I’ve resigned from my fairly awesome job because I have a new dream now that I’d like to share with you. I alluded to it briefly at the end of the planning survey but now it is taking shape and becoming real.

I’m going to travel the world, work for brilliant people, live with them so I get to know who they really are and write about all the things I learn. I have 4 people who have agreed to let me learn from them while I stalk them: Rob Campbell in Shanghai, Simon Kemp in Singapore, Jason Oke in Hong Kong and Saher Sidhom in London.

I am still looking for several more people and could use your help identifying them. I’m interested in planners, managing directors, creative directors, clients, digital, traditional, innovation and more. I want to essentially put together the PhD program that I could never find in a university. And I really want to go to India, Japan, Australia, South Africa and Argentina. But I’m sure there are some smarties who are willing to go along with the scheme in other places too and I’m open to that. Who do you think I should ask to be my coach?

I’ve saved some money to pull this off but I am opening my own business in Holland so I can keep Amsterdam as my base. I’ve named it I’ve Got the Fever – too corny? Well, it does what it says on the tin. This means that I will have to do some freelance in order to keep my visa. If you have any projects you might consider me for, I would love to hear about them. I’m hklefevre at gmail. Since I’m a company, I don’t need a work permit and can go anywhere. Please don’t make me go back to America! Give me a gig!

It will probably take me a year and a half to finish the book. Maybe two? I’m just really excited to see more of the world and meet as many planners as possible. If you aren’t already, consider following me on Twitter so you know where I am and we can connect.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 29,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 11 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Maybe you noticed and maybe you didn’t, but last week I was a social media fiend. There’s a reason. A little over a week ago, a comment was made by a client responsible for social media that they would expect someone offering advice on social media to have a higher Klout score than themselves. I wasn’t in the meeting, but one of our art directors made the comment “Wait until you meet our head of planning. She’ll give you a run for your money.”

When my colleagues return and tell me about the meeting we go online and compare Klout scores. Mine is 40. The client’s is 51. I’ve never paid any attention to Klout before this but they insisted I try to do so and get mine up. So I connect my Facebook account. Then Foursquare, Instagram, Google+ that I never use, and LinkedIn (that ought to take care of this competition). And then I simply put attention into all of these networks. After 24 hours my score had gone up 6 points. By the end of the week I was at 53 and it seems to have leveled off there. But that’s still 2 points higher than the client’s.

What did I learn from my experiment?

1. We are not our Klout scores. Klout cannot measure the latent goodwill that your networks have for you. If I start communicating openly through social networks, then I get a bump in my numbers. But it doesn’t see the fact that I have many side conversations over DM or Facebook messages. I can call people and they will answer the phone. If I go to other countries, there are friendly people willing to meet for coffee.

2. Klout, though an imperfect algorithm, measures something. It measures the fact that I am creating more content than I was a week ago and it is being spread because the content is interesting in some way and I have said latent good will. No algorithm is perfect anyway. No computer can measure human interaction perfectly. Have you had a conversation with Siri?

3. Keeping score inspires competitive spirit and action. This is why a dashboard and select KPI’s isn’t just something to do for fun. It gives you or a brand a sense of progression. And comparing your results with others’ given different approaches can certainly help in that quest. Have a look at this picture comparing airlines. What can we learn simply by the number of followers, the number of tweets and what we know about each of these brands. They are certainly yielding very different results. KLM is up to their elbows in tweets, but JetBlue has so many more followers with far fewer tweets.

4. Scheduling consistent posts reminds the world that you are alive. I have never scheduled my posts before, so I dip in and out when it is convenient for me. But I know a few people with very high scores who do schedule their posts so I gave it a go. I set up Buffer on my browser and now when I read something interesting the tweet goes in a queue that I can control. I’ve set it to post 3 times a day at times I’m generally not tweeting. That way I can still post whatever I come across and I hopefully won’t get spammy.

5. You’re presence can mess with your perceived value. One of my planners says that seeing me in his feed all the time makes him less likely to click on links and pay attention to what I’m saying. It’s perceptual supply and demand. Most brands forget this I think. Exclusivity with great content is often better than a deluge of great content.

6. There is not a huge amount of cross-over between my Twitter network and my Facebook network. I stopped posting all my Tweets to Facebook shortly after trying it out a few years back. But what I tried this week was taking some of my most popular Facebook posts and tweeting them. Such as “I just saw a wireless network called ‘prettyflyforawifi.’” It got a lot of play on Twitter just as it had 4 weeks ago on Facebook, just among different people. Funny is funny so cross-pollination is a good tactic.

7. Digital memory is short. Perhaps even flea-esque. There are a lot of great things I have read and a few I have written that many people haven’t seen. Or with the planner survey I figure a lot of people are considering new positions and may want to refer back to it. Something from a few years back even may still be very relevant today. Greatest hits are definitely good sources for posts.

8. Klout can be gamed. Klout has their own currency called +K. There are topics of influence that you need 5 +K’s in order to add to your own profile or another person’s. Then once the topic is added you can spend 1 +K to agree that a person is in fact influential on a subject. As I was looking for people to spend my +K’s on, I was rewarded with more +K’s for visiting more profiles. Then more for visiting Klout.com. It is reminiscent of Farmville. Lots of clicking.

9. The quest for Klout is not sustainable. I have a lot going on at work, personal projects, friends, etc. Writing and thinking about my brands usually has to trump tweeting my ass off. That’s why brands need a team of people focused on creating content and communicating with customers. It’s a full-time gig.

