Where’s the best place to work in Boston?  You guessed it – HubSpot!  At this morning’s 2010 Best Places to Work Awards breakfast at the Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, the Boston Business Journal announced HubSpot as the number one best place to work in Boston in the midsize companies category.  HubSpot, supported at the event by 12 enthusiastic members of its team, was up against some stiff competition for the top spot, competing against 19 other finalists including Google, who placed second. Read the Boston Business Journal feature article about HubSpot here.

"We really strive to build a unique and innovative culture at HubSpot, and our employees are a huge part of that," said HubSpot Founder and CEO Brian Halligan, who accepted the award on HubSpot’s behalf.  "One of the greatest things about working at HubSpot is the ability to help businesses improve and transform their marketing. Empowering our customers to be successful is a major factor in our employees' happiness, and without our customers, we wouldn't be here today. It’s hard to believe it’s only been 4 years since HubSpot was founded, and this recognition is truly an honor for us.”

HubSpot employees (AKA HubSpotters), now numbering over 160, are intelligent, hard-working, and team-oriented. They love HubSpot for its success, supportive leaders and co-workers, innovative and analytical culture and casual work environment, which boasts an office game room (foosball, ping pong or a beer, anyone?).  HubSpotters also enjoy no vacation policy, take pride in company-wide competitions such as Iron Chef HubSpot, and take part in HubSpot traditions such as a weekly internet marketing video podcast, HubSpot TV.

"It's an incredibly transparent work environment, and it's very laid back." said HubSpot Product Owner Karen Rubin, "There is a lot of joking and teasing that goes on in the office, making it a very comfortable place. Also, everyone here is brilliant, which makes it a lot of fun."

So, what do HubSpotters like best about working at HubSpot?  Other HubSpotters! In a recent employee survey conducted, HubSpot employees cited that their fellow co-workers were the key factors that made working at HubSpot so enjoyable.

HubSpot is an internet marketing software company founded four years ago in Cambridge, MA, whose inbound marketing software helps businesses get found online, generate more inbound leads and convert a higher percentage of those leads into paying customers.  HubSpot's software platform includes tools that allow professional marketers and business owners to manage search engine optimization, blogging and social media, as well as landing pages, lead intelligence and marketing analytics.  To date, more than 2,800 customers are using HubSpot's software to transform the way they market their products and services by leveraging the internet.

We're absolutely thrilled to be honored as the best place to work in Boston, so a huge thanks goes to our awesome employees, customers, partners, and the Boston Business Journal and its sponsors for recognizing HubSpot and putting together a fantastic event.

If a job at HubSpot sounds enticing, check out our available positions and apply today at http://www.hubspot.com/careers.

Watch the video of Brian accepting HubSpot's award below, find photos from the event in HubSpot's Flickr set, and learn more about HubSpot's culture here.

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For the second year in a row, we're pleased to announce HubSpot's recognition as an AlwaysOn East Top 100 company in the SaaS and Enterprise category.

The AOE100 represent the top emerging companies from the east coast that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technologies in on-demand computing, digital media and greentech.

To generate the list of winners, the AlwaysOn editorial team and its partners and industry experts across the globe sifted the entrepreneurial community to identify the top 100 private companies that are taking old notions of doing things and forging solutions that will lead to industry shake-up and huge value-creation opportunities.

The AlwaysOn East 100 awards is produced in conjunction with Venture Summit East, scheduled to take place June 21-23, 2010 at the Harvard Business School in Boston, where AlwaysOn East 100 winners will be officially honored.

Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot founder and chief technology officer, will also be attending Venture Summit East to present the keynote address, "What Every VC Should Know About Inbound Marketing," on the third day of the summit at 10:45 a.m. on June 23.  Click here to register for the summit to attend Dharmesh's keynote session.

