Episode 168 - Adam Kleinberg Waxes Lofty On Leveraging Influencers
Adam Kleinberg is a DishyMix repeat offender. :P
I love this dude. He's half my height and full of hugs and we have a lot of fun together.
On this episode, recorded on location at ad:tech SF as part of the "Muckety Muck Insights" series, I ask Adam about leveraging influencers in the social sphere.
If you haven't heard me interview him before, listen to that one too. And he also guest hosted the show and interviewed the founder of Pandora. Both are additional great shows.
Transcript
Transcript
Susan Bratton: Welcome to DishyMix. I’m your host, Susan Bratton, and this is an episode live from AdTech San Francisco. Awesome show, great people and here’s one of my very favorites. Adam Kleinberg, the CEO of Traction, an agency, a digital agency here in the city of San Francisco, by a really good Vietnamese noodle place by the way. I love Adam. We met at an iMedia, we had an instant attraction. We were tractioned to each other immediately. He’s been not only on DishyMix, but he’s been a guest host of DishyMix, so if you haven’t caught his act before I say tune in today and go dig up those archives. Lets get him on the show. Welcome Adam.
Adam Kleinberg: Well thank you Susan.
Susan Bratton: You were going to welcome me…
Adam Kleinberg: I was going to welcome you.
Susan Bratton: Oh yeah, you think you’re the host? No baby, I’m the host. This is my show.
Adam Kleinberg: You’re the woman of the day here with your big industry achievement award.
Susan Bratton: I had a good day. I had a good day, didn’t I?
Adam Kleinberg: You did, you did.
Susan Bratton: It was nice. You know it’s funny because I created that award a couple, like maybe 3 years ago, you know. I was giving away awards for mobile landing pages, you know, with the AdTech awards, when I would MC those things. I loved MC-ing those awards. And I was giving away those awards and thinking to myself “Well it’s the people. We should be giving awards to the awesome people that, you know, contribute so much to the industry.” And it’s been a couple of years since I’ve done that and they call me up there like “Hey, guess who’s winning the awards this year; you.” It was nice. It’s nice to get your own award.
Adam Kleinberg: That’s great. You know Dave Smith presented you the award…
Susan Bratton: Yeah, he’s a sweet one.
Adam Kleinberg: He said “You’ve heard of a man’s man; well Susan’s a woman’s woman.”
Susan Bratton: I know, what do you think about that? What did that mean?
Adam Kleinberg: Well I think it means that you give back a lot to a lot of people. I went out for tea with Daisy Whitney…
Susan Bratton: Oh yeah, Daisy’s awesome.
Adam Kleinberg: and your name came up. And she said, you know, she was saying how she respects you a great deal and we both were talking about how we kind of see you as a mentor. So…
Susan Bratton: Oh, that’s so nice.
Adam Kleinberg: You know, in a lot of ways I think you have a, I see you almost like a walking self help book. Like every conversation I have with you Susan…
Susan Bratton: I’ve done a lot of personal growth, haven’t I?
Adam Kleinberg: Yeah. But every conversation I have with you I feel I walk away learning something, so…
Susan Bratton: Nice! What’s going on with you and your business? Obviously you have a successful agency but it’s still, you have to probably be very scrappy out in the marketplace. It’s not like the money’s always flowing in. I’m sure you’ve had some great… You were, B2B Magazine named you once again one of the top digital agencies for the year, so you won that. That’s always nice.
Adam Kleinberg: They actually named us top interactive agency.
Susan Bratton: Nice!
Adam Kleinberg: And I think part of the reason that we won that award is because, you know, we have a very core philosophy; we believe everything is interactive. So we do TV, we do print, we do social media, we do mobile, but we think of it all as part of a big interaction and how brands can connect with consumers and provide experiences to consumers that resonate with them. You know, the business has been doing well. You know, last year we were named interactive agency by B2B Magazine and we were runner up this year. And those have both been, you know, 2009, despite the economy, we actually grew 25 percent. So it’s been great and satisfying to see the business grow, and the brands that we’re working with are stellar, you know, so we’re excited to be working with them.
Susan Bratton: I know you do Buydoo, that’s a big client for you.
Adam Kleinberg: It was alibaba.com.
