Fresno Pacific University is an accredited Christian university located in the Central Valley, California. Founded in 1944, Fresno offers leading academic programs for both undergraduate and graduate students.
Challenge: Tracking Marketing Initiatives and Closing the Loop
Before using inbound marketing methodologies, Fresno faced a twofold challenge—measuring its marketing activities and closing the loop to deliver leads to recruiters. “We didn’t really know how to find or track our leads,” Lisa said. Though Fresno invested in radio, print and online ads, the university couldn’t get a grasp of the specific results of its marketing initiatives. Nick and Lisa looked for a way to follow a lead from its site visit to its actual conversion. “We didn’t really have any way to close the loop,” Nick said.
Solution: Landing Pages and Salesforce Integration
Fresno uses landing pages to address the issue of collecting lead data and closing the loop. This enables the university to gather information about its prospects and answer questions such as how much time potential students spend on the site and what information they are looking for. Lisa was impressed by the ease with which she could create these forms, modify them and plug them on the site. By implementing a closed loop marketing system, Fresno tracks which of its marketing channels are most efficient. Thanks to this data, the university can make informed decisions about allocation of resources between channels. By using lead nurturing, Fresno increases the chance of converting leads into customers. Nick especially likes the automatic email alerts they receive when a lead has visited the site. “That is just a prime opportunity that this person is ready to receive information; they are ready for communication with the business,” Nick said.
Results: High Conversion Rates & Lead Growth
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Doubled Organic Traffic in 6 Months
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Attracted Over 1,200 Leads in the Past 6 Months
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Reached 100% Conversion Rate on 2 Landing Pages
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Accumulated 6,000 links from over 1,300 domains In the first six months of inbound marketing, Fresno doubled its organic traffic from 15,000 visits to over 30,000 visits per month. Its referrals have similarly grown from 3,000 per month to over 7,000.
Not only has Fresno increased its traffic, but it has also attracted thousands of new leads. In the same six months, the university has accumulated over 1,200 leads. A big part of this success can be attributed to Fresno’s use of landing pages and their high conversion rate: 2 of its 21 landing pages have a stunning 100% conversion. Using Hubspot software, Fresno addressed the challenges its marketing team was initially facing—tracking leads and closing the loop. As Lisa said, “We know that we are doing our job—we get the leads in, we get them to the recruiters and that really closes the loop for our marketing team.”
This post originally appeared on Hubspot.com.
If you want to get found online and have a limited budget to invest in expensive PPC advertising, then content marketing is for you. Even for larger organizations with large marketing and advertising budgets, content marketing is essential to getting found and engaging with prospects and customers.
If you're like most business owners or marketing directors we interact with, when you finally get your head wrapped around content marketing and what is required to do it well, the first question that pops into your head is "how are we going to find the time to do this?" Good question.
First take an assessment of your internal staff skills, and perhaps more importantly, the time each staff member has available. Make a list of the things that you think you will be able to get done internally, and those you won't realistically have time to do. Of the latter, prioritize them by those most likely to drive new business, because they will offer the best ROI on among task you choose to outsource. Before you get overwhelmed, the first thing to realize is that help is available.
Let's start by breaking down content marketing into the following buckets so we can discuss the pros and cons of doing them in-house vs outsourced:
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Content Marketing Strategy
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In our opinion, this is the most crucial aspect of your entire inbound marketing program. If you are new to inbound marketing, you may wish to bring in outside expertise to help guide and facilitate the process, and educate and train your team along the way. However, we feel that it is invaluable that your organization play an important role in developing and taking ownership for content strategy. Nobody knows your industry, business and customers like you do.
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Content Workflow
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Content workflow refers to the "trafficking" of content creation or curation, optimization, distribution and promotion. The nature of the content itself is determined by the content strategy; this is about managing the execution of that content. Understanding the broader goals, and the role that each type or format if content plays, controlling the timing and frequency of content creation and distribution, managing the budget and timelines, etc, is a management function that we believe can be largely outsourced and overseen by someone on your team. Ideally, however, your organization would take ownership of this function as part of your commitment to owning your own inbound marketing process. An inbound marketing expert, or Hubspot Certified Partner or Educator, can assist you in making this determination and developing the proper balance of internall vs. external responsibilities for your situation.
