Everyone likes to believe there is a plan and businesses follow those plans to become successful,  but what I’ve found is that there are a lot of unknowns along the road.  Some of the most successful businesses are the ones that have been brave enough to explore those unknown regions!

Based on that premise I came up with the idea that one’s business is like a space ship exploring some known and unknown regions. And, recently I had the rare opportunity to work with an extremely talented infographic designer (and college Professor), Mike Wirth, to make that vision more tangible.

Below is the result of  the synthesis of our combined efforts and creativity: A HubSpotter’s Guide to the Galaxy!  If you find it interesting, feel free to follow @mikewirth and @prashantkaw on Twitter!

Enjoy!

Data rules the post-information age more so than ever.  In fact the current age, the age of conversation or the age of attention, whatever we call it is conceived of data.  What are we conversing about?  What’s keeping our attention?

Working for a software company, HubSpot, that has marketing analytics as part of it’s main offering I’m a data junkie.  It makes the world go round for me as it does for most others in our industry with APIs connecting services and what not. Das zietgeist!

This has led me to think about data and data usage on the internet in 3 different ways.

1. Data Porn: People love stats.  I mean look at how crazy everyone is about baseball metrics in the United States.  It is insane.  And now days everyone is gaga over growth metrics of Facebook and Twitter.   At HubSpot we refer to this love for data as data porn – information that gets us very excited.

2. Data Ho’s: The data whores are all the companies that like to share their data with the world.  Most major internet companies have APIs so developers and users can access their data and do things with them.  Even at HubSpot we collect interesting information from our Grader Tools and give that away through APIs and some we share through reports.  We are in a new era of unprecedented free whoring of data and everyone is the better for it!

3. Data Pimps: Lastly we have the data pimps which refers to companies that collect and aggregate other people’s data, slice and dice it and push it through social media.  As an example the TwitterGrader tool has analyzed more than 6.5 million twitter profiles, which is essentially Twitter’s data.  We put together a semi-annual report called the State of Twittersphere report where we share this data with the world, no charge in this case!  Another simpler example is Google – what if not data pimping is the indexing of other people’s web pages and offered up to the world for use in their own relevant, ranked way?

So while we may all be in the vile data porn loving, pimping, whoring age, it has definitely kept us attentive in this age of conversation and educated us in a way the Kama Sutra educated the Hindu masses in the art of loving back in the day!

So what kind of data junkie are you?  Can you think of other memes for data?  Share your thoughts in the comments or chat with me @prashantkaw on twitter!

Are you as competitive about retaining the Foursquare Mayorship of your office?  How about the local coffee joint or fast food place?  Friends and colleagues trying to illegally steal Foursquare mayorships – beware.  The Foursquare cops are making the rounds!

In an ultra funny, new, spoof of the FOX network documentary series, COPS, HubSpot has launched a new series or shorts called FourSquare Cops! Follow the adventures of  Detective John Hardy and Officer Frank Ashton.  Tune in every Tuesday at 12:00pm EDT to the HubSpot inbound internet marketing blog, or subscribe to their YouTube page.

Hubspot is my employer and the creator of the HubSpot Inbound Marketing System for small and medium businesses that includes a suite of lead generation and lead tracking software, lead nurturing software, SEO tools and marketing analytics.

Cast & Credits:

Series idea: @mvolpe
Producer and Director: @WoodyTondorf
Starring: @KylePaice, @natehinchey
Guest Starring: @kylejames, @andypitre, @repcor and Richard DeAgazio.

Enjoy!

Don’t forget to see the forest, don’t forget about the leads…

Social media is great for having conversations, engaging new audiences and in general being social. But don’t forget to think about the bottom line that drives your business. It’s easy to get lost amongst the trivial aspects of social media and focus on what matters, like generating leads.

Here are 5 simple things that will help you generate more leads from social media:

1. Get focused: It’s easy to feel the pressure to grow a large following on social networks like Twitter. A smaller but more relevant follower base will do more for you than a large audience not related to your business or industry. At the same time make sure your conversations mix the social and business aspects of your online identity. After all you are in it for networking as well!

2. Answer questions: A great way to build trust and authority without being aggressive with a sales pitch is to answer questions. Listen in on conversations about your industry and answer questions. At times it might be relevant to add a link back to your content to help out the person and generate some qualified traffic for yourself.

3. Add a profile link: Include a link to your company website or your personal blog from your social media profiles. While engaging an audience through relevant conversations, that provides an opportunity for them to learn more about you and your business.

4. Share your own content: A lot of people are happy retweeting content from popular blogs and thought leaders. When you read something share worthy, write an interesting response and share your own links. Not only will it position you are a thought leader, again it will generate new traffic and leads for your business.

