I had the opportunity to visit Brian Halligan at the Hubspot office in Cambridge, MA on Tuesday (April 27th, 2010). This is my second visit to Hubspot and the first time they were about 100 people smaller at a different office. Now they have outgrown their new space in Kendal Square a stone’s throw from MIT and Microsoft’s NERD (New England Research and Development) Center.

Brian Halligan and Dean Whitney

Every available space seems to be filled with a bright looking nerd/bohemian worker with double flat screen monitors. Brian says they may have to move to “bunk cubes” if they keep growing as fast. Brian tells me they have a ‘no door’ policy and that no one, not even he, has a private office. In fact we found that the room we were to meet in was taken and there were no other conference rooms open so we met in the hall.

The reason for my visit was to talk to Brian about social media with my editor Bob Margolis for my book Zero to Social. Zero to Social is  about small to medium sized businesses and small divisional marketers that are gearing up to make their first social media efforts. They may never have used social media or perhaps tried a few things with limited success. The book is a guide to help them be successful. Brian is the perfect person to talk to. Not only is he a thought leader in the area of social media marketing, his company sells social media marketing products and services and he used social media marketing to achieve the amazing success Hubspot has experienced so far.

So here is the interview; would love to hear your comments.

Dean: Zero to Social is all about small and medium sized businesses or brand organizations starting with social media for the first time or with limited experience. At first look it can be a daunting task and without the right direction there are many wrong paths to take. Tell me about your observations of the marketing space.

Brian: What we have seen that works for these little guys is, it really is a pretty big change in the way they need to think. When it comes to small and medium businesses I think all this modern inbound marketing stuff really disproportionately benefits small guys relative to big guys.
So if there is a New Yorker cartoon, for example, and the New Yorker cartoon is really clever. It has a dog on a computer and there is another dog looking over his shoulder and the dog on the computer says to the other dog ‘the great thing about the Internet is that nobody knows you are a dog.’ And it’s sort of very true. You don’t have to be ESPN you don’t have to be GE or some big brand.  If you get interesting ideas they can really really spread quite easily with very low friction on the Internet. And if I think about the evolution of how this stuff all worked. If you started a company ten years ago and you wanted to kind of spread the word, marketers wanted to spread the word, it was very expensive to do that. You had to pay for a lot of PR and buy a lot advertising. And then you think about it today, the friction in the marketplace is much much lower. Good ideas spread really really fast. Like for example, a good movie comes out on Friday night and by Saturday morning everybody knows if it’s good or not because the Twitterati sort of make it or break it. And just the friction is so much lower for good ideas, whereas ten years ago the friction was so much higher. But ten years ago you could sort of buy your way through all that friction with PR and advertising but today you can buy as much PR and advertising as you want but If your ideas aren’t remarkable it just won’t spread. So I think its a great time to be a small business, its a great time to be an entrepreneur. Because the internet sort of does level that playing field for you from a marketing perspective.

Dean: Brian, when I started blogging a few years ago it had seemed kind of pointless because I hadn’t written a single blog article, no body was going to my website. So it looks kind of monumental, when you’re not doing anything. It’s like having a Twitter account with no followers and having a blog with no articles or maybe one article and no comments. What do you say to the guy just starting out?

Brian: Yup, I say a couple things. So I think its really easy to stick your toe in the water in this stuff and its one of those things where the toe in the water doesn’t work. You kinda need to jump in up to your waist. You don’t have to jump in up to your head you need to jump in up to your waist because the toe in the water just, I’ve seen it not work for so many people, it just does not work. And the key to success is creating remarkable interesting content. I use remarkable I stole from Seth Godin. If you want to create content on your site that other people will remark about. And you need to set aside some time on your schedule.