Susan Bratton: Oh Alibaba, that’s right, not Buydoo. Alibaba, and you’ve done work for Livescribe for the college market, which is a perfect sweet spot for them…
Adam Kleinberg: Yeah, we launched the Livescribe Smart Pen.
Susan Bratton: That’s a good one.
Adam Kleinberg: We’re working with Shutterfly, we’re working with Intuit, we’re working with Intel, Apple, Adobe, Cabot Cheese. So really phenomenal brands that we’re doing some very interesting and innovative work for.
Susan Bratton: What kind of projects would you, or clients or programs or retainer based services, what would be really fun for you? If you could get any piece of business – it doesn’t have to be a particular, but it could be whatever comes to your mind – what would you love to have right now?
Adam Kleinberg: I look at us as a team that understands how to create experiences for brands. And we, you know, we work with business to business brands, we work with consumer brands, and it’s really about brands and ideas and how we can bring them to life. And we are looking at how we can create experiences that align your business objectives with human behavior, you know. Our team started as a, you know, we started off as a kind of, with an identity crisis – are we an advertising agency or an interactive agency? And we toed the line between doing branding and advertising and user experience design. And so we’re looking for relationships where we can continue to help brands break through and create more meaningful experiences for customers. So right now you look at kind of the agency landscape and you hear a lot of agencies kind of complaining, right. We’re…
Susan Bratton: What are they complaining about?
Adam Kleinberg: They’re complaining about we’re unable to train people, we’re unable to provide the value to our customers that they want because there’s such a focus on ROI and on cost. And I think that there is a dire need for brands to look at ideas. I talked about, I was on onstage at the iMedia Summit a few months ago and I talked about this notion that agencies, you know, customers are becoming commoditized and I think that’s because there’s a big focus on cost – cost per click, cost per… - instead of measuring value. And there’s a big opportunity for ideas that not just, that are not just advertising ideas but business building ideas, and we’re an agency that can provide that.
Susan Bratton: When you talk about a business building idea, are you thinking - what comes to mind for me is always driving more revenue – is that what you’re thinking about when you talk about business building ideas, and if not, describe it a little bit more?
Adam Kleinberg: When I think of business building ideas I think about, I think about how there are different motivations that drive us in everything we do. There the motivation to do something good, there’s the motivation, the financial motivations, right. There are tribal motivations, the need to help your community. There are social motivations, need to be recognized and valued for what you do. And brands can create value for their consumers, for their customers by thinking about those motivations and creating experiences. I just talked, I just got off stage in the Killer Creative Showcase and I talked about, we were talking about specific verticals and one of the verticals that we discussed, that I discussed was moms, right, and one of the pieces of work that I showed was Cause World, which was something that Kraft just did. And Kraft chose utility over branding and providing an experience that kind of combines – imagine Four Square but where you check in your earned karma points and when you scan products you can earn additional karma points, right, so you’ve actually picked up a tube of Crest toothpaste and, you know, what are the odds once you’ve done that that you’ll put it in your shopping cart. So it works for Kraft, you know, but they chose utility over branding, right, to get closer to where most purchase decisions are made. You know, that’s a business building idea. You know, one of the ideas we were working on for a water bottle company was simply an iPhone app that reminds you to drink, right. So it takes the product, a simple water bottle, and it extends the product through marketing. The marketing itself now has value, right. I think a challenge that the industry faces is this focus on ROI limits innovation, limits creativity, limits exploration into new ideas at times because there’s not necessarily a predictive model associated with the ROI of producing an idea like that. One client in particular, we approached – I guess I can’t say who – but the idea was a portfolio type application for creative professionals on LinkdIn. And the brand was challenged, the loved the idea, but they couldn’t get funding for something that was a non revenue driving project even though they knew it was a good idea intuitively because there was no predictive model there. So I think we’re tasked now with figuring out new ways of making those assumptions, providing ROI and putting ourselves in the position as agencies where we can provide the value that brands need. You know, otherwise we’re going to become commodities. But I do think that the agency landscape is going to shift where you’re going to have a division, where you’re going to have high value agencies and you’re going to have commoditized service agencies. And some of them are going to do a good job even, but I would say, you know, there’s a lot of digital production chops that, you know, media buying is a commodity, right. Even certain things like activating influencers are services that you can buy from vendors now.