5. Use Calls-to-actions: While asking people to sign up for your product or service may not work well, adding a trial or demo call-to-action button on your thought leadership blog post will get your conversions. Make sure that all your content has some call-to-action on it that links to a landing page.

Are you ready to see the forest? How do you plan to use social media for lead generation? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

…Being Social!

This morning I came across this passionate post written by Todd Defren, PR innovator and the principle at Shift Communications.

His observation of the “lack of social” in social media while not new, reminded me of a story my Uncle shared with me about his teacher, Sri Satya Sai Baba.

People visiting Baba would often say, “Baba, I want peace.” To that Baba’s response would be: “Take away “want” (desire), take away “I” (ego). And then there’s just peace.”

It seems like social media marketers and brand ambassadors (me included) tend to easily get forget that as we get caught up in the MEDIA part of social media.  How can we make a conscious effort to ditch the promotional aspects of the space and just focus on people?

So taking a key from Baba, let’s remember to: take away Media (often our agenda), take away marketing (purpose of our work) and just be social.  As Todd aptly titled his post, It’s About the People, Stupid!

If you want to be social, you can connect with me @prashantkaw on twitter!

On Friday I did a webinar with Ellie Mirman on how to promote your business blog using the HubSpot software. I framed the webinar into three ways to think about blog promotion:

1. Passive promotion: The notion here is that you can optimize your site using relevant keywords and over time you will passively attract more and more visitors to your blog.

2. Automated promotion: Thanks to RSS it is now easy to include the feed for your blog into various social media profiles. Above and beyond that the HubSpot software can automatically post tweets and status updates to various social media profiles. This is how technology have help with automated promotion.

3. Active promotion: This is the crux of blog promotion and we touch on how to interact with community and use social networking sites such as LinkedIn to answer questions and get your blog out there.

Enjoy the slides above of view the entire recorded presentation on the hubspot product webinars page.

I recently reread Illusions: Adventures Of A Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach for the first time in over 15 years.  It is an amazing book and I think everyone should read it!  But, the most inspiring part is the parable in the introduction.

The story starts with a messiah narrating the lives of creatures living along the bottom of a great river.  All those creatures clung for dear life to the bottom of the river to avoid getting swept by the swift current.

One creature however feeling bored and directionless clinging the same old way decided it was time to let go and trust the river current.  His companions warned him and laughed at him but he let go anyway and was instantly dashed against some hard rocks.

However he refused to cling to the bottom and soon the current of the river picked him up again and he started to move downstream.  To all the creatures who lived downstream to who he was a stranger he appeared to be miracle creature and a messiah flying in the current like no other but of course knew better.

A sea of change is taking place in how internet marketing is being done today.  Most companies are sticking to the same old ways of reaching their prospects by barraging them with emails, direct mailers and telemarketing calls, interrupting their daily routines.  However these techniques are not effective and are often detrimental to the marketers.

The new marketing requires us to let go of the old ways (you can go back whenever you like) but you need to experience where the river is going and trust it.  The river in question is 1) how the internet is transforming and becoming flat, allowing smaller and larger companies to compete on equal footing in search engines. 2)  It’s how people are trusting each others’ recommendations in social media to discover new products and services.  3) It’s how companies are creating remarkable content that is being shared in social media and helping them to get found.

Sometimes we just have to trust that the river knows where it is going and let go.  Fellow marketers clinging to the old ways may think you are a fringe case, may discount you as a radical or even choose to worship you as messiah but you know better that it really is all about trusting the river.  It’s time to change our marketing and go with the flow.

How have you changed your marketing recently?  Please share your thoughts in the comments.

In Architecture school we debated the importance of form versus function. Does form follow function or is it the other way around? That’s a problem as tricky as the chicken and the egg issue. However what everyone will agree on is that both form and function are integral to building. In very few fields do art and science come together such as in Architecture. At the end of the day the field of Architecture is like a continuum with the art (form) at one extreme and the science (function) at the other just like form and function.

The same goes for Marketing. Today Marketing is on the continuum of the arts such as copy writing, messaging, imagery on one end and technology on the other end. I cannot imagine marketing without technology today. Most traditional forms of marketing have some component of technology whether it is using displays at trade shows or embedding urls in direct mail.

With that said, simply, markitechture.com is about the architecture of marketing. What are the building blocks of any marketing campaign or strategy?  What went into the execution?  Although my experience and knowledge is more on the technology end of the continuum I will try and provide commentary and insight on the form side too. Also I will try to go a level deeper whenever possible to talk about conceptual themes such as lead nurturing, new media strategies, etc.  I hope you will find the material helpful and engaging. Thanks for surfing in — Let’s go build!