So when we first started Hubspot for example, my co founder and I, would write, you know, two articles a week each on the blog so I would block out four hours a week to create content and essentially optimize it for Google and promote it on the social media sphere. And that was enough to get us cooking. The four hours a week each really got us cranking. And the interesting thing about all those blog articles in my mind, so lets say we write a blog for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The article on Monday we got a few links into it. Those links sent us traffic. Those links told Google we were important and sent the link up the rankings. And we did the same thing Tuesday, same things Wednesday, same thing Thursday. And the way that content behaves in my mind is like compounding interest in your bank account, in your 401K. That content stays around forever, those links stay around forever, those blog articles rank in Google forever and we are still getting lots  and lots of leads from those early blog articles that we wrote in the first month at Hubspot and its the complete opposite of advertising where you’re just throwing money after money and it doesn’t scale particularly well but this idea of content as compounding interest should be very appealing to the small business owner. But my advice to the small business owner is you gotta just slice out some time in your week to do it and you should go to your schedule and block it out you can’t just sneak it in between other stuff you cant just cross other stuff off your list or sneak it in at night. You need to block it in your schedule and I’d say you need at least 4 hours a week to create that content, optimize that content and promote it on the social media sphere. The toe doesn’t work you gotta get both legs and maybe even your waist in there.

Dean: So tell us a little about how you promote the content.

Brian: Sure, so I think of it all as a three step process.
Step 1: Creating the remarkable content.
Step 2 is optimizing it it. And it used to be an SEO optimize. Now you SEO optimize and SMO optimize (social media optimization). And so you gotta get your keywords in there, and you have to be a master writer of titles. The title has to be really brilliant and catchy so that when it is flying by on someone’s Twitter feed or flying by in an RSS feed or flying by on Facebook somebody actually wants to click on it.
And then the 3rd step is promoting it. And what we do to promote it is write an interesting article. Every article we write we then post it to lots of different places. We post it on Twitter, to our personal accounts, to our corporate account and then we post it on our personal and our corporate Facebook Fan Page, we post it on our LinkedIn group, we’ll post it basically anywhere we can where there is communities of people who might be interested in it and can help us spread it. And what’s nice about Hubspot now for us is, we’ve been added sort of up to our waist for three years now, is your leverage really increases over time, so the content is leveraged like compounded interest, but the following or the reach acts like compounding interest. For example, when we first started it was Dharmesh and I and lets say a week into our blog we had twenty subscribers and we had twenty Twitter followers and twenty Facebook fans. Wind the clock forward a year we had a couple thousand subscribers to the blog, a couple thousand followers on Twitter, a couple hundred fans on Facebook. You wind the clock forward today and we have 27,000 blog subscribers, 100,000 Twitter followers, 20,000 Facebook fans, 20,000 LinkedIn group members. That leverage is incredible, so every time we post an article today relative to posting it three years ago, it just got so much more leverage because we post it to Twitter and 100,000 people get exposed to it  opposed to 20 people and that’s 100,000 people who could potentially retweet it, it’s just the leverage is tremendous and it’s compounding interest in terms of content and compounding interest in terms of reach. And that’s kind of getting back to what we were talking about earlier is that sticking your toe in doesn’t work. It’s a patient man’s game actually because the compounding interest. You start your 401K and you’re looking at your account every week, it just sucks, you know. There’s nothing really there. But when you wait a year, two year’s it’s like “wow!” something interesting is happening in this account because it’s just building on top of it so it’s a patient man’s game. The way I like to think about it is a little like learning to play a guitar.
Step 1 is learn how to hold the thing.
Step 2 is learn how to play a G cord and your fingers are like bleeding learning how to play that. And then learning how to play a C cord and your fingers are bleeding.
And then step 4 is learning how to combine the the cords together.
And step 5 is combine them in a way that is sort of melodic and sounds good
You absolutely sound horrific up until step 5 and you suck incredibly badly, but once you get up to step 5 you actually sound kind of good. And I feel like it’s the same with all this Internet marketing stuff. You start your blog and there’s just nobody there. You start your Twitter account and there is nobody there. And you start your Facebook page. And you are nickle and diming your way but you have to stay with it and then it all comes together but it takes 4 or 5 months until it starts coming together.

