A Good article that I found over at: MattShaw’s Blog. You should check out some of his other stuff.

Every so often you come across one of those strokes of brilliance that makes you ask the really important questions: Is there another way of doing things? Is everything I know about XYZ-topic completely wrong? Why aren’t we all doing this? (And, of course, why didn’t I think of that?)

Recently I came across one such idea. HubSpot, thought leadersextraordinaires in the inbound marketing realm, recently became the first B2B business ever to launch an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) to promote their products.

The premise is simple: HubSpot invented a company, Kronus Media, and told all of their followers that Kronus had issued a Cease & Desist order that forced HubSpot to shut down inboundmarketing.com, their thought leadership arm. The same day, HubSpot launched a Ning network — captaininbound.ning.com — dedicated to solving the mystery behind the evil Kronus Media and their motivations, and eventually to get inboundmarketing.com back up and running. To solve the mystery, the proprietor of the network (who goes by the name “Captain Inbound” to protect him/herself from violating a non-disclosure agreement) points out “clues” left on HubSpot’s various social media sites and asks people for help figuring out what they might mean.

Here’s why this is brilliant:

1. It’s instantly engaging. The Inbound Marketing University is shut down?! How could they do something like that?!
2. It requires subscription. Part of the fun of the game is discovering clues. Where are these clues? On HubSpot’s Facebook page, in their Twitter updates, on their blog, etc. In order to find these clues, you have to be actively monitoring HubSpot’s social media accounts.
3. It promotes followers. There is tremendous incentive to be an active part of a game like this for several reasons. First, it’s reasonably high-profile, which means that there are lots of eyeballs scanning your content. Second, participating in — never mind winning — the game gives you a chance to show off your analytical skills. And third, it levels the playing field for exposure. Anyone can find a clue, anyone can solve a riddle, and anyone can win the game. So why wouldn’t you participate?
4. It promotes an ideology. The very nature of this game is to pit those people interested in the Inbound Marketing University — who are, for the most part, modern and forward-thinking marketers — against Kronus Media, a company that represents the exact ideology against which Inbound Marketing rebels. The success of HubSpot as a company revolves around their ability to make people understand that this dichotomy exists, and that HubSpot’s side is the side to be on. This game helps to reinforce that idea.
5. It creates a positive sentiment. I don’t know what this game will do to drive business for HubSpot — I’m thinking it won’t drive much, but that’s me being skeptical. To be honest, though, I don’t know that HubSpot is thinking about this game in terms of ROI. Any return that they’ll get from this game will be entirely metaphysical in nature. There is an unspoken value in the number of times someone says, “Hey, did you hear about that cool game that HubSpot’s running?” To have the words “cool” and “HubSpot” in the same sentence, multiplied by a couple of thousand, adds up to the kind of achievement that they probably couldn’t have accomplished otherwise.
6. It happens in a natural environment. HubSpot isn’t asking you log into some third-party website to access the game. You don’t have to download anything, you’re not using some kind of game widget. You’re doing things that you were probably already doing: interacting with HubSpot on their blog and on Twitter and Facebook. You already do that (or if you don’t, it’s really easy to start doing it). So there’s no barrier to entry.

There are a lot of people who were upset about the way HubSpot launched the game. I’d like to address some of those concerns on Monday, if you’ll give me the weekend. In the mean time, tell me what you think about www.captaininbound.com — A cool game or a spectacular failure?

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This was in an article over at CNN: “Facebook calls this new social paradigm the “Open Graph,” and Zuckerberg called the shift “the most transformative thing we’ve ever done for the web.”"  We’ve been talking about this “Social Graph” on the blogosphere for what I feel like is at least 3 years now. And now Zuckerberg decides to talk about it in a press conference and everybody is all over him for his GREAT idea.  Oh, and Facebook added a “LIKE” button. Uhm.. you mean like the folks over at Digg and Stumbleupon did years ago? This whole shpeel that Zuckerberg went on about at his latest press conference is a guy just repeating what everyone else online has been talking about or doing for years, but because he’s an “icon” people NOT online are treating it like it’s fresh and new.  Same thing as Steve and the iPad.  Yes, it’s a cool device, yes, it is getting great reviews. But is honestly a large iPod Touch with a few new features, it is NOT a rocket car, or a transporter.

Sorry for this rant, but I really don’t like Zuckerberg.  His assertions that Facebook is going to topple Google is just for the moment absurd.  You have a social network. Yes, it is the most popular but let’s not trick ourselves into believing things that aren’t true.  Google has a sound biz plan with the assumption that someone searching for a product type might actually want to buy it.  Facebook? Just because I throw up a status update that “I loved my bike ride up Blue Mountain yesterday” does not mean that I’m in the mood to buy a new book.  I just do NOT see how social networks are going to become the next Amazon, or hulu.  Heck, I use Hootsuite and almost never even log in to Facebook to see

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I’m sure this isn’t a new topic, but I thought I would talk a little bit about brand management online for small businesses.  Many small businesses believe that because they are not using the internet that their business is not being talked about online. This is frankly stupid.  There are many sites out there like yelp and zagat that allow users to create profiles for businesses, services, restaurants, etc. and then vote on their experiences. Also people have their own blogs (like this one!) where they can rant and rave about the guy they bought their new car from or the mom & pop coffee shop they went to last week.  And this doesn’t include forums, wikis, twitters, facebooks, and what have you that let people say pretty much whatever they want.  In other words, just because you are not online talking about your small business doesn’t mean that other people aren’t.  To that end you need someway to monitor what people are saying about your company, or website (if you have one) online.  There are a couple of options here: 1. would be to spend every hour of every day doing google searches, crawling over tweets, facebook, yelp, and all of those other sites mentioned above 2. pay someone to do this for you 3. dupe an intern into doing this for you 4. pick up some software that you have to pay for to do it 5. use Google Alerts.  For most small businesses options 1-4 are pretty prohibitive.  So I’m gonna talk about Option 5.  Google Alerts. Alerts is a free system provided by Google that allows you to enter various keywords and then get either a daily digest or an instant email when something is posted with those keywords.  So what I usually do for my clients is to create a Google Alert with their company name inside of “”. This means that by and large if someone write an article, posts on a forum, etc with that company name I will get an email about it. (I usually create these an instant alerts as I want to know ASAP when someone comments about a client). Now sometimes these will not be talking about your business especially if you have a common word as your company name or if it is a common company name.  But the nice things is that these alerts work just like google so if the company was AlteredGames and it is based in Missoula, the alert would be “AlteredGames” + Missoula. This would return all mentions of AlteredGames and Missoula.  You could also add other identifiers so you knew it was your company.  Next I like to set up an alert or two that is a daily digest and is more concerned with the industry or area. So if we were doing a restaurant in Missoula, the alert might be: “local restaurants” + Missoula. This just lets me monitor what’s being said about the general area, and may provide some good places to drop a link or a comment about the business to help drive traffic.

These are just a few tips for a very powerful tool that Google provides. The biggest thing is just to remember, if you are doing your job right SOMEONE is talking about you online even if you aren’t. And in this day and age it is important if you are not the one leading the conversation that you are at least aware of what is being said.

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