Steve Hall is My Name

Murray Newlands and I meet a few years ago at an ad:tech event and somehow got to talking, which, considering where we met (at a party) would be better termed shouting. To say that over the years we just kept bumping into each other would be a massive understatement. I literally can’t go to any ad conference without seeing the dude. He’s everywhere. Of course the fact he’s got spike-styled flaming blond hair probably guarantees I will see him if he’s anywhere in the same city I am.

ad:tech’s Jeff Valentine agreed once saying, “I see him everywhere I go and with his hair he’s hard to miss.”

If you too have seen Murray at some conference, you probably already know he always ends up at the best parties. And we have the pictures to prove it.

The reason for Murray showing up everywhere soon became apparent to me - he seems to know everyone. With a long career in online marketing, Murray, along with his other accomplishments, recently founded the affiliate network Affiliate Heat and is serving as CMO and head of US Operations for carbon offsetting company Carbon Advice Group PLC.

When I spoke with Murray about his plans for Carbon Advice Group, it turned out to be an interesting idea. The Carbon Advice Group uses affiliate marketing as a mechanism for environmental change by making it easy for any individual, company or organization to launch their own white-label site to sell carbon credits. Murray says seventy percent of the revenues go directly to carbon offsetting projects.

Murray also told me, “It is great to be able to use your knowledge and connections to do something genuinely good for the world.” And why not? Everyone’s going green today.

Murray, who hails from the U.K and did a lot of lead generation and affiliate marketing there before moving to the States, predicts there will be a surge in green social entrepreneurship this spring. And if that does happen, it can’t be a bad thing.

So the next time you’re at an ad:tech, an Affiliate Summit or at any other ad conference and you see Murray (and you will see him), ask him why he hasn’t dyed his hair green yet.

I met Julia Roy on Twitter over a year a go. I somehow saw a tweet or two from her and decided she was interesting enough to follow. But that wasn’t all that caught my attention. Her Twitter image at the time - in which she is wearing the glasses that, in some respects, have come to define her - was strikingly similar to my own. As a joke, I made a “separated at birth” image of the both of us and posted it to TwitPic for all to see. It was no big thing but Julia noticed and thought it was kind of funny.

Once that initial novelty wore off, I became interested in Julia’s work at Undercurrent, an ad agency with its hand completely immersed in the world of social media. The agency’s website is the furthest thing you’d expect from ad ad agency. On their site, a sort of Drudge Report-style collection of relevant news items and thoughts from the twittersphere and blogosphere, it’s all about social conversation and little to nothing about ego-stroking portfolio’s of work, the common denominator of most agency websites.

Undercurrent had its hand deep inside the Mad Men/AMC/Twitter fan fiction movement that saw upwards of 20 Mad Men characters come to life on Twitter. Initially, AMC went legal and did a cease and desist. But all that did was raise the ire of the show’s fans, mostly those who work in the ad industry and created the characters on Twitter out of the love for the show.

Julia, who writes a blog about her digital life, went to Simmons college in Boston to study international relations, public policy and political science, It wasn’t long though before she realized it wasn’t the thing for her.

For a while she worked at Boston’s Cone Inc. where she brought life to the Making Change for Katrine fund-raising campaign. At Cone, she dove head first into the world of social media and then met Joan Schneider of Schneider Associates and worked for a while before she ended up in New York where she currently resides and works at Undercurrent.

A few months ago, Julia launched Tweet Week, a weekly recap of news, trends, discoveries and drama found on Twitter including the highlight of the show, Hilarious Tweets. It’s like Lonelygirl16…but with a purpose.

In addition to Tweet Week, you can always find Julia in front of her webcam, grinning for all who follow her on Twitter. There, you’ll find her blowing bubbles, showing off her new hot boots, modeling her new haircut, showing us her hot dress that’s so short she can’t bend over while wearing it, highlighting her work on a CNN project, letting us appreciate the cuteness of her hittens, sharing yet another new (ahem, seriously hot looking) dress, sleeping, eating cupcakes, making alternative uses for a tie, showing us her own, ahem, cupcakes, the brief love affair with Second Life, sharing the fact she can cook, her Twitter worshippers and…oh the horror…posing without her glasses on.

During Advertising Week in September, about a year after I had digitally met Julia, I had the pleasure of physically meeting her. I met her at the Undercurrent offices along with her co-worker Yianni Garcia. If you think the 2D digital version of Julia Roy is appealing, wait until you see the goodness of her 3D physical version. And the wit that completes the package.

We had beer. We talked advertising. We talked Mad Men. We talked Boston. We talked New York. We talked Twitter. We made fun of the suit-wearing mid-town crowd that filed the bar at which we met. We had fun.

Digital Elite. Social Media Mover and Shaker. Those terms are horribly trite and overused but Julia knows her shit. Like any good social media expert, she plays in the sandbox and because she does so she knows the rules.