All Posts Tagged ‘Hubspot’
Imagine you’re sitting at a dinner party with some of the biggest players in social media and new marketing. Chris Brogan is there. So is David Meerman Scott. The group starts talking about the new marketing ecosystem in Boston and wondering how they can work together to build something totally new, totally unique. That’s the position HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan found himself in a few months ago.
As you may remember, we first covered FutureM, an upcoming week-long, marketing menagerie in Boston at the beginning of the month of October.
This week, we had a chance to chat with two of FutureM’s creators, Brian Halligan, Founder and CEO of HubSpot and Kiki Mills, President of MITX, to get a better understanding of how this event came about and what attendees can expect.
When asked how the idea of FutureM came about, Halligan told us, “I guess the whole idea started a couple of years ago when I noticed that both David Meerman Scott and Chris Brogan, two guys that I have been following for awhile as real leaders in the marketing transformation movement, both happened to live in Boston.” Halligan said he soon realized that there were a number of revolutionary marketing thinkers around Boston that were “at the vanguard of inbound marketing, marketing transformation, marketing 2.0 — whatever you want to call it.”
For example, Larry Weber is based here, Dave Balter of BzzAgent is here, the Blue Ocean Digital folks who did all of Obama’s web work for his campaign are here, Chris Hughes who was Obama’s Internet czar in his election works at General Catalyst, etc.
Halligan saw a huge opportunity brewing for the marketing industry right here in Boston. He knew something had to be done to open other people’s eyes to the world class marketing talent currently living in Greater Boston. (more…)
Tags: FutureM, Hubspot, MITX
Posted in Around the Hub, New Marketing | View Comments
On Tuesday, Lenox-based ThoughtLead, led by our friends Steve Haase and Sam Rosen, organized the shortest virtual marketing conference ever — the Influencer Project.
This magical hour of online content, sponsored by HubSpot, Marketing Profs, Anne Holland’s Which Test Won, Rack Space, Winstanley Partners, and ReadWriteWeb featured 60 brilliant minds in the marketing field who spoke for 60 seconds each.
The Influencer Project was developed for a very interesting reason. When we talked to Hasse, he explained that the project was actually a bit of much-needed marketing for his company.
“It’s a funny thing, because it was born from a pretty high-pressure situation,” he admitted. “Basically, our business needed a hit. We needed to grow in a hurry, since we had only recently launched our web presence after spending lots of time and money on a software platform that wasn’t panning out. We spent time doing services after that, but had transitioned away from those as well. So we were in a tight spot, but endlessly optimistic.”
The Influencer Project was designed to inspire virtual attendees and empower them to grow their online influence. Haase and Rosen said, “We know so many people who are up to amazing things but aren’t getting the kind of traction or attention they deserve. So we created this event to deliver all the tools and perspective someone would need to make a big difference using the Internet.” (more…)
Tags: David Meerman Scott, Guy Kawasaki, Hubspot, Joselin Mane, Justin Levy, ReadWriteWeb, Scott Porad, ThoughtLead
Posted in New Marketing | View Comments
The world of marketing as we once knew it has changed dramatically in the past five years alone. It has moved away from traditional media marketing including TV, radio and magazine advertisements, and is now more present than ever on the Internet, mobile phones, and other new media outlets.
As Brian Halligan, CEO of locally-based marketing software provider HubSpot, wrote in a recent blog post, Boston was first described as the ‘hub’ of the universe by Oliver Wendell Holmes nearly 100 years ago, and it’s now the hub of New Marketing. That fact will soon be celebrated at FutureM from October 4-8.
FutureM, organized by our friends at MITX, will be the first ever week-long marketing summit featuring the brightest in the field, including entrepreneurs and technology gurus alike. Massachusetts is rich in mobile advertisers, analytics experts, pioneers in online communities and video bloggers. There was no better place for FutureM to start than right here in Boston.
We at BostInnovation are very excited to follow and attend this first-ever event. We truly believe Boston to be a city that is innovative, technologically advanced, and marketing-centric — and we hope FutureM can communicate some of that with a week of celebration and information.
We have seen the rise of many now-famous marketers and technology evangelists right here in Boston, including Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott, Edward Boches, Seth Godin and Halligan; solid proof that we are breeding next generation marketers seeking to disrupt and improve the marketing arena.