HubSpot has also been recognized by AlwaysOn as a 2010 OnDemand 100 winner, a 2010 OnMedia 100 winner, a 2009 Global 250 winner and a 2009 East 100 winner. For a full list of HubSpot's award wins, visit our Internet Marketing Awards page.

HubSpot is very honored to be included on this year's list, among good company, and thanks AlwaysOn, its partners and the industry experts who selected HubSpot as a leading private company.

To check out the complete AlwaysOn East 100, visit http://www.aonetwork.com/node/65221.

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Since early March, we have been routing links within Direct Messages through our link service to detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of malware, phishing, and other dangers. Any link shared in a Direct Message has been wrapped with a twt.tl URL. Links reported to us as malicious are blacklisted, and we present users with a page that warns them of potentially malicious content if they click blacklisted links. We want users to have this benefit on all tweets.

Additionally, as we mentioned at our Chirp developer conference in April, if you want to share a link through Twitter, there currently isn't a way to automatically shorten it and we want to fix this. It should be easy for people to share shortened links from the Tweet box on Twitter.com.

To meet both of these goals, we're taking small steps to expand the link service currently available in Direct Messages to links shared through all Tweets. We're testing this link service now with a few Twitter employee accounts.

User Experience, Safety, and Value

When this is rolled out more broadly to users this summer, all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL. A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title. Ultimately, we want to display links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened link and lets you know where a link will take you.

In addition to a better user experience and increased safety, routing links through this service will eventually contribute to the metrics behind our Promoted Tweets platform and provide an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm—the way we determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting to users. We are also looking to provide services that make use of this data, an example would be analytics within our eventual commercial accounts service.

Early Developer Preview Comes First

As a first step, developers who create applications on the Twitter platform can now begin to prepare for this service. They will be able to choose how to display the wrapped links in a manner that is most useful, informative and appropriate for a given device or application. Our first step is a small one. We're rolling out wrapped links on a handful of accounts, including @TwitterAPI, @rsarver, and @raffi, to help developers test their code. Ultimately, every link on Twitter will be wrapped.

If you are already partial to a particular shortener when you tweet, you can continue to use it for link shortening and analytics as you normally would, and we'll wrap the shortened links you submit.

We’d like to thank our friends at .CO Internet SAS, the registry for the new .CO extension, for helping us secure t.co for use with this service. Links shared on Twitter will be safer, clearer, and more valuable.

Looking to improve the level of trust in your business' relationships and sales?

This Wednesday evening, HubSpot VP Sales Mark Roberge will be joining Charles Green to speak at the HBS Association of Boston event, "How to Win Sales and Influence People: The Art of Trust Based Selling."  Charles Green is author of the book Trust-Based Selling and is CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates.

The event, scheduled for this Wednesday, June 9 from 6 to 9 p.m. on the Harvard Business School campus, will seek to address the key principles of trust-based selling, which include:

• Why value propositions are overrated
• The power of reciprocity on influence, and where it appears in business
• Why individuals get seduced into trust-destroying behaviors
• Why trust-based selling doesn't draw down on trust-it creates it in the sales process itself
• Ten insights and practical tools that can improve the trust level in your business relationships and sales
  

As VP Sales, Mark has integrated trust based selling in each stage of the HubSpot sales methodology.  He will join Charles, who has spoken to, consulted for and conducted seminars about trusted relationships in business for a wide and global range of industries and functions, to discuss why trust plays such a powerful role in the art of selling.

For additional information and to register to attend Wednesday's event, visit http://www.hbsab.org/article.html?aid=346.

For a complete list of HubSpot's upcoming speaking engagements, check out the HubSpot Events Page.

Mark hopes to see you there! 

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"College of Marketing Knowledge," a new online TV show produced by Blue Wave Marketing & Promotions, an agency that offers creative, interactive marketing solutions, recently released a new episode featuring HubSpot and CEO Brian Halligan.

In the 21-minute episode, Brian speaks with show host, John Moran, to discuss inbound marketing and the transformative nature of the internet as well as HubSpot's vision for helping businesses take advantage of new online technologies to get found and attract more customers.  Watch the full episode here.