Susan Bratton: I want to talk about activating influencers. Here’s my question: I’ve been working with Rap Leaf. Have you worked with them yet?
Adam Kleinberg: Have not.
Susan Bratton: Okay.
Adam Kleinberg: But I’ve seen their….
Susan Bratton: Do you know what they do or do you want me to tell you?
Adam Kleinberg: Tell me.
Susan Bratton: Okay, so – and I won’t do a great job of this – but basically what they do is they mine your social graph. So whether you’re an individual like just me, Susan Bratton brand, you know, Susan Bratton DishyMix brand, I have about 10,000 people in my database. Or it could be any big multinational brand, it could be all of their customers in their customer database, their prospect list, whatever it might be. They mine that data and they look at a lot of different data points to come up with who the key influencers are for your business, who are the most influential people that are connected to you, either in your customer base or your fans and followers or whatever they might be. And what Rap Leaf also does, one of their most popular services is that they will essentially, not behaviorally target it but social graphically target a person. Lets just say that you and I are the fans of York Peppermint Patties and York Peppermint Patty knows that we’re influencers, ‘cause we are, we’re social influencers. Whenever we’re on a website they can actually serve an ad for York Peppermint Patties to us because we’re known influencers. So they’re actually – and there are other people. I think Media Six Degrees does this as well. There are other people doing this. So it’s kind of a new trend. It’s like, it’s instead of behavioral targeting it’s influencer targeting, which I think is interesting. But here’s my question to you, ‘cause you’re talking about influencer activation, right. Lets just say I have this list and I know who my top, you know, hundred or two hundred most influential people are. And I would like that they know me, they’re fans of mine or followers of mine or they’re connected to me and we’ve met and they’re very influential people – they have a lot of followers, etcetera. And my business for me to drive revenue, what drives revenue for Susan Bratton, what pays for my kid’s college education is when I sell my information products to, directly to consumers. They’ll download my e-books or whatever it might be; that’s how I actually make my money. I’d like to activate my influencers with all my personal growth content. I’d love to find a way that I could feed you information that would be so valuable, not only to you, Adam, but to the people who follow you, that you’d be willing to disseminate that and forward that information and talk about me in some way to the people that follow you. You know me, you trust me, you like my stuff, I provide value that you can then forward into the universe, thereby increasing my number of aware prospects who might somehow link back to some content, see my products and buy them. What, just off the top of your head – you’re doing like a, you know, I’m asking you for some creative ideas off the top, I’m totally putting you on the spot, but you like that….
Adam Kleinberg: I do like that…
Susan Bratton: Yeah.
Adam Kleinberg: And I think there’s two ways to look at it. There’s strategically, and we’re doing a lot of social media strategies and integrated marketing strategies. I think just as a – I’m going to jump back – but I think a problem that happened ten years ago was that digital started to sparkle up, right, and agencies didn’t know what to do with, didn’t know what to do with digital so they put it in silos. I was working at Tribal DDB at the time, which was a silo and we weren’t even talking to…
Susan Bratton: Now Mike Parker’s running that.
Adam Kleinberg: Oh yeah.
Susan Bratton: Do you know him?
Adam Kleinberg: Who’s that?
Susan Bratton: Mike, he used to run The Digital for Hal Riney, and I just saw him here at AdTech and now he’s the president of Tribal DDB.
Adam Kleinberg: I’ve met him. I’ve met him.
Susan Bratton: Totally nice guy.
Adam Kleinberg: Yeah Mike Parker, yeah.
Susan Bratton: Yeah.
