Our fearless leader Adam Kleinberg has been named to the Advisory Board of the inaugural iMoms Summmit 2011 to be held May 1-4 in Amelia Island, Florida. The theme of the event is "Innovative Marketing to Moms" and Adam will leverage his experience marketing to moms for brands like Clorox, Shutterfly and CamelBak to inform the content of the event.

Traction has just launched our new LinkedIn Companies page. As I've said before, I think the new LinkedIn Companies feature will become as important as having a website or a Facebook is now. 

Check ours out and give us a recommendation here.

The Twitter Media blog posted an interesting analysis of the rise and fall of an entertaining hashtag that popped up recently, and there are some interesting lessons here for social media marketers.

I remember the time when I was first introduced to Mr. Potter. It was dark and he was about 10 feet tall even though he was just a boy. That first Harry Potter movie changed everything (relatively speaking of course). Here was a boy who was living life surrounded by something I had always craved—magic. Of course Potter-mania was already in full swing by then, but I had discarded the entire Potter epidemic as children's fluff. Little did I know that this boy would become an icon and defeat "He who must not be named"!

"People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it." Take a look at this TED talk by Simon Sinek, the author of Start with Why.

With the advent of social media, crowd-sourcing and consumer participation, brands are finding themselves deluged with comments, complaints, suggestions and requests. Many are struggling to navigate and decipher this new wealth of consumer generated content. So how do successful companies take advantage of this new source of information without drinking from a fire hose of data?

Most just ignore it.

Google is the most recent browser vendor to have stirred the html5 video pot. Passionate posts have flowed about if it's a good or bad of them to drop their support for h.264. And this all goes back to the debate in the html5 specs about which should be ~THEE~ codec for the video element. That never got resolved. You can think of the current spec as having handled the dispute by punting.

South by Southwest has announced the final round of accepted program for this year's SXSW this week. Traction CEO Adam Kleinberg was one of the selected speakers. He'll be discussing how to manage successfully in a creative culture in a talk entitled "7 reasons your employees hate you."

A colleague asked me today if we were doing anything interesting in the social space for our B2B clients. Since many of our social engagements are strategic in nature, they sometimes don't make it to our portfolio, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to share my response.

Are web advertising networks underperforming and useless? Patric King over at Imprint certainly thinks so.