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.
Posted by Brian Cantwell on Wed, Jun 17, 2009 @ 12:29 PM
As I was writing my post on why I use Twitter, I was curious to see if the Twittersphere shared my views. Do most twitterers use Twitter to find and filter information? Do they use it to connect with friends? Do they use it as a content distribution platform?
In true Twitter fashion, I tweeted my question and got several enlightening responses. Keep the conversation going, either in the comments below, or on twitter with the hashtag #whytwitter.
Ten Reasons to Use Twitter
@LoriOnTwitter: To obtain skills for becoming social media marketing specialist, meet and listen to experts, find webinar learning opportunities
@timlawton: makes me feel like I have friends
@annverbin: To keep up with friends and find out about interesting links
@mgeorgieva: because you become more creative in coming up with new ideas to attract followers. You actively look for news and events!
@MikeNorman22: So many reasons! As a centralized news aggregator, a platform to publish new ideas, and a vehicle for social change.
@elizaburke: I use twitter to get news and information in real time
@hmryan72: I tweet because often the replies I get, make me laugh out loud when I really need a break in my day.
@nonprofitadvice: to try and get ahead of the technology curve. It's about what is next not what was.
@matthewglidden: Top Twitter reason: Close-to-instant tackling of problems
@DhruvMehrotra: Twitter is part educational part entertainment for me. As a supplement to news, it helps me quickly learn happenings in my area of interest
Posted by Brian Cantwell on Wed, Jun 17, 2009 @ 10:44 AM
Yesterday my MIT Sloan classmate @amandapey (check out her b-school blog) tweeted about a study that compared click-through rates on links posted to Twitter and links posted to Facebook. Twitter blew Facebook away with nearly double the click-throughs, despite having 7x smaller test audience. That got me thinking about why I use Twitter and what I find so useful about it.
One of the biggest problems I have as a b-school student is information consumption. When I was working as a consultant, I could focus my information consumption efforts on general news (NYT) and sources relevant to my job - mainly marketing (AdAge, Colloquy), consumer products (GMA Smart Brief), and the 5-10 weekly newsletters and research findings that my company sent out.
For me, the whole point of b-school has been to broaden my knowledge base and experiment with multiple areas of expertise. In order to stay on top of the most relevant information I need to consume information on a much wider variety of topics than ever before. RSS feeds, daily emails, article aggregation sites like Digg and Reddit, and the major news media outlets are either overwhelming or insufficient. In this age of distributed information, there really was no one-stop-shop source for the best content... until Twitter.
vs. 
Cartoon Credit
I go to Twitter to click on links. By following people who represent all of my interests (entrepreneurship, the MIT $100K, business school, social media, web/tech, marketing, the red sox, boston events, wine, and, of course, my future wife) and setting up saved searches for my favorite topics, I get a real-time stream of relevant information so that I can stay on top of trends and the latest news. I'm not surprised that Twitter had a much higher link click-through rate than Facebook, because that is exactly what I use Twitter for. I log in to Facebook to see what my friends are up to. I log in to Twitter to find and filter information - and information usually comes in the form of a link.
As I've mentioned before, I wish I had known about Twitter before b-school so that I could have engaged with the MBA community before setting foot on campus. If you are in b-school or heading there in the fall, I would definitely recommend getting active on Twitter. Hopefully you'll find it as useful as I have.
Posted by Brian Cantwell on Fri, Jun 05, 2009 @ 03:23 PM
With the completion of exams and the start of my summer internship, the time has come to officially close the books on MIT Sloan MBA Year 1. The year was exhausting, exhilarating, and full of surprises. For all you future MBAs out there, here at the things I wish I had known a year ago.
Five things I wish I had known before b-school:
- The economy would tank: Knowing that the U.S. economy would completely implode within the first three weeks of b-school would have opened up all kinds of opportunities. I could have funded my MBA with the proceeds of shorting the S&P in July of 2008 and covering my position in late November. I could have postponed my MBA by a year, banked another year of salary (assuming I would not have fallen victim to layoffs), and bought a house on the cheap. Most importantly, I could have read up on MBSs, CDOs, and tranches, so that I actually understood what was going on when the financial crisis went down. As it turned out, I learned all I needed to know from this PowerPoint.
- This is not college 2.0, this is b-school: B-school looks and feels like college - you are on a college campus, enjoying a student ID (great for discounts!), taking classes, participating in extracurriculars, and cranking out homework - but don't be fooled! Top three differences between b-school and college: Class (you can't skip it and you have to participate), Speed (it is all over in two years and you don't want to waste a minute), and Reality (you'll study and work with real companies, you'll try to get a real job, your classmates have done really incredible stuff in the real world).
- Twitter is awesome: I wish I had jumped on the twitter bandwagon well before arriving at Sloan so that I could have followed current students and gotten an unfiltered sense of what was in store for me. Fortunately I jumped on the twitter bandwagon early in the semester thanks to getting to know @hubspot through a marketing project. if you want to follow some interesting Sloan tweets, check out @mitsloanies or you can follow me.
- Math is hard: Upon arriving at b-school, I had K-12 math under my belt and some undergraduate statistics. Being a History major in college, I never fully appreciated the complexities of regressions, Monte Carlo simulations, and covariances. Thanks to the help of my awesome Core Team, I somehow managed to make it through courses like Data, Models, and Decisions, and Economics for Business Decisions. My advice for admits, bone up on your math skills (or acquire some new ones).
- Planning a wedding during b-school is harder than math: Don't get married during b-school. When my fiancee and I decided on July 2009 for our wedding, we thought we were being smart. The date would fall smack in the middle of my first and second year and the planning would take up a few hours every week or two during year one. Now remember, at the time I thought that the economy would be solid, b-school would be like college, and I wouldn't need to know math. In retrospect, adding the stress of wedding planning to the stress of a first year in b-school and planning a summer internship around a wedding and honeymoon weren't the brightest ideas. So, a word of warning to all you engaged future MBAs, elope now or wait until you graduate.
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