Adam Kleinberg: I know Mike. I know him. And I actually know Mike pretty well. You know, and at that point… So what’s happened now is social has kind of become increasingly relevant and what people are doing is putting it in silos. We’re getting a lot of social media agency record RP’s right now, and we’re working with some big brands right now on doing programs, and the first thing I go into these meetings and say is we’re not a social media agency. You know, we’re an interactive agency, and like I said, everything is interactive. You need to think holistically. I mean brands need to be thinking about, you know, how does social fit into their products, how does it fit into their customer service. You know, it’s not something you can just stick in a silo and, you know, have a brand do your, an agency do your Tweets in Facebook promos. You know it has to be more than that. Going back to the strategic and tactical approach to how can you activate influencer, I think from a strategic perspective one of the things we’re telling our clients is that the funnel no longer exists. You’ve read Groundswell, right? 83 percent of purchase decisions are influenced by word of mouth. 83 percent, right. So now we need to continue to disrupt customers and engage them – I said the dirty E word, right, but it’s important to disrupt, you know… That disruption now has to come from not just the brand, but from the customer advocates of the brand, right, fans of the brand. So we look at a planning model that we call The Whirlpool, that is about looking at how do we disrupt both with paid media and consumer influence, how do we create an experience, a brand experience that delights customers, right, provides value to customers, you know, and maybe entertainment.
Susan Bratton: Are you asking my question back to me?
Adam Kleinberg: No, no, no. I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I’m telling you how I plan, I’m telling you how I plan.
Susan Bratton: No, go ahead. I’m listening. I’m just giving you shit.
Adam Kleinberg: Yeah, how do you delight, how do you, you know… But creating those particular experiences and then amplifying, right. And amplifying that becomes a new tactical imperative that marketers need to think about when they’re planning communications plans, so that amplification then fuels that ongoing cycle, that whirlpool of both consumer and brand sponsored disruption. Tactically, you know, as we’re looking at those different things, I think there’s lots of different opportunities and creative opportunities to create experiences that make that work. We’re working with Cabot Cheese, and they do a lot of events, right. So Four Square is becoming a huge, I think it’s the next Twitter, right. Actually spoke at iMedia about that. That had a Trend Watchers 5 companies to watch and I talked about Four Square. If you’re not familiar with Four Square yet, it’s like a game that allows you to check in and you earn badges and it’s a fun experience and it’s social and it’s sharing, and it’s tied into your additional social networks so you can stream where you are. So we’re amplifying customer advocacy. Cabot Cheddar, they’re a farmers collective up in Vermont and they make the world’s best most amazing delicious cheddar cheese you’ve ever had, and their marketing strategy has been to give people cheddar, get people to taste it, but you can’t obviously always do that in the digital space so how do we model after that, how do we replicate that in the digital realm? So we are, when we meet people face to face and we give them cheese we’re using Four Square and incentivizing them with maybe get a coupon or something like that if you show us you’ve checked in, and then all that influencers who’s just checking in, who’s on Four Square, all the people following them on Facebook, all the people following them on Twitter will see that they’ve just checked in to Cabot Cheese and left a comment about how much they loved it. So that’s one tactical way of approaching it. Other ways are there’s, we’re working with a grassroots publisher now that publishers sign up and they don’t get paid, all they get is swag, you know, on behalf or opportunities to give special offers to their readers, and it’s based on validation, right. It’s why do people blog, right? They don’t want to do it ‘cause they’re speaking to an empty room; they want validation. You know, I started my first blog in 1997 and I, for 4 years I used to go to the Gold Cane on Hate Street with a yellow pad and I’d scribble down my thoughts and I’d hand code HTML – they didn’t have Word Press back then. Why did I do that every week, week in and week out for years on end? Because there was a validation that hundreds of people would come back and look what I had to say and respond to me, and when there was, I used to have a kind of left wing political bend to my ramblings, but when elections were coming up my readership would quadruple, you know, and that was validation. And it’s very real. So these are additional motivators that you can think about is how can you provide, how can you meet these motivations with currencies that activate your influencers?
Susan Bratton: Can you give me some examples of some ways that I might do that? Would I do a sampling program to my influencers? What do influencers want? The big influencers who have a lot of followers, they want to disseminate interesting information, that validates them when people like what they’re talking about, right?
Adam Kleinberg: Mm hmm.
Susan Bratton: So what’s a good way, is that the best thing? Is there other things that I could do?