Dean: Now you probably weren’t just promoting your own content. What did you do to sort of lift up other people or make connections?

Brian: Yup, we were, both of us, I think to get this stuff going, and I learned most of this from my co-founder Dharmesh, you have to think like a publisher or think like a newspaper publisher. So what a newspaper editor would do is he is reading blogs and newspapers all day looking for ideas and so I would spend a reasonable amount of my day looking at my RSS reader looking at different blogs, looking at different articles and when I find something interesting I would promote it by Twitter or Facebook or a LinkedIn group so other people can collaborate around it. And when other people are seeing that I am putting good stuff out there, that’s not completely self-promotional that provides me with a lot of credibility and they start following me and I increase my following. So we try to not over promote ourselves so lets say we put five articles out into the mix and then maybe one article about ourselves or our blog, we try to mix it up because if you try to over promote yourself, no one wants to help you promote your product – it just doesn’t work.

It’s remarkably similar to what your mom and dad told you when you were younger. If you walk around a cocktail party and all you do is talk about yourself and you are a big self promoter, you’re not going to be a very popular person, it turns out.

I think BookFree is really good and Long Tail are really good sources for what you’re doing. And I sort of think of that for our blog, so think about our blog, we’ll write ten articles in a given week and we won’t mention Hubspot in those ten articles, we may sneak it into the eleventh in a very subtle way, like a graph from Hubspot. If you start self promoting, people see it very quickly. And I think where these small business owners get in trouble is let’s say you’re 40 or 50 years old and you’ve been selling and marketing your whole life and every atom and every fiber in your body says “sell, sell, sell!” so if I’m going to write a blog article, I’m going to write about my product! And it’s exactly the opposite of what works on the Interent. It’s counterintuitive and it’s hard to get your mind around it and it feels kind of Communist, sort of free love but it actually works. When you self promote, nobody wants to link to a blog article that is talking about your product or that’s pimping your product. But if you write about your industry that is remarkable and interesting, boy that can really spread.

Dean: I have a guy I’m working with, he’s a CEO of an investment group. He has about 5 different $10 million companies and I’m showing him how to set up these Twitter accounts and he says “Who’s going to do this? I’m not gonna do this.” It seems ridiculous to him. Were you at a point where you thought it looked kind of ridiculous or it didn’t make sense or did you get it right away?

Brian: I feel like it made sense right away. I’m not sure why. I think it’s because I came from a tech background, a web 2.0 background. But certainly if you are a fifty year old lawyer or investment guy you’re scratching your head, its so different. The industry, marketing, is really changing. I think about marketing today and I think about the horse and buggy industry. So in 1910 there were 16,000 horse and buggy companies between wheel companies and horse companies and whatever. 16,000 businesses. Of those 16,000 businesses, there is one left today, a company called Timkin (?). The industry just went through a massive transformation. And I think marketing is going through a similar transformation. It’s just that stuff that worked in 1980, spending all the money you’ve got on advertising, interrupting people in their living rooms with TV ads, interrupting people in their cars with radio ads, interrupting people while they read the newspaper with newspaper ads, it’s over, or it’s almost over. There’s gotta be a new way and what I think of the new way is to publish your way to success, pull them in through Google and blogs and social media.

So I think you guys know Mike Volpe, he’s the VP of Marketing. After we hired him we hired a string of publishers. We hired a guy named Rick Burnes, he was from the New York times. Then we hired Rebecca Corliss who was a student right out of BU, she basically had a theatre art, you know, actress – she does the music videos. She is very talented and has a marketing part to her. Basically her full time job is to create videos. And then we hired a guy named Dan Zarella who is a very active blogger and then we hired a guy named Kip Bogner who was a very active blogger so we were hiring these publishers and I think to win today you publish your way to success. It scales a lot better than buying advertising.