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Content Creation
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In-House Pro: writing and other content production done from inside your company will probably benefit from that magical ingredient called authenticity
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In-House Con: internal experts are often too busy just doing their normal job, and despite their best intentions may end up underdelivering in terms of the content volume needed to make a difference over time.
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Outsource Pro: and external writer (or writers) can bring a fresh set of eyes to your industry and brand, and may be more familiar than you with certain writing and distribution best practices. They can also interview your internal experts (phone, skype, email, etc) to get specialized knowledge, quotes, and even tone of voice. They could also play the role of editor if you mixed internally and externally sourced content. Additionally, using external providers can help you offer content in formats where your internal production ability is limited (think video, PPT, whitepapers, etc). Finally, having a bullpen of external content producers theoretically would allow you to scale the volume of production up or down at will as long as you have budget.
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Outsource Con: while content production may be the most out-sourceable of the processes, that's only the case if you stay on top of the process. If you try to outsource the whole process, or too large a part of it, the work may end up losing its authenticity and with it your credibility and thought leadership. Authenticity is the magic ingredient of content marketing.
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Content Optimization: Unless you have strong SEO skills internally, and the writing skills to write for human beings and search engines, this is an area where outside help me be valuable
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Contrent Distribution: Don’t overlook the variety of social media channels available for different content formats. While you may have time to create original, authentic content internally, getting help converting that content into a variety of digitial formats (ppt, pdf, mp3, mp4 etc) so that you can spread you message across a larger number of channels is any area where outsourcing could be a good move.
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Content Promotion: While content promotion can be outsourced with the right level of guidance from internal managers and directors, some of the conversations that occur online need to be delivered and responded to in a timely fashion by internal authorities and personas
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Measurement and analysis: this is an area where outside help is always available, but we'd advise you to use that help to beef up your internal skills. You'll be better off you own the skills and capabilities to measure and improve upon your content marketing effectiveness, and analyze it rigorously, no matter who you rely upon to produce the content itself. While it may take time to develop these skills, it will be worth it. Choosing the right tools is critically important as well.
How are you handling content marketing? We can help you think through it.
According to Forester's “US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2011 To 2016," the combination of social media management technologies, agency fees, and spend on paid integrated social network campaigns will bring about growth in social media at a 26% CAGR over the next five years. That said, because of it's relatively low-cost to setup, manage and monitor, the overall cost of using social media to companies will be, like email, relatively manageable.
There are many who see social media as new and exciting, but still look at it as just another online channel and one among many like natural and paid search, email and affiliate marketing.
However, in a whitepaper entitled “Comprehensive Measurement: The Key to Social Media Marketing Success” by CoreMetrics (an IBM Company), that firm argues that the evidence is mounting that these channels all behave quite differently in terms of how they drive prospects and customers to a company's main website. In particular, they note an important difference between how Twitter and Facebook behave for visitor acquisition because users appears to behave differently when using these platforms.
Coremetrics asserts that Twitter actually behaves quite similarly to search, where users state their interests and needs and advertisers seek to reel them to their websites with relevant ads and offers. Why is this so? Because Twitter users are presumed to be more selective and proactive in determining who to follow based on the topics they’re interested in, the companies they want to stay in tune with, and the people they wish to add to their short list of influencers and information sources. They have a more focused, almost search-like set of criteria for deciding who to follow, in other words. As a result of having invested this thought upfront, they are more likely to allow themselves to be interrupted by a tweet, and to click through a link to a website where one is offered and the topic interests them.
Facebook, on the other hand, is, as the authors conclude, a rather self-contained environment. Users go there planning to spend considerable time engaging with friends, and brands, without necessarily wanting or expecting to have to leave. It is a destination unto itself. To be sure, some users do click through to company websites in response to targeted ads, but they are less likely to do so spontaneously as Twitter users do, preferring to first complete the social interactions drew them to Facebook in the first place. In the case of Facebook, brands may achieve awareness with users, and users may eventually arrive to their websites, but often only via other intermediate channels and stop-offs. They’re less likely to go directly.
This suggests that marketers planning to invest in using Facebook should consider a two-pronged approach. Such an approach would involve strategies for driving and tracking click through to their main website, as well as providing content and engagement to help nurture prospects and customers who may be quite content to stay put on Facebook until they’re ready to conduct any real transactions on the main website.
How are you using Facebook and Twitter to promote your business?