Many of these professionals are sure to attend, along with a brilliant following of committee members including: Joe Grimaldi, CEO of Mullen; Kiki Mills, President of MITX; Chris Hughes, Co-Founder of Facebook and Dave Balter, Founder and CEO of BzzAgent. (more…)
Tags: Boston's Innovation District, FutureM, Hubspot, Innovation District, MITX
Posted in Around the Hub, New Marketing | View Comments
Your product's not cool? Time for New Marketing!
Imagine you’re the head of marketing for a company selling staples and have the task of making your company the No. 1 reseller of staples in the next two years. What do you do?
Seeing as staples are a relatively uninteresting item and not a positively motivated purchase, you might feel lost thinking about how to become the best seller of a product people don’t care about.
The excitement around staples may be dead in many people’s minds, but your company’s approach to reintroducing staples in a new way doesn’t have to be.
Traditional marketing rules would tell you to create a funny television commercial, a catchy radio jingle and a magazine advertisement. However, the days of traditional media advertising consumption are coming to a close and the focus is now turning to newer, more refreshing and creative ways of distributing brand concepts.
Boston-area companies like HubSpot and Communispace, and local industry professionals like Steve Garfield and David Meerman Scott have found highly effective and captivating ways of creating new marketing campaigns using video, search, and community building to sell all types of business ideas.
Today, compelling marketing strategies for even the most minute items can include viral videos, social media marketing, blogging, and SEO optimization to name just a few. (more…)
Tags: Communispace, David Meerman Scott, Diane Hessan, Hubspot, Op-Ed, Steve Garfield
Posted in New Marketing | View Comments
Jay Wilder of Brainshark, Michael Troiano of Holland-Mark, Kipp Bodnar of HubSpot and David Hauser of Grasshopper all have something in common. Even though their companies deal in B2B video, advertising, Inbound Marketing and startup software tools, respectively, there’s something tying them all together.
Each of these Boston-area companies have had a hand in creating remarkable brand strategy from the ground up through realtime web movement in a world focused on virality.
How do you use social media, utilize inbound marketing tactics, and promote your personal or company brand to get people talking about you and wanting to learn more about your product?
Last night, MassChallenge and Grasshopper teamed up to give dozens of entrepreneurs the chance to hear from a group of panelists who have done just this — created brand buzz to build their customer base. The event, dubbed How to Build Buzz around your Brand, was held at Microsoft N.E.R.D. (more…)
Tags: Brainshark, David Hauser, Grasshopper, Holland-Mark, Hubspot, Jay Wilder, Kipp Bodnar, Michael Troiano
Posted in New Marketing, Social Media | View Comments
Captain Inbound
Cambridge-based new marketing innovators HubSpot are at it again. We’ve told you before about their cutting edge approach to new marketing, and this time they may have pushed the envelope too far. If you haven’t heard the buzz, last week on June 2nd for 24 hours HubSpot tested out an innovative marketing strategy by implementing an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) into their site.
HubSpot, you’ll remember, is the creator of Inbound Marketing, and most of it’s products are designed to help its customers better understand the new rules of online marketing.
To kick off this new experiment, HubSpot released a blog post stating that an outbound marketing agency, Kronos Media, ordered their Inbound Marketing University program to shut down with a cease and desist letter. One of their marketing superstars, Rebecca Corliss, recorded a very compelling video apology on the site as well, giving their proclaimed situation some credibility.
As the company’s situation circulated on the Internet, people became skeptical, posting comments on the HubSpot site or Googling to learn more about the issue. In no time, many discovered a character called “Captain Inbound,” who was ostensibly online to fight back against the evil Kronos Media. In actuality, this character was part of the ARG, and was designed by HubSpot to help customers figure out what was really going on.
HubSpot soon revealed what they were doing with complete honesty and transparency. First, they released a blog post apologizing and discussing the results. They then analyzed the marketing take-aways on this past Friday’s edition of HubSpot TV.
HubSpot had made the whole situation up — It was a rouse, meant to elicit emotional response and drive HubSpot customers to a new Ning site for the HubSpot community. The prank taught some valuable lessons, so we caught up with Mike Volpe, VP of Inbound Marketing at HubSpot, to gather more insights and marketing lessons learned.
