.” In this episode we talk about Maslow’s Hierarchies as Chip has applied them to The Customer, The Employee and The Investor.
Get Chip’s “Peak Prescriptions” for creating a culture of recognition and providing inspirational work that goes beyond a job or even career for employees and creates their “calling.”
Then Chip takes us on a tour of Asia, with highlights of his many trips to Bali.

more.

If you are going to be in London or Cambridge from July 5-11th, here’s our Traveling Geeks agenda.

Perhaps you can join us for the TweetUp, the Guardian Round Table, Reboot Britian, the Europa awards from TechCrunch or the Round Table Discussion on Social Media in Cambridge.

http://travelinggeeks.com/agenda

Let me know if you can attend any of these fun events. I’d love to see you there.

The most exciting new area (to me) of social media marketing, or as @ShivSingh, my latest guest on DishyMix from Razorfish likes to call it, “Social Influence Marketing,” is mining the clusters of connections to identify new prospects for products and services.

Similar to the concept of behavioral targeting, marketers and researchers believe that if they target the friends of an existing customer, they will find “birds of a feather” prospects for their goods.

There are a number of companies using social graph data including Lookery (my interview with Scott Rafer, CEO), Media6Degrees and UNBOUND Technologies . These data mining and ad targeting companies are leveraging your data: the things you “fan” on Facebook,  your personal profile information, your network of connected friends (and god knows what else!) to find new prospective consumers connected socially to you so they can market products to your friends if you are a customer.

UNBOUND Technolgies can take a marketer’s existing customer list, compare it to their database of all known LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter users and come up with a rank order list of who, among their existing customers, are the most influential. If a brand has a Facebook “Page” (Fan Page), they can map the most to least influential fans, based on number of social connections.

Here’s an article from Business Week that gives you some idea of how important this data mining of social graphs is to the social net companies and marketers.

Learning and Profiting from Online Friendships

These next two images are very telling. These are my Affiinty Map and my Influencer List from UNBOUND Technologies.

First you can see, of my 3,200 Facebook friends, what the top Celebrities/Public Figures, Brands, Bands, Services et cetera are of the people to whom I’m most connected.

If I were a brand (I’m certainly trying to be!) doing co-marketing promotions, it would be brilliant to partner with Guy or Seth or Arianna or the IAB or 212 in NY.  My friends and friendsters (virtual friends) would be more likely to pay attention to my messaging if I were to co-create something with other public figures, associations or brands about which they care most.

In this list from UNBOUND Technologies, you can see who in my network are the most influential. If Joe Jaffe, Charlene Li or Mike Webb were to promote DishyMix, for example, their followers would be most likely to be interested in my work and they have the biggest reach.

If I give Unbound Technologies my professional contact database, they can also match it up with the premier social networks to give me an even better rank order of those people I know who are most connected in the social sphere. Even if I’m not directly connected to them now, I’d know who I should approach to friend to continue to widen my network more proactively.

Just replace Susan Bratton with your brand and think of the efficiencies and implications. What comes to your mind?

And here is this week’s DishyMix. Perfectly timed to talk about Social Influence Marketing with Shiv Singh of Razorfish who has been thinking about social network theory since grad school at the London  School of Economics & Political Science.

Shiv Singh, Razorfish on the Social Influence Marketing, the Portable Social Graph and Friendsters