The "College of Marketing Knowledge" series seeks to educate viewers about the latest media and marketing trends.  The bi-weekly program goes on location to showcase business leaders who have successfully pioneered the development and use of new media and marketing strategies.

In two weeks, tune in for an additional "College of Marketing Knowledge" episode featuring HubSpot VP Sales Mark Roberge. (UPDATE: Mark's interview is now live!)

Watch all "College of Marketing Knowledge" episodes at http://www.bluewavemarketing.com/marketingnews/bwcmk.htm.

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Yesterday, we began an experiment here at HubSpot when we shut down Inbound Marketing University as a part of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) that will be running over the next couple of weeks. A day later, we have a lot to think about, considering reactions ranging from the very excited to the very upset.

This is the first ARG ever done in the B2B and software world, and breaking new ground is always risky. But we also believe that constantly experimenting is important. In fact, taking risks and sharing our results with the community has helped us build that trust in the first place. We would not be doing our jobs if we stopped taking risks, and we will make more mistakes in the future, for sure.

Did this go as well as we had planned? No way! It was not, and will never be, our goal to break the trust of our customers and fans.

We apologize for misleading IMU community members. Please understand that we never meant to break anyone's trust or waste anyone's time. The game was meant to be a fun marketing experiment.

For those who are completing IMU education and certification, the www.InboundMarketing.com website is now back up. 

We also want to apologize to the ARGing community for posting this article, potentially breaking the suspension of disbelief.  At this point, it is much more important to acknowledge our community and explain what's going on.

So, now that everything is on the table and we've learned from this experience, we invite everyone to play the game for what it is! You can join the game at www.CaptainInbound.com if you want to check it out. I hope you will!

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Added June 9, 2010: The below video is the June 4th episode of HubSpot TV when Mike and Karen discuss the ARG at length. It occurs toward the second half of the episode.

 

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HubSpot's new Leads API, currently in beta, gives marketers bidirectional connectivity between HubSpot's lead capture and intelligence tools and any customer relationship management (CRM) software to provide closed loop marketing to all HubSpot customers.  The Leads API is the in a family of HubSpot Application Programming Interfaces, HAPI, that will allow developers to create innovative marketing applications using capabilities and data from customers' own HubSpot's portals.

HubSpot marketing software customers already enjoy bidirectional integration for closed loop marketing analytics with Salesforce.com, but the new Leads API extends this benefit to customers using any other CRM system*.  Marketers can enjoy streamlined marketing and sales processes as well as campaign specific insights showing them which marketing investments resulted in not just traffic and leads, but ultimately sales -- the most effective measure of ROI.

Sample implementations for SugarCRM, NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics CRM are all in production with beta users, and HubSpot Certified Partners are preparing to help customers develop integrations for their CRM of choice.  HubSpot developers have even created a mobile leads application, currently running on Google Android, so that sales people can access leads and contact information on the fly, ensuring that they can connect with a hot prospect when the time is right.

"The availability of this API is going to open things up for all our clients who have been eager to connect the dots between their marketing and sales efforts," said Daniel Lynton, CEO of Lynton Web, a HubSpot customer and partner.  "We've already implemented the beta API for three clients using Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  It is working great so far and will solve a lot of workarounds that marketers have traditionally used, giving them visibility into marketing ROI."

Marketing sophistication is increasing, but marketers need to rely on a single, consistent source of data to power all their marketing activities and decisions.  By giving developers access to HAPI, HubSpot can provide this central hub of data while giving marketers the flexibility to create unique applications required for their specific businesses.  HubSpot APIs will expose other applications and marketing data sets from within HubSpot, enabling integration with more existing content and blogging systems and many more creative scenarios that passionate users and developers will imagine.