As it turns out, some HubSpot customers were extremely upset, feeling they had been lied to and misled. Others, loved the game and found the mystery exciting. (more…)
Tags: Company News, Hubspot
Posted in Gaming, New Marketing, Social Media | View Comments
Sometimes, spinning your gears until they're red hot isn't the best way to realize your goals
I grew up believing in the idea that if something didn’t feel like work, then it wasn’t real work — it didn’t mean much, it probably wasn’t useful to anybody.
We New Englanders like hard work. We live rather fast-paced lives, we shovel a heck of a lot of snow, many of us spend years acquiring multiple degrees. Our first questions are often, “Where did you go to school?” and “What do you do?” Operating from this mindset — that nearly all meaningful things in life are necessarily hard — often leads us to believe that complexity is almost always a good thing, too. If a concept is difficult to grasp, then it must worth all that time and energy, right?
Here’s the thing: One of the most important lessons I’ve learned since college — a place where I spent a lot of time working very hard — is that some of the most valuable lessons in life (or business) are very simple. They are simple ideas stated in simple terms, and they require a genuine respect for simplicity in order to be acted upon. (more…)
Tags: David Heinemeier, Deborah Frieze, Dharmesh Shah, Harvard Business Review, Hubspot, Jason Fried, Jim Womack, Lean Enterprise Institute, Margaret Wheatley, Op-Ed, The Berkana Institute, Umair Haque
Posted in Around the Hub | View Comments
Boston-based startup Pinyadda is changing the game of news distribution. Pinyadda is a personalized social news platform that provides the easiest way to follow the news from the people, sites and topics you are interested in. By sharing, or as the company calls it, “Pinning” interesting articles and engaging in conversations, users can earn points to become a “Maven” of a topic or an “Ambassador” of a favorite site.
Simply put, Pinyadda has made the news in to a legitimate game that helps users find topic experts and build community for publishers around their top supporters, while providing users the most engaging way to follow the news.
“With Pinyadda, we’re trying to address what we see as one of the biggest problems facing society, and that is providing an efficient way for consumers to receive and engage around quality news. We’re developing an innovative distribution model that will help publishers monetize their content, which is something we think everyone cares about today,” said CEO Chase Garbarino earlier this week. “The game has changed and now users are essentially digital paperboys — users are the distribution mechanism.”
According to Garbarino and the “Pinyadda squad,” no one has successfully built a next generation news platform to accommodate both the evolving consumption habits of users and the publishers’ need for a way to capture more value from readers. “The news has always been social.” explains Garbarino, “People used to exchange the news across many different platforms, be it Email, chat, etc. This made discovery and management laborious for consumers, and is almost impossible for publishers to track and extract value from.”
Pinyadda's HubSpot Badges
The company plans on changing all of that. Today, Pinyadda is releasing a system akin to that of Foursquare in an effort to help users find the most relevant Mavens of topics and Ambassadors of sites on its platform, thereby building a news graph of sorts that will help ensure consumers get the best content available. The company hopes this will ultimately lead to an effective way for publishers to capture value in their audiences. To kick things off, and staying true to supporting their Boston startup roots, they’ve partnered with some big names in the local startup community free of charge to deliver engaging badges around relevant content.
(more…)
Tags: Chase Garbarino, Company News, Company Profiles, CSN Stores, Hubspot, pinyadda, RunKeeper
Posted in New Marketing, Social Media | View Comments
Aside from creating the unbelievably appropriate term “Inbound Marketing” and then releasing a book by the same title, Cambridge-based HubSpot has a strategy for convincing potential clients that they’re worth their salt where Internet marketing is concerned. A component of that “proof” involves creating really informative, valuable tools for analyzing and simplifying social media effectiveness.
As someone with an interest in blogging that runs so deep it makes my grandparents uncomfortable, (“But what is blogging, Kyle?!”) I must admit that one of my favorite free online tools was made locally. It’s HubSpot‘s Blog Grader.
So you can imagine my excitement when I sat down with HubSpot Labs product owner Chris Keller recently to hear about what he’s been doing to improve the tool, which just witnessed a completely revamped re-launch yesterday! That’s right, it’s brand new! (more…)
Tags: Company News, Hubspot
Posted in New Marketing, Social Media | View Comments
"The MIT 100K is openin' doors"
Is it on the brink of going viral?
Probably not, but MIT students are proving they’ve got vocal cords as well as brains in a new YouTube video promoting MIT’s 100K Entrepreneurship Competition. The competition is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year and these students are hyping it up with this YouTube video called “Sexy Pitch.”
