Remember HubSpot? The Cambridge-based startup that has tapped the rising tide of social media by creating Inbound Marketing. We’ve told you about many facets of this company already, but timeout:
Did you know that HubSpot supplies all kinds of free social media tools for non-paying users to take advantage of? I’ll cut to the chase and tell you about the newest one, because it’s a total innovation over their previous releases.
Alerts Grader is different from all of HubSpot’s other free tools because it isn’t a one-time analysis that runs metrics on your various web outposts and properties. Those are valuable too, but this unique tool is something you register for. It requires a bit more setup than the others, but if you’re into the realtime web — things like Google Alerts, Twitter, and LinkedIn — it could provide you with a valuable metrics-based service.
I got a tour of the software solution from HubSpot Labs product owner Chris Keller — the fabled RazrDude himself — last Friday. He’s the Motorola RAZR-toting developer behind this super sharp product.
Alerts Grader can compress the most persistent Email alert messages into simple daily digests sorted by their HubSpot-prescribed grades.
“You’re letting HubSpot be the middleman in your alerts,” explained Keller. “But in doing so, you can decide whether you want to receive them based on a threshold you set up.”
HubSpot's Chris Keller, AKA RazrDude
The tool also provides valuable LinkedIn account data and can grade the relevance and reliability of the sources behind your Google Alerts — BINGO!
The value is in combining all of these services.
Whether you’re an alerts fanatic or not, Alerts Grader is worth hearing about because it’s taking HubSpot’s technology for something like grading Twitter accounts and letting you filter it by way of HubSpot’s proven grading system.
Which is to say, HubSpot is building on its own solid analytical software.
Keller and the team seem cool with continuing to explore Alerts Grader while early adopters test drive it. It’s still very new; Keller said he finished it this month, and the first people to using it are HubSpotters (employees). However the two HubSpotters who have written reviews of Alerts Grader on oneforty’s database are reliable guys, and a third, unconnected reviewer also likes it.
What will be interesting is if social media heavyweights and consultants — those most in need of a solution to unclog their Email-based alerts — begin to adopt Alerts Grader. Considering it touches on some of the most popular alert sources, we don’t think this scenario is out of the question.
By providing valuable social media metrics, boiling them down, and making them accessible, HubSpot is ensuring that fewer websites will be online business cards and more will become living mediums for the exchange of information. That’s something we can all get behind. If nothing else, it creates hope for the self-fulfilling prophecy of a more vibrant and interesting realtime ecosystem here and elsewhere.
And if cutting into a little bit bigger realtime pie to find clients, customers, distributors and vendors isn’t something the local innovation economy can get behind, well we might all want to toss our smartphones out the window and grab a *RAZR. Because Boston, if you aren’t progressing in the world of technology, you may as well be back in 2002.
*Thanks go out to Chris Keller for answering my endless stupid questions about how this thing he created works, and for fighting the good fight to bring the RAZR back.
What are your favorite HubSpot Grader tools? Let us know in the comments section.
Tags: Chris Keller, Company News, Edu, Hubspot, oneforty, RazrDude