Adam Kleinberg: Well I think influencers are, you know, big personal branders, right. I find it interesting when you talk about Twitter; I’m an avid Twitter @adamkleinberg on Twitter. And, you know, first thing that people who aren’t on Twitter always say when you talk about Twitter is, you know, “Do you really think people care what you have to say?”, and influencers do. You know, it’s ironic that very small percentage of the population actually is on Twitter, but when you look at – and I don’t remember the specific statistics – but how things are shared, it’s predominantly through Twitter. Twitter is first, Share This is actually I think second, Facebook is third, and again, I don’t remember the source but I saw it somewhere, right, in terms of how people actively share. So knowing that people are looking for validation, looking for, you know, looking for exposure, right, financial motivations, economic motivations, tribal motivations, how can you empower someone to achieve those? What are currencies that you can dole out, right, in exchange. I think iMedia Connection, right, I’ve talked about them a number of times ‘cause I write for them a lot and I love their conferences, but I think they’ve got a really smart model, right. They attract all these thought influencers and I contribute content voraciously to them because I get exposure in return, right. I wrote an article, 5 Marketing Mega Trends You Can’t Ignore, and it was their most popular article ever, right, and it was basically I looked at what are the trends reshaping society and here are examples of how brands are taking advantage of them. You know, about tens of thousands of people read that, right. So they gave me a platform; I gave them content, quid pro quo, you know. And you are a, you know, how can you do this Susan? You’re a, you know, you’re a brand platform in and of yourself, right. I’m happy and thrilled to be on DishyMix, right. Why? A, because I love spending time with you, right, that’s my pleasure motive, right. But, you know, b, I appreciate being able to share what I think with the advertising community…
Susan Bratton: 20,000 people.
Adam Kleinberg: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: All right, so one of the ideas you just gave me was instead of me thinking about what I could give to an influencers that they could push out to their community, why wouldn’t I create a place where – lets just say for example I gave the influencers the pick of my products and said “It’s all yours; the only think I want from you is just any insight that you’ve gleaned from, and if you didn’t glean one no problem, you will. There’s insights in there like crazy. Just send me an email or anything, whatever you want, send that back to me and I’ll disseminate it for you to my followers but it’ll be about you, which will promote you, my follower. So instead of me saying “I want you to promote my stuff to your followers, you just read my stuff, give me whatever, you know, whatever comments you have about and I’ll promote you to my followers”, would that be a better way to go?
Adam Kleinberg: I think there’s some degree of that, yeah. I mean I was approached by a guy about being, you know, providing a quote to be on his book jacket. I was thrilled to give the quote ‘cause I enjoyed the book, I genuinely authentically thought that it was a great book, and I, you know in return was that, you know, little snippet of exposure, you know, and he didn’t even have to give me that but it was a nice thing to have in return.
Susan Bratton: It’s so funny, Dave Evans, you know, he wrote Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day, and he asked me to write the forward to the book. And it ended up that when Wiley laid the book cover out they put Forward By really small and then Susan Bratton really big and then the title of the book and then the image and then Dave’s name, and like I got top billing on Dave’s book. He jokes now that I’m the co-author, you know. All I did was write the forward to his book. He’s like “You’re the best co-author I’ve ever had.” I see people Tweeting “Susan Bratton’s book, Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day”, and it’s Dave’s book. It’s just the funniest thing.
Adam Kleinberg: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: So those are valuable…
Adam Kleinberg: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: I see what you mean. People like that; they’ll like having the imprimatur of being someone that gave a quote.
Adam Kleinberg: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: Uh huh, so that could be a better way to do it.
Adam Kleinberg: Mm hmm.
Susan Bratton: If I went out to 20 or 30 or 40 people and said “Pick any one of my products and give me a quote to use, I’d love to use it, and I’ll Tweet that and promote that and do all those things about it, any insight or quote that you have”, that’s a way that – and once they do that they’re going to love the products ‘cause they’re so interesting and unique that…
Adam Kleinberg: Absolutely.
Susan Bratton: the chances are that they’ll dig it…
Adam Kleinberg: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: they’ll do it for the promotion, they’ll actually use the product and then they can, and then once they see their quote they’re going to Tweet that or, you know…
Adam Kleinberg: It’s like personal affiliate marketing.
Susan Bratton: Yes, it is. Although they probably wouldn’t want to necessarily sign up to be an affiliate or anything, but it is about a value exchange of cross promoting brands.
Adam Kleinberg: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: Don’t you think?
Adam Kleinberg: I think that there’s definitely validity to that.
Susan Bratton: There’s something in there, right?