Sung to the tune of David Guetta’s “Sexy Chick,” (edited version) MIT students put a fun and endearing spin on MIT’s serious 100K Competition. Check out the video for yourself (embedded): (more…)
Tags: 100K Competition, Akamai, harmonix, Hubspot, MIT, Videos, Youtube
Posted in Digital, Social Media | View Comments
We just can’t seem to keep HubSpot off our homepage this week. The locally-based, MIT-grown startup has just inked a deal with Yahoo according to Rick Burnes, a marketing pro at HubSpot.
While Burnes couldn’t talk much about the specifics of the contract, he was able to reveal a few things about why Yahoo has hired HubSpot. Yahoo, you’ll remember, has branched out from their original role in the search engine race now dominated by Google.
Yahoo seems to be making some serious moves to reposition itself in order to maintain it’s massive role in the Internet ecosystem, and Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo, issued a warning to Google yesterday by way of the BBC.
“Google is going to have a problem because Google is only known for search,” Bartz told the BBC. “It is only half our business; it’s 99.9% of their business. They’ve got to find other things to do.”
Here’s what Burnes had to say about HubSpot’s deal with Yahoo: (more…)
Tags: Company News, Google, Hubspot, Yahoo
Posted in New Marketing | View Comments
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. (more…)
Tags: Chris Keller, Company News, Edu, Hubspot, oneforty, RazrDude
Posted in Edu, New Marketing, Social Media | View Comments
WebinarListing is a calendars for online webinars.
We feel it’s important for BostInnovation to cover companies that are in all stages of development. Every startup BostInno has covered had to start somewhere, usually with that first line of code or a rough sketch on a napkin. When Rachel Levy hit me up about the brand new WebinarListings, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to change the pace around here, have some fun, and take a look at Webinar Listings together as unofficial beta testers. Feedback extremely valuable to any startup; why not make this fun start a conversation about WebinarListings right here on BostInno? (more…)
Tags: beta test, Company Profiles, Hubspot, Rachel Levy, WebinarListings
Posted in Social Media | View Comments
The "Foos and Brews" Grand Finale is Wednesday at N.E.R.D!
After two months of warm-up foos-networking and enough wrist curls to make Predator-era Arnold Schwarzenegger wince, the final tournament of the first-ever Tech Hub Foosball League has arrived. Call it the Boston tech and innovation scene’s equivalent of the FIFA World Cup. Call it a chance to win prizes as awesome as lunch with Google Cambridge director Steve Vintor. Call it a chance to shame your fellow startupers into your herculean shadow while you revile in glorious foosball victory.
Just don’t call it a missed opportunity.
Tech hub foosball’s practice rounds brought together dozens of local startupers for networking, foosball and beer over the course of the last four rounds. Each round was hosted in a different startup location. First came BostInno’s home, the Hangout Hub coworking space in Downtown Crossing. Then EchoDitto in Davis Square played host. HubSpot hosted some steep competition at the Cambridge Innovation Center. And two weeks ago the tech hub foosers stormed a welcoming Betahouse.
Now it’s Microsoft Cambridge’s turn. (more…)
Tags: Betahouse, echoditto, Hubspot, Microsoft NERD, tech hub foosball
Posted in Around the Hub | View Comments
The Davenport will be HubSpot's new home
What’s the modern tech office of the future look like?
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of touring HubSpot‘s new office at The Davenport, located at 25 First Street in Cambridge. The space won’t be ready until this summer, but HubSpot — perhaps the most exciting startup in Boston right now thanks to its wildly popular “Inbound Marketing” software — is currently working with architects at Boston-based Architecture3s to create what will surely be an impressive space to set the tone for future offices in Boston’s tech sector.
Hubspot: Movin' on up!
“For us, it was really important to get open contiguous space,” said HubSpot VP of engineering Yoav Shapira, who spearheaded the new office search effort for the company. “There’s a lot of open space available, but it’s mostly chunked out in smaller parcels. You feel like you’re walking through a little bit of a maze. You can tear down walls and stuff, but then you’re spending all your construction budget on tearing down walls, which is lame.”
Complete with a “library” section, showers, rough hewn timber supports, Birch tree accents, and a 9-foot fish tank, HubSpot’s new office will be anything but lame once it’s complete. (more…)
Tags: Company News, Hubspot, Zipcar
Posted in Around the Hub | View Comments