Dean: Yeah that’s kind of what I ran into. I’ve had clients try to ask me what it would cost to do all this for them and I try to talk them out of it. Like listen, hire someone who focuses just on creative content but because it’s so close to your core competency, you can’t just outsource all of it.

Brian: Yeah it’s hard for them to teach you how to be an expert in their industry and write something really thoughtful.

Dean: Well also then you cross the line with what you need to publish on their behalf. The content needs to come from the person not an outside agency.

Brian: I just think it’s like, you can’t outsource that. This is your marketing, this is marketing now. You can’t completely outsource it, somebody’s got to dig in and figure it out.

Brian: What I think is remarkable, what always surprises me is somebody will have a very standard website, a nice looking website, it’s beautiful, about their product and then one of their engineers or their employees will start a blog about their industry that is completely separate for it and before you know it, that blog is outranking you and it costs tons of money to build, there is a huge art into the design of it and some kid whose writing in his parents house is absolutely killing him in Google. Happens all the time.

Dean: What do you think about some of the sites that, like Microsoft built those Execute Tweets and the IdeaStorm or the MyStarbucks is the sort of destination sites for social collaboration. Execute Tweets is almost like they created a site for propaganda. So its almost like they follow CEOs and they did it with all this people power campaign.

Brian: I think that’s really cool.

Dean: Now IdeaStorm is a little different it’s like idea management, basically so people can have ideas and people can see the progress of that idea.

Brian: I think they’re great. I mean when I think of all this stuff, it’s like when Tim Burners  Lee came up with the whole concept of the web and it was supposed to be this collaborative, interactive thing and it hasn’t; it’s been this one to many thing.  And in a couple years these websites are turning into this web collaboration thing so it’s the natural way in which the web’s gonna go and I think small business owners are trying to get their heads around that and they need to turn their websites into stuff like this that’s a hub on the Internet that pulls people in and is more collaborative, living, breathing, and pulls people in, other than just their product page. Their websites, most websites look like a billboard desert, you know people are driving by it, it looks really nice, but you know two people drive by it a day, and your mom’s one of them.

The whole open source software thing. If you think a company like Red Hat and MySequel and all these guys have taken these things to the extremes. So if you think about Red Hat they offer Linux free for the masses and what they do is open the top of their funnel in a massive way by giving this stuff away for free and then they use the packaging of it and the services around it and they upsell all these free users on it. I think that is how a small business user should think about it, but instead of being an open source software company they are an open source knowledge company or open source content company. Instead of giving the software away for free, they’re giving away their ideas for free on their blog or website.

That’s essentially what Hubspot does. If you think of Hubspot we have our blog, all these graders that are free, we’ve got inboundmarketing.com, and we give a bunch of free stuff away and the top of our funnel is huge. We get tons and tons of leads and the challenge for us is qualifying the leads and giving the right ones to the sales reps or nurturing them, not getting more, essentially. And that’s what I think you get when you do this stuff right is you really open the top of your funnel and that’s what the Internet has really opened the opportunity for. The nice thing about the Internet is there is tons of customers out there and you can use these tools to really open the top of your funnel.

Dean: Now when you think of all your target buyers, when you think about automobile buyers, there is only a certain portion of them that are influencers that you would actually ask for advice. Do you actually look at tactics to focus on influencers as opposed to the large majority?

Brian: We do. We do a little of both but we definitely pick out, for example, Guy Kawasaki, an influencer in our industry and we nurture our relationship through him through online means and also offline means. So just like there were influencers before, there is more influencers now.

The concept of the roladex is really changed so if you were at Digitas and you hire some hot shot and you have a roladex of 7 or 8 big ex accounts that you used to have that was super valuable and is still super valuable but now you want to hire someone like Dan Zarella whose got 20,000 Twitter followers and 40,000 blog subscribers. That’s the new roladex, the roladex has really changed.