"At HubSpot, we are building marketing stars who must have full visibility into the sales return on their marketing investments," stated Brian Halligan, Founder and CEO of HubSpot.  "The Leads API is how we can give this critical business intelligence to our entire customer base, regardless of their choice of CRM.  HAPI will let developers extend the product so it can ultimately be the foundation that lets marketers transform their entire marketing ecosystem."

To learn more about HubSpot's new features to help businesses master inbound marketing, register for the HubSpot Summer 2010 Launch Webinar on June 8^th at 11AM ET.

To learn more about HAPI, the Leads API or to obtain information about support for HubSpot APIs, visit HubSpot's Developer wiki at http://docs.hubapi.com/.

*Update: As of August 1, 2010, access to the HubSpot APIs (HAPI), will be included with specific HubSpot software subscriptions.  Check the HubSpot Pricing Page for details.

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This is the fourth, and not nearly final post, in a series chronicling the inbound marketing journeyof HubSpot customer, Randy Chavers of RE/MAX Metro Atlanta (RMA), from his early decisions about inbound marketing, through selection, setup and success with HubSpot!

Now, as we are caught up to how his story is unfolding, we'll keep sharing interview style, even if that means blogging about any rough patches along the way.  If you are just joining us now check out the whole series to follow Randy's Inbound Marketing Journey. 

When we talked to Randy in April, he talked about onboarding and how he learned that doing the homework his HubSpot Inbound Marketing Consultant gave him was critical to his learning and let him make the most of his calls.  Once onboarding was over, and Randy was officially an inbound marketer on his own, there were still some big steps to take, what with additional real estate system integrations, doing his day job and buying some tools to make his video blogging ideas a reality.

Randy, after looking at your early results, I noticed that you had a lull but are now starting to really get into blogging and driving traffic results.  What happened during that lull?

Even though I had a great blueprint of what I needed to do after my onboarding, I feel like our situation was unique and maybe more complex than most.  I still needed to figure out how I wanted our HubSpot processes to work with LoneWolf, a back office realty management system, and LeadStreet, the RE/MAX lead management service that we also use for our business.  Between that and the IDX integration, I still had a lot of foundational work to do.

The other thing that I did during the months leading up to May was get myself re-oriented to the CMS.  We needed to build out a lot more content on the CMS - which I've done and which I am now methodically optimizing page by page using HubSpot's Page Grader.

 

What changed that has you blogging more actively now?

Some of the concepts we talked about, using video to engage folks, really made a lot of sense to me.  I had this idea that if between me and the realtors, we could capture the most compelling moments and living experiences in the Atlanta area, and then brand it as the Peach City Guide - we could become the source of information for families moving in or around and wanting to purchase a home.

Once I got the right tools, I was rolling.  But I will offer that I tried a few tools first ... as much as I really like the Flip video for quick snaps, it didn't have the audio quality I needed.  Ultimately, I am using the Q3 from Samsung along with an external mic.  Between the great equipment and some excellent video advice I got from success.hubspot.com, I am video blogging from local festivals and other points of interest.

Now, how are you going to get realtors, who are NOT used to creating content and sharing their opinions online to blog?

It's a good question.  This is as much a cultural shift as a functional one for any realtor.  But, as in many industries, the Pareto rule or even more extremes apply - in fact, according to NARI, 7% of agents do 93% of the real estate transactions.  That means, if I can do a pilot with some of the most successful realtors at RMA and show results, the rest of the team will adopt.  It's ROI plain and simple.  Because of what I've seen with HubSpot and I know that inbound marketing is the right direction for real estate, I feel really good about the pilots.  In fact, I recently saw how Shannon King, an award winning realtor from Texas, practiced inbound marketing to drive amazing amounts referrals and it just proves the point that remarkable content & brain power really work!

Coming Soon ...

Next time we talk to Randy, we'll get a real time update of how the summer is shaping up for real estate in Hotlanta.  Check out the entire RE/MAX Metro Atlanta Inbound Marketing Journey Series.

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