The ABCs of Startup Marketing

July 10, 2010 By 7 Comments

Anyone that has worked the startup life before knows how different and difficult it can be and how important marketing and lead generation is to the survival of the company.  Especially when you’re first starting out, the win of a single customer could be what pays the light bill for the month or the loss of a single customer could be enough to put the company on life support.  For those of you reading this who work at a startup, if there were a set of tips from a successful startup that would help you be a better marketer at your company, you’d want to know about it, right?

Recently Mike Volpe, VP of Marketing at HubSpot spoke at Atlassian Starter Day in San Francisco about startup marketing.  Mike used his experiences over the past 3 years of spearheading marketing for HubSpot while it grew from 5 to 160 employees and from a few customers to over 3,000.

I think you’ll find this presentation really useful as it has all sorts of actionable nuggets hiding inside of it. I know I took down a few notes and already shot off a couple of ideas to my team at New Marketing Labs. I would encourage you to sit back, relax, and hit play because I think you’ll do the same thing.

In case you missed it during the presentation, Mike broke down the ABCs of startup marketing into the following:

-Avoid Addiction
-Blog Beforehand
-Create Convenience
-Data Drives Decision
-Employ the Exceptional

You can read a short description of each of these over on the OnStartups blog.

If you don’t already know Mike, you should get to know him. As any good marketer would be, Mike can be found all over the web on his personal blog, the HubSpot blog, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, just to name a few. He’s works for an awesome company and is a good friend of mine that I think you would enjoy following.

Were there any letters in the alphabet that you think Mike was missing? List them in the comments below along with a short description.

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Filed Under: Hubspot, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Videos Tagged With: , , , , ,

Capturing One Day of Your Life

July 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Would you like your chance at being co-director of a film that will be premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival? Well, depending on how interesting and creative your life is on July 24th, you may just have your opportunity.

While jumping around YouTube testing out the new mobile HTML5-compatible version that was launched today, I came across an experiment that YouTube has launched along with executive producer Ridley Scott and Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald. The project is being called “Life in a Day” and its goal is to document a single day in the life of the world.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to capture, on video, an aspect of your life on July 24, 2010 and upload it to the Life in a Day YouTube channel before July 31st. If you’re video is selected for the final cut, then you’ll be credited as a co-director and will even have a chance of attending the premier of the Life in a Day film at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

The Life in a Day crew has created an introductory video and also have posted the official guidelines.

This is a cool concept and it will be interesting what the response from the community will be. Will you participate? If so, what aspect of your life are you going to capture on July 24th?

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Filed Under: Community, Videos Tagged With: , , ,

Google News Refreshed

July 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Google News has been my go-to source for news and has served as my homepage since it was released in 2002. I have always liked how Google News allows me to see what’s going on with top stories and then broken out by different interest areas such as Business, Technology, Entertainment, Local, and more. For each story listed, if I’m interested in reading other angles, Google News provides all of the other sources for a given story.

What I like the most about this is that I’m not boxed into a certain opinion just because I like a particular source. For example, when I used to receive the print version of The New York Times and only watched CNN, those were my two main sources for news. While both news sources try to stay in the middle and report the full details of a story, of course, there are other stories, access, and angles that different media sources receive. When Google News debuted, it immediately solved my curiosity to read multiple angles and to consume as much news as I could get my hands on.

Since Google News launched it has only had a few updates to it.  However, the Google News team has just launched a new, refreshed version with the goal of giving users more access to the specific news that is important to them.

The most noticeable aspect of this is when you first log in to the refreshed version, in the “News for You” section, Google asks you to customize your experience by telling them how often you read news from the different sections that Google News provides. Your choices are “Never”, “Sometimes”, or “Always”. You also have the option to provide custom topics that interests you besides the standard topic areas. Once you submit your choices to Google it adapts to your experience to show you news that is curated to your interests.

This is just one of several features of the refreshed Google News. To see all of the new features, check out the video below.

I’m really excited to have seen Google make these updates and I’m looking forward to seeing how well it provides more relevant news based on the ratings and interests I provided.

Do you use Google News? What are your thoughts on the updates? If you’re not a Google News user, how do you receive your news?

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Filed Under: Google, Videos Tagged With: , , ,

Inside Larry & Sergey’s Brain [Book Review]

June 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Imagine if you had been a fly on the wall during the inception of Google straight through to today when they’re one of the most powerful brands in the world.  That is exactly what Inside Larry & Sergey’s Brain (affiliate link) by Richard L. Brandt does.  From the back cover:

Based on interviews with their current and former employees, competitors, professors, and friends, Brandt details their early lives, the origins of their idealism, and the strategies underlying Google’s relentless expansion.  He explores misconceptions about the company’s culture, especially its motto, ‘Don’t be evil,’ and rule number one, ‘Focus on the user and everything else will follow.’

I really enjoyed how Brandt structured the book and I learned a lot about Larry, Sergey and Google that I didn’t previously know.  This book is definitely worth picking up if you’re fascinated with Google, their culture, their growth and the way in which they view the world.

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Google, Reviews, Videos Tagged With: , , ,

Enabling Your Abilities

June 29, 2010 By 4 Comments

Knowing that I’m a huge fan of Timbaland and gadgets, a friend of mine recently sent me a video of his new tour bus. The tour bus has been completely outfitted with everything imaginable to allow him to record and mix a song whenever he has a stroke of creativity or when he has time in between performances, appearances and other responsibilities.

Besides thinking that the tour bus was awesome and being slightly jealous that I couldn’t have something uber-cool like that, it got me thinking about why Timbaland invested the money to build the tour bus.

Timbaland is one of the most sought after producers in the music business and also an award-winning artist. His ability to be creative anywhere at any time is critical to being able to stay on the top of his game. Without a tour bus with these capabilities, he would either have to turn down opportunities or do a lot of flying back and forth.

This brought me to consider whether or not I have an optimal set up with me at all times to enable content creation and fuel creativity.

To enable myself the ability to create content on-the-fly, the following tools are standard in my gear bag (mostly affiliate links):

In addition to the main gadgets, I also always have all of the cords, chargers, memory sticks, and other accessories that will allow me to transfer and upload my content and always be charging.

There certainly is some duplication between the capabilities of each of these gadgets but they do provide me the full suite of tools that I inevitably need during my travels.

I also always have a magazine or two and at least a book besides the magazines and books that I keep on my iPad and iPhone. While this doesn’t necessarily enable content creation, unless I’m reviewing a book for this blog, it does help to keep my mind sharp and inspire ideas.

Depending on where I’m traveling to, this bag will be tweaked but this is my standard day-to-day gear that I always carry with me.

While there may be some tools that could be upgraded or other tools that I want to add to my gear bag, my assessment is that I do have a complete set of tools to enable content creation and creativity from anywhere I may be.

Are you enabling your ability to be creative and create content anywhere you go? What say you?

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Filed Under: technology, Videos Tagged With: , , ,
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