When you think of high-tech, one of the first organization's that comes to mind is NASA. They put men on the moon, send probes to Jupiter carrying small lego statues of Galileo, and launch dune buggy like rovers to explore the surface of Mars. Since the inception of the space program, NASA has held the world in thrall.
They're also showing their tech savvy with their innovative use of social media to promote the upcoming Mars Rover Launch, and what they're doing is a great example of what all sentient species of marketers can do to promote their businesses and organizations.
Create A Social Event
NASA is going to conduct a tweetup from the launch site itself, to help generate buzz and interest in the launch. To get attention and encourage social advocacy, they have announced that they will randomly select 150 of their Twitter followers to attend the launch and participate in the tweetup. Tweetup registration opens at 9 a.m. PDT (noon EDT) on Wed, Oct. 5, and closes at 9 a.m. PDT (noon EST) on Fri., Oct. 7. For more information and rules about the Tweetup and registration, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/tweetup
What a cool idea! Imagine winning a trip to witness the launch of a spacecraft. You may be wondering what you could do to promote your business that compares with that, and it may not require a rocket scientist to figure it out. NASA is in the business of launching rockets, what business are you in? What events does your business host that could be turned into a Tweetup, or what explosive events could you conjure up that your customers and followers would find worthy of lifting off their couch to go take part in, and tweet about it to others?
Pick A Spot On Your Favorite Planet And Turn It Into A Tweetup
NASA intends the Tweetup from Nov 23-25th to provide its social media followers (and if you don't follow NASA you should because the stories and accompanying images are nothing short of fascinating) the chance to meet other followers and the NASA social media team, tour the Kennedy Space center, meet the scientists and engineers, and even view the launch event (assuming there are no delays) of "Curiosity," the latest Mars Science Laboratory rover, from Cape Canaveral.
It's going take Curiosity around ten months to travel the distance from Earth to Mars, and when it gets there it is going to be landing in an area near the Gale Crater that scientists believe could contain signs of microbial life on Mars, past or present, if there are any.
Drive Traffic To Your Website
NASA's mission is to educate and share the findings of the Mars Rover with the public. Their tweets, emails, and Facebook posts all drive traffic back to their website where more details about the findings of their missions are available, along with mission history and photography. I could spend hours just reading about the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Imagine the excitement that will be generated if life is actually found on Mars, and the way word will spread throughout the Twitterverse
If signs of life are also found at your Tweetup event, leverage that by creating a hashtag and encouragin tweeps to employ it in their tweets. Then make sure there's remarkable and engaging content about the Tweetup on your website along with whatever other call to action, offer and conversion mechanism you think will turn your new found attention on Twitter into leads.
A Tweetup is a great way to blast your social media followers into the stratosphere, and have new customers and site visitors orbiting your business.
You can follow the Mars Curiosity mission on social media:
via Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/MarsCuriosity
and Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/MarsCuriosity .
The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-302&cid=release_2011-302
These tips come directly from the marketing team at Foursquare.
Over 500,000 businesses use foursquare to learn more about their customers, find new ones, and make sure their information is up to date. Here are the three secrets to success for businesses on foursquare:
1. Personalize your foursquare page.
As a manager, you can customize the way your business appears on foursquare. You can edit everything: your phone number, address, twitter name and website, or even add a description that includes details of your delicious pasta dishes. Just log in, head over to your business's listing, and click the ‘edit’ button.
2. Grow your business with foursquare “Specials!”
There is one constant to every foursquare business success story: foursquare Specials. A Special is a free way to find new and engage customers. Here are a few of our most successful types of offers:
- A discount with purchase (something like, 'get 20% any orders over $10'). It’s a great way to push your sales higher.
- Something for free (for example, 'enjoy a free dessert if you buy an appetizer and main course'). These are often low cost and high impact.
- Special treatment (one of our favorites is at a zoo: 'check in on foursquare for private access to the penguin feeding'). These have no cost and create a great connection.
- Reward your best customers (the classic Special is, 'free coffee on your fifth visit'). It’s like a digital punchcard.
Setting up a Special is free, takes just a couple of minutes, and can yield amazing results. And, on foursquare, your listing will include an orange ‘Special’ graphic, drawing in more members from our 10,000,000-strong community! Get started now at foursquare.com by logging in and clicking on 'Manager Tools.' Or click here to find more information about Specials.
