Where is Inbound Marketing Headed? Panel Session

We were lucky enough to have industry superstars available for an open question and answer session to discuss the future of inbound marketing. On the panel were David Meerman, Chris Brogan, Dharmesh Shah, and Ann Handley.

Question: What is the best way to measure ROI?
Dave's Response: When analytics just can't do it it's best to see your area of influence. How many followers do you have, who is talking about you, who is retweeting your posts?

Question: Is it best to keep content on your site or post it in other locations?
Ann's Response: Yes. It should be on both you need to give your content both wings and roots.

Question: What is more important volume or quality of content?
Brian's Response: Both. The more youdo the better you get kind of like running. You start off running 6 telephone polls one day, 8 telephone polls the next day, then you all of the sudden do 12 telephone polls one day when you really shouldn't but you saw a pretty girl and you didn't want her to see you stop running. He thinks the same way about blogging. He just wants a pretty girl to see his blog posts so he keeps posting.

Question: Should you sensor blog comments?
Panel Cumulative Responses: No don't sensor and don't moderate the comments. It can hinder good open conversations and discussions about the topics. If all comments are good people can lose trust in your site that it is being moderated. Brian jokingly recommended hiring people to hate you so you could build trust. If it is a good negative argument that gives another aspect of the topic consider promoting it on twitter or facebook because it can help build trust that you are open to other points of views other than your own.

Question: How should companies/people handle a username that was created while the person was at the company should the time come that they leave or are fired fromt he company?
Panel Cumulative Responses: Well they are followers not sales leads. It mainly depends on whether the username included a tie to the company and the nature in which it was used. The I vs. We decision. If the posts were primarily I oriented meaning "I think ...." then it should stay with the person. If they were primarily We oriented "We think...." then it should stay with the company. It would be much easier if a written agreement is written out prior to the departure or creation of the account to establish ownership of its influence.

Question: Should content be recycled or customized for use in different areas/websites?
Ann's Response: She thinks its good to have a presence everwhere but suggests tweeking the content.
Brian's Response: He hates autofeeding content to several places. He thinks that it disrepects your audience that follows you on several places. You definitely should change it or fluff it up a little before posting in new places.

Question: Should you block your competitors from following you on twitter or your blog?
Panel Cumulative Responses: Let them follow you. If you know it is them making a comment respond to their comment by thanking them for taking the time to follow your blog/twitter account. They shouldn't be able to get any type of trade secrets from your blog or twitter accounts anyway.

They ended up the Q & A session by letting the panel give some parting advice.

Brian: Be a leader not a follower.
Ann: With content, focus on quality to differentiate yourself not quantity.
David: Do what you love.
Dharmesh: Marketing is not just about leads it is about building and asset or a brand so it can be worth something someday.

Overall it was great to get all their different points of views and gave unique input to several industry quandaries.

Hubspot User Group - Introduction

After the fun opening video of the Alanis Morissette remade by Hubspot employees with lyrics made relevant to the Internet Marketing community, the moderator began with Mike Volpe delivered an overview of Hubspot. It was impressive to hear that over 20% of their growth is directly attributed to Hubspot resellers. An interesting statistic was that the audience was an even division of men and women (women represented 49% of the audience and men 51%).

Hubspot seems to be looking more to hear what their customers are saying about both their products and services, and then changing things to meet customer expectations and needs. http://ideas.hubspot.com/ is a website that is dedicated to hearing what their customers would like to see included in the Hubspot platform.

Mike Volpe then introduced Brian Halligan (Grateful Dead enthusiast and co-author of a new book about Grateful Dead book). The great thing about Brian Halligan is that he's not only a co-founder of Hubspot, but he also uses his tool - which really puts him directly in touch with both the strengths and weaknesses of his tools.

Brian Halligan discussed how there is indeed a big press to hear customer feedback and after a large survey four main points were made about the products:
1. New Bugs
2. Old Bugs
3. Usability issues
4. Speed
With every new app created for the hubspot platform one or more bugs are introduced, some of which can be worse than others. As a remedy Hubspot is dedicating time and energy to create a plan to introduce new features to apps, while limiting the number of bugs that can make it into the production version of the application.

There are older bugs that are still in the system, and because of that a lot of version 2 apps will be coming out, that have been retooled without the bugs that were in the first version of the applications.

The are also consolidating and restructuring some of the features of the Hubspot platform, to make the product more usable and less time consuming to find the information that you need.

