Posted by Brian Cantwell on Fri, Jun 26, 2009 @ 11:22 AM
Dear Brian Cantwell,
Yes, you Brian Cantwell. The
one with the Facebook page and the friends named Alfio Previtera, Jillian Scarangelli, Sam Fran Scavuzzo, and Lydia Hernandez.
I don't know you Mr. Facebook Brian Cantwell, but your recent presence as the number two Google result
when someone searches for "Brian Cantwell" has not gone unnoticed. I don't remember you ever showing up before when I've
self-Googled, yet you have miraculously risen from the depths of Google to take the number two spot and (incidentally) knocked me from the coveted first page.
Since I started using Google in 2001, information about me has been relegated to the far reaches of Google page results. I was ok with that, because the folks at the top of the "Brian Cantwell" ranks seemed like they deserved the honor. This past April, my
twitter profile finally made it to the first page of Google results for "Brian Cantwell." One of my goals over the past year has been to expand my online presence, and the self-Google page rank is one small (albeit self-indulgent) indicator of my progress. My current effort is this blog,
B-School with Brian, which is still very much a work in progress. I'm working hard at creating and optimizing interesting content for current and future b-school students, as well as folks interested in entrepreneurship and marketing.
There are many Brian Cantwells in the world. On Facebook alone there are 27. I've come to grips with being less accomplished and less interesting than several of these Brian Cantwells. Some of my favorite name-mates are:
- Mr. Stanford Brian Cantwell is a very accomplished Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford. He is literally a rocket scientist, and entirely deserving of top billing on Google.
- Mr. IMDB Brian Cantwell looks like a pretty skilled digital artist in the movie business, bringing his talents to blockbuster films like Iron Man, Wall-E, and The Matrix Reloaded.
- Mr. Brian Cantwell-Smith, a CS genius with multiple MIT degrees, has several publications on computer science, metaphysics, epistemology, and other things that I can't begin to understand. I'm proud to share an MIT connection with Mr. Brian Cantwell-Smith and, despite the hyphen in his last name, I happily cede my Google rank to his accomplishments.
- Mr. Political Donor Brian Cantwell gave $9,300 in political donations in 2008. As a cash-strapped MBA student, I can't afford $9 in political donations, much less $9,000, so Mr. Political Donor Brian Cantwell has my respect for his political involvement.
- Mr. Travels with Brian Cantwell writes fantastic travel posts for the Seattle Times. My favorite post is one where Mr. Travels with Brian Cantwell actually discovers Mr. Stanford Brian Cantwell through Google and the two Brian Cantwells go to Ireland together to reconnect with their shared ancestry. Coincidentally, I'll be in Ireland for my honeymoon this summer and I plan to visit the same ruined church and Cantwell Fada statue in County Kilkenny that these two Brian Cantwells explored two years ago.
Which brings me back to you, Mr. Facebook Brian Cantwell. How have you risen to number two so quickly and with seemingly minimal effort? Where is your remarkable content? Where is your personal website, your blog, your twitter, your vanity url? Why, of the 27 Brian Cantwell profiles on Facebook, is your profile tops? Please accept my humble apologies if you are, in fact, any of the Brian Cantwells mentioned above. Yet, for some reason I doubt you are.
So, Mr. Facebook Brian Cantwell, I am writing to inform you that your unintentional challenge has been accepted. Inspired by the tremendous accomplishments and remarkable content produced by my name-mates Mr. Stanford Brian Cantwell, Mr. IMDB Brian Cantwell, Mr. Brian Cantwell-Smith, and Mr. Travels with Brian Cantwell, I will be employing all the weapons in my inbound marketing arsenal to take you out. I am on a mission to regain first-page status and I have you in my sights.
Game on,
Posted by Brian Cantwell on Thu, Jun 25, 2009 @ 09:00 AM
As a summer intern at HubSpot, I've been drinking a lot of "inbound marketing" kool-aid over the past few weeks. For the uninitiated, inbound marketing is a new way of looking at marketing that focuses on getting found by customers through the web rather than putting tremendous effort and expense into finding customers through direct mail, TV, magazines, etc. There is a great article on the topic on HubSpot's blog. This paradigm shift in the marketing world has been generating some press and HubSpot (a startup that sells software to help small businesses with their inbound marketing) is at the center of the conversation.
The son of a lifelong marketer, I was skeptical about the efficacy of inbound marketing. As a kid, I had loved checking out the TV and print ads my Dad brought home. These ads were placed on TV shows and in magazines where my Dad's company was hoping to find customers. The ads were funny or catchy, and the whole process seemed to work pretty well. I didn't become an inbound marketing convert until we put it into practice this past year at the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition.
The MIT $100K is similar to the small businesses that HubSpot serves. We have a tiny marketing team and extremely limited resources (the vast majority of the money we raise from sponsors goes toward cash prizes for winning teams). In order to get the most bang for our marketing buck, we need to make sure that our marketing efforts will be successful in connecting with the right audience. We faced a particularly difficult challenge this past year in promoting and raising money for an Entrepreneurship Competition in the face of a financial crisis.
Sombit Mishra and I, now Co-Managing Directors of the MIT $100K, got our start on the $100K's Elevator Pitch Contest marketing team. One of our first projects was to create a series of promotional videos that we posted to Facebook and YouTube in an effort to drum up excitement for the event.
The videos pulled in hundreds of views and were very successful in increasing the number of participants and attendees at the Elevator Pitch Contest. This experience drove home one of the core lessons of inbound marketing - create remarkable content. We continued to create funny, inspirational, or informative videos throughout the year. I've created a WebVoter with links to all the MIT $100K Videos. Check them out and vote for your favorite!
Once we had remarkable content, whether in the form of videos or relevant contest information on our website, we promoted it through multiple channels. Over the course of the year, we increasingly relied on social media channels like our Twitter account to publish information and notifications. We also created landing pages for individual contests (Elevator Pitch, Executive Summary, and Business Plan) and optimized our website so that mit100k.org is the top or near-top result for Google searches related to MIT, entrepreneurship, and business plan contests.
Thanks to our inbound marketing efforts, the $100K enjoyed a record year. The 2009 MIT $100K Business Plan Contest had 260 entries, the most ever in the contest's 20 year history. But, we still have a long way to go. The $100K could do a better job of creating remarkable content to help student entrepreneurs at MIT and beyond build and launch their businesses. In the next year look for the MIT $100K to re-launch our website, start a blog, post relevant elevator pitch, executive summary, and business plan resources, and of course continue to roll out more hilarious videos.