3. Identify your best customers by diving into your data
You also get full access to your Merchant Dashboard, which tells you interesting information about your customers, like the time they check in, their demographic information (like age and gender), what are your most popular hours, and who are the customers that visit most often. Use this information to grow your business; try running a Special during your slow period to find new customers (for restaurants, we recommend a Special for the often-empty late lunch hours). If you haven't turned on the Merchant Dashboard yet, log in at foursquare.com, go to 'Manager Tools,' and enable it for your business. If you manage multiple businesses, each one has its own 'enable' button.
Many business owners and marketing managers we speak to want to talk about social media, and how to use it effectively to promote their businesses. The focus until now has been a numbers game, with businesses measuring their social media success by the number of followers or fans they have been able to compile.
A number of recent studies have shown that the focus should really be less on the numbers, and more about the level of engagement of those fans. In other words, what percentage of those fans are actually visiting your page, interacting, and sharing with their friends, or retweeting you, during a given time period? Accumulating a large list of fans or followers who otherwise don't care, and do nothing to help advocate you, your company or brand, may actually be worth very little.
If it makes sense to you that fan engagement is more important than total number of fans, then the next logical question becomes "what do we have to do to get fans engaged?" At this point, you start to brainstorm about new things you might be able to do to make your social media pages of more interest, new content or offers to share, etc.
It's usually at that point that we get a call, and are asked to come up with new ideas. While I'm happy to get the call and have the conversation, I always make sure the conversation does not become myopic by only considering things that can be done TO or ON a social media page to make it more interesting and engaging to the people who visit it. Questions arise such as: "Should we reward or incentivize people who visit our pages?" Or, "is there something we need to give them to make them care more, come back more, buy more, and tell friends?"
From our perspective, it's important to remember that real life is still real life. People use social media to talk about and share the things that happen in real life, and with regard to you that means real life experiences with your brand or business. If their experience with you in real life is not good, there's nothing you can do online to meaningfully change that except apologize and fix the real world problem. No amount of offers and incentives and engaging social media content can overcome the base reality of a customer's experience.
As the chart below clearly points out, if you want to increase the level of engagement with your social media fans and followers, focus on getting things right in the real world by doing what you do best, exceeding their expectations, and giving them reasons to want to tell everyone about the great experience they had with you. Whether that's serving a great meal, mixing a great drink, greeting every customer with a smile, preparing a great research report or legal brief, caring for the health of someone or their animal, answering customer service calls, or literally any other role that anyone in your organization plays that has the potential to improve a customer's experience, make sure you get it right. That's the best thing you can do to increase engagement and advocacy.
The 2011 football season is underway with all the excitement that it always brings. The NFL disputes have been resolved, and college stadiums are once again full of the fans and adrenaline. Monday Night Football trounced the CNN Republican Presidential Candidates debate this past Monday. There is no question that America loves its football. The NFL is a $9 billion dollar industry, and NCAA / BCS football brings in nearly $300 million per year. Football is big business.
But let's face it, when the game's over, we've still got our own businesses to run. Wouldn't it be great if we could get as excited about using the internet to market and grow our businesses as we do about football? What if our love and understanding of football could be used to inspire a love of internet marketing, to the benefit of our company or organization?
As I searched for the answer, I came across this incredible blog post written by Dan Bischoff on www.seo.com and I loved it so much I had to share it with you. Here's a big shout out to Dan for his talent at making internet marketing accessible to football lovers!
In honor of college football’s return, here are the position-by-position starters if Internet marketing strategies made up a football team:
Head Coach – Analytics and A/B Testing The head coach analyzes everything and makes changes to improve. Analytics and testing gives you the stats, tells you what is working, where people are coming from, how long they’ve been on the site, what is bringing traffic and what converts best. Through analytics and testing, you can tweak strategies to be more successful.
Assistant Coach – Competitive Analysis 
The assistant coach often scouts out the competition to know how to beat the bad guys. A detailed competitive analysis will reveal the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors so you can know how and where to strike.
Offensive Starters – Building the Brand, Getting Exposure and Outbound Marketing
Quarterback – SEO
Arguably, the quarterback position is the most important position on the field. Top quarterbacks win games despite weaknesses in other areas of the team. If you get top rankings for the right keywords, you will get more website traffic and sales. All-Pro SEO services will almost instantly make you a major player in your industry. Quarterbacks are also the face of a team. Similarly, organic natural results act as the face of your company
Running Back – Conversion Optimization 
There are crucial times in any football game where a team needs 1 yard for a first down or a few inches to score a touchdown. A dependable running back will get that extra yardage almost every time. Conversion optimization plays that role for your website. Once you get that extra website traffic, you need dependable website conversion principles to take that visitor into the end zone.