I’m curious to know what you think of my little experiment. And the competitor in me will gladly accept any +K’s, RTs and @replies you’d like to give me for Christmas.

We thought it would be fun/ inspiring/ mildly embarrassing for us to share the random connections that we have made to come up with the strategies that we are most proud of.

We’ll be inviting everyone to step up to present for 6 minutes. The event will be at the StrawberryFrog Amsterdam office and begins at 7pm. Let me know if you’d like to reserve a presentation slot.

And make sure to join our group on LinkedIn.

I’ve been quiet most of the summer working on this year’s planner survey. And the release day has finally arrived!

It’s a huge effort, not just for me, but my team and the group of planners who I inflict the non-sensical early drafts upon. Please know that your contributions are appreciated.

Now it’s time to download and have a little read. We all love to know your thoughts and comments so please leave some here. They often inspire additional analysis and future posts and discussion. You can also email us your questions and comments.

So I’ll get out of the way and let the report do the talking. As always, thank you for playing.

And the appendices:

I wanted to share a new business with you all that my dear friend Heather Sullivan has started. Heather is a producer (full disclosure: I worked with her at Tribal and then made her come work at the pond with me again because she’s excellent) so it’s inspiring to see how she’s put her know-how from what we do day to day into starting her own business.

I think it’s an example of a business that was formed from a simple insight: people buy Groupons and the like and then don’t redeem them. And on the flip side, when the deals come out, they are only available for 24 hours so sometimes you let them slip by because you aren’t sure if you’ll use them.

DealSellers is a really user-friendly site that has created a marketplace for daily deals. You can unload those pole dancing lessons that you’re too scared to use. Or you can buy a deal for a restaurant and use it tonight.

Buying and posting deals is free. When you sell a deal, they charge a small fee of the sale price to keep the lights on.

It’s only available in the Netherlands for now, but the plan is to roll it out in different countries soon.

“The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers, but most of all the world needs dreamers who do.” - Sarah Ban Breathnach

So my loss is your gain. He’s visiting Boston and New York at the moment, so contact him for that junior planner spot you need to fill. He’s @jaredadler on the twitter. And here’s his perfectly written cover note and CV.

Patricia De Luca, Heather LeFevre and Olé Pedersen at Cannes

What a whirlwind trip to report on. Olé Pedersen, Patricia De Luca and I met on Monday to go over our presentation and workshop exercises. They were both worn out from their flights over and we had only discussed our session over the phone so we weren’t sure how well we would gel together. In addition, our workshop was at the same time as a talk by Robert Redford. We were all a bit wary on Monday evening that we might only have the 10 or so friends who said they would attend the next day.

Little did we know that the next morning participants would flood the workshop room so that the presentation portion was chock a block with folks sitting on the floor and standing in the back. The organizers had to turn people away.

Everything went beautifully and I’ve uploaded our presentation here. Will try to get a few video clips of us speaking.

This session just confirmed for me what a special place StrawberryFrog is. We worked our way through the theory behind our philosophy into some cases and practical principles into hypothetical examples to demonstrate the broad potential of cultural movements for all types of brands. Then about half of the room left and the other half stayed to actually work through and make a movement in small groups. You can see them in action here:

Then after we had so much positive feedback, both in person and on Twitter, I had what can only be described as a professional high. We are on to something truly great.

I live in Sao Paulo and I have recently completed my undergraduate degree in Social Communication and Advertisement.

I’m writing you because I have recently decided to shift my work area. Although I’ve always wanted to work in Account Planning, I worked as an intern in the branding area of a large company in the food industry, and in the last two years I’ve been working with marketing for advertisers, in a editorial company.

I’ve been having a lot of difficulty to make this shift, and I think it is because the brazillian Account planning market is too closed. Everybody knows each other, and it becomes hard for newcomers to be introduced to this market. Also, agencies ask for a lot of background, even for junior positions. I would like to ask you how do you think I can get some space in this market. I considered applying for a program in Miami Ad School here in Brazil, or even searching for a planning program in the U.S. I’m afraid of being unemployed or out of the market, even if I take one of these programs. What would you advise me to do?

Personally, I think it’s difficult to get that first planning position anywhere in the world. You have to make it happen. Without being pushy, you can ask for informal chats with planners to learn how they got their jobs. And I think schools are a good opportunity to meet other planners. Planning isn’t a profession you learn from memorizing jargon and case studies. You have to learn by doing. So internships really help. But in my opinion, there is something innate that makes a good planner. If you’ve got it, you’ll find a way to get a job.

What do you think, planejadores?

According to a post by Farrah Bostic this week, here’s why you should participate:

Greater transparency into salaries by position, experience, region, size of agency, etc. help us better negotiate for our salaries. It helps us figure out what the high and low ends are and therefore gives us leverage: we know what the agencies are willing to pay, and we can start the salary discussion from a better educated, and therefore more advantageous position. TRUE TESTIMONIAL: I used the survey to negotiate my last salary – it worked, and it worked to my advantage. I wouldn’t have had the guts to ask for that salary otherwise.

It also helps us see where the discrepancies are – do men and women make the same amount? Are more senior planners at smaller agencies under-valued compared to their colleagues at big agencies, or vice versa? What do we gain or give up in making the choice to take certain roles, in certain cities, at certain agencies?

Sunshine, as they say, is the best disinfectant. The more we know about how much and how hard we work, how we’re paid, what our benefits are like, where the opportunities for career growth are, and so on, the brighter the light shines on agency practices, and hopefully encourages them to behave better.

I appreciate you taking the time to fill in the survey. And if you ever need anything from me, twitter is the best way to reach me.