Adam Kleinberg: Yeah. And brands, you know, look to brands. Brands look to cross promote and leverage one another all the time, right – Got Milk would do, you know, a spot with the Rice Krispy Treat guys, right, the Rice Krispy Snap, Crackle and Pop…
Susan Bratton: Yeah, Chips A’Hoy, mm hmm.
Adam Kleinberg: you know, like why would they do that? It makes sense to validate one anothers brands and cross promote and do it in line with your strategic position.
Susan Bratton: I’m very interested in influencer activation. I’m very interested in what influencers are willing to do for products and services and what value and benefits are created by brands for influencers.
Adam Kleinberg: I should share with you this slide and maybe you could post it to your blog…
Susan Bratton: Sure.
Adam Kleinberg: that I just used in my Killer Creative showcase here at AdTech.
Susan Bratton: Definitely. What you got?
Adam Kleinberg: And it was about these motivations in currencies. And it kind of, it really I think covers the gamut of and really provides thought provoking food for thought provoking thought, for, you know, how you can actively take advantage of core motivations to inscent people.
Susan Bratton: I’ve been reading a couple of things lately about persuasion and influence and consumer motivation. Well I interviewed Bob Cialdini. He wrote Influence: The Art of Persuasion or whatever that book was, that was really good. And then I bought that e-book from Blair Warren. Have you ever heard of Blair Warren?
Adam Kleinberg: No.
Susan Bratton: Okay, you’ll totally want to get this because he writes about human psychology of motivation, why we do what we do even though it’s totally, it seems counterintuitive, sometimes our behaviors, you know.
Adam Kleinberg: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: That’s a really interesting thing. And then I also just downloaded a free thing from David, I think he says Frey, it’s f-r-e-y, on something like the 12 steps to great copywriting or something where you kind of have to blast through the objections of consumers, you have to tell them certain things like, credibility, social proof, you have to blast through, you know, there are certain levels of resistance that they have, and that was pretty interesting as well.
Adam Kleinberg: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: Then I recently bought Ryan Deiss, have you heard of him, d-e-i-s-s?
Adam Kleinberg: Mm hmm.
Susan Bratton: He is an information product marketing and he has a product – I don’t even remember what it was called now, probably Blueprint something or other – that he teaches you how to sell with those PowerPoints that are like (unintelligible), it’s like a video where you do a voice over, a PowerPoint…
Adam Kleinberg: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: and you put that on a landing page, and what the steps are to walk a person through the decision process when you’re teaching them in that way.
Adam Kleinberg: Interesting.
Susan Bratton: Yeah. They all go back to the human behavior of, you know, the quid pro quo, what are you getting…
Adam Kleinberg: Well I’m really interested in this notion of really understanding behaviors right.
Susan Bratton: Me too.
Adam Kleinberg: The reason that the funnel became an important model for communications planning…
Susan Bratton: It was a behavior.
Adam Kleinberg: it was both understanding a behavior that you were trying to elicit – awareness, interest, consideration, purchase – but also it was a tactical planning model that you can line that to.
Susan Bratton: Yeah. Now of course all blown away by word of mouth and…
Adam Kleinberg: Blown away by word of mouth.
Susan Bratton: viral and social and all that stuff, you know.
Adam Kleinberg: Yeah, we have a process that for planning communications programs that we call Engineered Marketing that’s about using insights to understand for each brand – ‘cause it’s different for every brand and every scenario – what are the actual behaviors that we’re trying to elicit, you know. And how do we tactically create a tactical imperative that we can then match with actual tactical programs and how do we weave those all together to have a true integrated model of communications? And it’s been successful for our clients.
Susan Bratton: What kinds of things do clients want right now? When you get the phone calls – you’re saying you’re getting a lot of those phone calls where you’re looking for, you know, RFP social AOR kind of a thing. Is that what clients are thinking about right now? Are they trying to figure out the social? They’ve got their search now, they’ve got their email in place, they’re doing their landing page optimization, now they need to figure out social – is that the big thing?