Several senior product developers have been pulled off of their current projects to focus on improving the speed of the tools over the next few months.

Besides product focused feedback, they also received customer service feedback such as:
1. People are frustrated with success.hubspot.com and due to that a version two of this is being created to make this tool more useful.
2. Communications from Hubspot can take on a "holier than though" feel which turns off the customers. Hubspot is working on reorganizing in order to address this issue and take on a better customer service approach, which also includes reducing the wait time to talk to a Hubspot customer service representative (In june the average wait time was 4 minutes, currently the average wait time is 2 minutes, and the goal is 1 minute. They are not going to try to go under a minute wait time, because they'd rather shift money into Research and Development versus customer service calls).

2010 HubSpot HUG Conference

So I would say that tonights welcome reception was a huge success. It started off with getting great HubSpot gear that included a couple HubSpot t-shirts and an awesome coffee mug. We were then offered a tour of the new HubSpot facility. When you walk into their building there is a great courtyard area with a skylight that during the day i'm sure lets in wonderful sunlight. They have some walls of their office painted with dry erase paint so you can brainstorm, draw, or write whatever you'd like on the walls.

They have several conference rooms of which any hubspot employee can participate in any meeting. Instead of an org chart they have a huge wall that is an influence chart. It not only connects people who work for each other but it also connects people that influence eachother. They have the developers in a more quiet work zone and a different area for their sales marketing team that tends to a bit more noisy and boistrous. They even have a bocce ball area. This is just the tip of the iceburg but needless to say it's an impressive work environment.

Upon going downstairs to the courtyard they were recording a live broadcast of HubSpot TV where Karen and Mike were able to get some of the guests involved with answering and asking some questions. It was a bit hard to hear at times because of a slight echo but I could tell that they were having a great time. Meanwhile as you can imagine some great networking oportunities were developing as all sorts of marketing industry folks were co-mingling and talking about their experiences with HubSpot and raving about their personal representatives. It is really great to see a company that is so involved with their users/clients and seems to appreciate their input as much as HubSpot. I can't wait to see how the conference goes tomorrow!

Nemith Auto Provides Great Customer Service

I strongly recommend Nemith to anyone interested in buying a car.

I just completed the purchase of a 2009 Lincoln MKS from Dave Seacord at Nemith Nissan-Volvo-Lincoln-Mercury in Latham. And it was the best car buying experience I have ever had!! I strongly recommend that you go visit Dave when you are shopping for a newer car!

Dave was very knowledgeable about the different cars on the lot and he was experienced enough to be able to tell what I really wanted before I even knew. If you asked me before if I would buy a Lincoln, I would've told you that Lincoln's are old men cars but now I know they are NOT!

Laura found an older Nissan Altima listed on cars.com and my appointment was to test-drive the Altima. During the test drive, I found that the Altima just didn't have enough power for me. It couldn't handle the curves as fast as I wanted and I slid out the backend a couple of times braking around the corners. This was definitely not the car for me. After that Dave showed me a Volvo S80 which looked very promising but then he said "If you like the Volvo and it's in your price range, then I've got something else to show you." He took Laura and I over to see the Lincoln MKS and it was love at first sight.

So we took it for a drive and that was it - I was hooked! I had to have this car. He gave me an extremely fair price and such a great price for my trade-in that I didn't even bother shopping around. This was Saturday. Even though the dealership closed at 5 p.m., Dave and I were still communicating by cell phone which shows his dedication to his clients. The negotiation process was very low-pressure, easy to handle. I've never negotiated for a newer car so this was my first time. He came in below the window price but I needed him to do a little better. I asked once and he came back with an extremely reasonable offer in the middle.

After that, it was time to meet with the finance guy to finish up the paperwork. The last time I met with a finance person, it was a very uncomfortable situation. She pushed hard for me to buy add-ons, such as DVD player, windshield coating, extended warranty. She wouldn't take no for an answer and it completely ruined the experience for me which is why I didn't return to that particular dealer.

The finance person at Nemith was Bob and he was as great as Dave was. He was thorough and fast. He asked me if I understood everything I was buying. He also asked me if there was anything that was promised to me that I didn't have yet (there wasn't). For those of you in the know, he was also wearing two silly bands!! That was a great conversation starter.

I strongly recommend Nemith to anyone interested in buying a car.

Dave's phone number is 518-937-2840