Posted by Brian Cantwell on Tue, Jun 30, 2009 @ 03:58 PM
Today my summer employer HubSpot launched their latest viral video, a hilarious twist on the ED ads from Viagra, Levitra, Cialis, and others. I was fortunate enough to take a bit role, providing the doctor-esque voiceover at the end. Check out the video. Who knows, you may start to experience overwhelming lead flow!
UPDATE: I'm (officially) a
HubSpot Viral Video Star!
Posted by Brian Cantwell on Mon, Jun 29, 2009 @ 07:33 PM
A few days I ago I wrote about my mission to return to the first page of Google results for my own name. The Facebook profile of an anonymous Brian Cantwell had risen to the top of the Google results, knocking my Twitter page page to the purgatory of SEO: Google's second page.
Well, the mission was shortlived, and successful beyond my wildest dreams. I'm happy to report that at some point over the weekend, my Twitter page made it back into the first 10 results. Also interesting was that the anonymous Mr. Facebook Brian Cantwell fell off the face of Google entirely, and results for more deserving Brian Cantwells like Mr. IMDB Brian Cantwell and Mr. Brian Cantwell-Smith took his place.
Even more encouraging was that today my Facebook profile arrived on the first page of Google results, surpassing my Twitter page to be the top result for this Brian Cantwell (maybe that vanity url was a good idea?).
What have I learned from this Google whirlwind? Here are my three takeaways:
- Keep the content coming - My Twitter page's slip from the first page of Google results coincided with a few days where I wasn't tweeting as often. Frequently posting interesting content, whether as links on Twitter or as posts on a blog, is a must for getting found on Google.
- Open up your Facebook profile - Until this past weekend, my Facebook profile was closed off to Google. This made sense back in the earlier days of Facebook when their privacy settings weren't very robust, but now you can customize the privacy settings for every aspect of your profile. You have nothing to lose by making your Facebook profile available to search results and simply restricting your public profile to the information you want to show the world. For example, my public profile is limited to my goofy photo and things that I like (am a fan of). It looks like this:
- Don't Get Caught Up in the Day-to-Day - I know this seems like major hypocrisy since I clearly got caught up in the day-to-day last Friday and decided to take on an internet full of Brian Cantwells as a result. But, I've learned that it doesn't pay to obsess over the daily shifts in Google rank, particularly for infrequently searched terms like my own name. A much better use of time is developing and sticking to a content creation and SEO plan that works over the long term. As long as I can get a page related to this Brian Cantwell on the first page of Google results for "Brian Cantwell" on most days, then I am not going to sweat the occasional day when someone like Mr. Facebook Brian Cantwell grabs my spot.
Mission accomplished!
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.
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 Thu, Jun 11, 2009 @ 08:38 AM
It took a week and a half, but I have just about settled into the working rhythms of my b-school summer internship. You would think that after four years in the working world pre-MBA, I would slide right back into the daily grind - but it was harder than I expected. Even after nine short months of b-school, my physical and mental state had completely reconditioned to a new way of life.
In short, work is not school. Here are some of the key differences:
- Cubicles: One of the best things about school is that there are no cubicles. At Sloan we've got tables, benches, conference rooms, couches, lounges, classrooms, and (of course) chairs with built-in desks, but no cubes. At work, it's all about the cubes.
- Alarm: My alarm goes off at the same time every day. This is a novelty. During the school year, my alarm never went off at the same time for more than two days in a row.
- Diversity: In b-school, everyone is around the same age, taking the same classes, and pursuing similar business-oriented interests. Work is more diverse in that you have colleagues with a wider range of skills, experiences, and aspirations, but less diverse in the number of languages I hear being spoken in the hallways.
- Homework: You don't have any. Sweet!
- Responsibility: You are doing real work with real implications and real people depending on you. This is pretty cool because it makes work significantly more fulfilling than school. The downside is that there is more pressure. My advice, learn to love the pressure, or become a life-long student.
- Boss: A real person depending on you. See "Responsibility."
- Money: Getting paid is awesome. I didn't realize how much I missed it.
I've also learned that assimilation back into the paid workforce is much easier when you have a great office environment to ease your transition. This summer I'm working for HubSpot, a venture-backed internet marketing software startup in Cambridge, MA. HubSpot's office culture is high-energy, but with a funky and friendly vibe. While I do sit in a cube, at least the wall is painted bright orange and I've got an IKEA floor lamp next to me to spice things up. Even better is the stocked kitchen which boasts free soda, coffee, granola bars, and even Gushers (yeah, I hadn't seen those since middle school either).
So, no matter how accustomed to the workforce you think you are before coming to b-school, you will become unaccustomed to it during your first year. Give yourself some time to reengage with office culture when you start your summer internship, and don't worry if it takes a little while to feel normal again.
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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