Adam Kleinberg: I think it really varies from brand to brand. You know, I’m seeing some brands that are kind of siloing off social services and saying, “This is a family of services that we’re looking for a partner to help us with”, I guess they’re not satisfied with their giant agencies and how they’ve approached that so they’re looking for best to breed partners. I think others that - you know, Livescribe for example. I think there are looking for how to create experiences that have social as part of them and that create deeper interactions with the consumers. Right now every new emerging tactic, right, that has become available to us as marketers, from podcasts to social media fanning type of situations to RSS feeds to iPhone applications to iPad applications – we’re talking to a client now about creating a really interesting program using the iPad in a retail environment, very exciting stuff tied in with their digital programming. All of these offer a much deeper more meaningful engagement with the customer, right. If you’re going to get on my iPhone you’ve got to bring it, you’ve got to provide value. You know, and you have to have an ecosystem to support that, right. How are you going to make that program successful? So thinking about ideas first and then building ROI driven programs around that I think is a smarter way for brands to be approaching rather than just thinking about how are we going to deal with Facebook, how are we going to deal with this idea.
Susan Bratton: Totally. As a matter of fact I ran the social media masters track yesterday, it was like a two part series, and one of the things that I did was I wanted to start off the session about social media talking about strategy. You know, I led the two part social mastery track here yesterday at AdTech and I wanted to lead off with trends, data points and strategy and I looked all over the web for anybody that had put together some kind of a strategic approach or a thought process or a checklist or anything that I could get my hands on so I could give people a step by step process to use to think about how to come up with their strategy. And there’s nothing out there. So I wrote one. I just took all my knowledge, my traditional experience, my social experience, my marketing experience, my PR experience, things that I, little pieces of advice or blog posts here or there and collected everything and I put together a framework, and I came up with, you know, in each step what the right order of the steps are to go through and then all kinds different like potential, like 30 or 40 different potential business objectives, all the different kinds of things you could possibly track if you were going to do it, you know. What kind of dashboards you could create; just put all that together and I made it free, I made it a PowerPoint so that anybody could just take it, suck it into their template and call it their own, and then I made a cantega video where I talked through the PowerPoint and recorded it in audio and then put that up, so someone could listen to me explain the framework and then they could grab the slides and put their name on it and turn it into their own social strategy for their company. And I put that up on socialmediasuperpowers.com, it’s free, and I’ll send a copy – well you just go, go to socialmediasuperpowers.com and download that. I’d love to get your comments on anything you think I might have missed, ‘cause you do this all the time for clients…
Adam Kleinberg: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: This is, you know, a lot the work you’re doing is helping them figure out their strategy, map to their business objectives, into their higher organizational requirements based on what they’re doing elsewhere in the market, how their competition impacts, you know, what they’re going to do, you know, if their competition already owns something they don’t want to do the same thing, they want to own something different, how to find where their customers are, how to identify their influence – like the whole thing, step by step by step. So I’d love for you to take a look at that and tell me what you think.
Adam Kleinberg: I will do that.
Susan Bratton: You can make it better. I definitely think you’ll find some things you can do to improve it.
Adam Kleinberg: I will find it and comment upon it.
Susan Bratton: That’s perfect. I’d love that.
Adam Kleinberg: Yeah.
Susan Bratton: Awesome! So well, you know, as usual we run over on our time ‘cause we love to chitty chat.
Adam Kleinberg: Yes we do.
Susan Bratton: And you had a successful time here at the show?
Adam Kleinberg: I had a great time.
Susan Bratton: Awesome!
Adam Kleinberg: It was terrific. I had a great speaking engagement in the Killer Creative showcase.
Susan Bratton: Well and you were in the big keynote room. How’s it feel to be on the big sexy stage?
Adam Kleinberg: It felt very sexy. It was interesting, I talked about, the session was crafted, they asked five creative agency heads to talk about different verticals and someone approached me and said, “Mom’s”, you know, “I’m surprised you picked moms Adam, I thought you would’ve picked something sexier”, but in my opinion there’s no demographic marketing segment out there that’s sexier than moms.
Susan Bratton: What’s sexier than a mom?
Adam Kleinberg: Not a thing.
Susan Bratton: Everybody loves a mom.
Adam Kleinberg: No body.
Susan Bratton: All right, well you have been listening to Adam Kleinberg. He’s the CEO of Traction, a fantastic interactive, because everything is interactive, agency in San Francisco. I hope you’ll check him out and follow him at @adamkleinberg. He’s easy to find. I’m your host, Susan Bratton. Have a great day and I hope we’ll connect next week. Take great care.