Fullback – Web Design
Fullbacks are often the lead blocker that clears the way for the running back to get that extra yard. Good SEO Web design clears the way for everything else to work right.
Wide Receiver — Social Media Marketing 
Fast wide receivers can change the game with one quick-striking score. Good social media marketing using viral video, infographics, blog posts, etc., can quickly send a lot of traffic and create a ton of exposure in a short period of time. Social media can be a game changer just like a flashy wide receiver that blows past the defense.
Tight End – Online Public Relations
Tight ends are instrumental in blocking for the quarterback and running backs. But they also consistently score touchdowns and get first downs in tight situations. Tight ends are critical in clutch moments whether it’s a run or pass play. Online public relations have the same dependability. Online PR doesn’t always results in a home run, but it does consistently bring good traffic quality links. And sometimes online PR scores a touchdown by getting the attention of big blogs and publications. Online PR is the go-to weapon in tight situations when you need good links, and more traffic and exposure.
Offensive Line – Keyword Research 
The offensive line is the foundation of every football team. They give the quarterback time to throw and open holes for the running backs. Games are won and lost in the trenches, and they are similar won and lost with the right or wrong keyword research. Every search strategy revolves around picking the right keywords to target. Targeting the right keywords will make you a lot of money. The wrong keywords will keep you guessing and will lose you money.
Defensive Starters, Protecting Your Online Brand
Defensive Line – Reputation Management
The defensive line is the literally first line of defense. Any offense will roll over a team with a pansy D-line. For online marketing, this is similar to reputation management. It’s the foundation to defending your brand online.
Line Backer – Link Building
I chose this mostly because linebackers and link building have the same abbreviation: LB. So, you can come up with your own analogy on this one.
Corner Back – Social Media Profiles
Corner backs protect the pass and are sometimes the secret weapon on a corner blitz to reach the quarterback. I compare this to social media profiles. An active profile that provides valuable information and brings in fans, is a big part of protecting your brand and company. Social profiles are usually found high in the search engines for a company’s name. Plus, social media is all the buzz right now. In the sports world, corner backs are usually the guys with all the hype.
Safety – PPC 
The Safety position is self-explanatory. The Safety has a lot of roles, but is there to basically defend wherever things break down. That’s what PPC is for. A good mix of PPC with your SEO will make sure you get the right exposure and traffic while you work on getting your SEO rankings where you want them.
Kicker/Punter – Local Search and Maps Optimization
A good kicker can nail a field goal in clutch situations or pin a team near the end zone on a good punt. Local Internet marketing places your website in the right spot for local shoppers to find your business and buy your products.
Click here to see Dan's original post on SEO.com
If you're trying to win the local search battle on behalf of your business, writing articles and blog posts that mention locations in your community can be play an important role in your SEO. There is almost always an audience out there searching for articles about certain locations. Referencing your business, product or service in the context of your local community can help make it relevant if you can make the connection of how it fits into people's lives and helps them solve their problems.
However, when you use a location name such as downtown Tucson, or Paradise Valley in the title of an article, you are making an implicit promise to people searching using those terms that your article will contain information relevant to that specific location. If you create a title like that in order to attract people searching for those terms, as opposed to searching more directly for the services you offer, then the onus falls upon you to ensure that your article really does contain something interesting, useful and specific and succeeds at weaving in how the mention of your business is relevant to the total picture, or your article will be rejected as the blatant SEO ploy it would otherwise be.
Targeted local search results can be improved by developing articles about your city, neighborhoods within it, tourist attractions, parks and recreation opportunities etc. Consumers searching for information about these locales will usually be served articles that including place names in their titles. Such articles are valuable to consumers who may be planning a trip to that area, or looking for a merchant, restaurant or venue in that part of town. How might your business, bar, restaurant or brand fit logically into their visit?
If you plan to try to influence your local search rankings through authoring articles of this nature, then be sure that you don't come across as trying to trick the audience into thinking they are getting one thing, when you are really being self-serving, and serving something other than what they ordered.
So, what makes an article about a location unique? Simply put that it is actually about that location in some specific way. How hard was that? For example, if your plan to write an article about Scottsdale Arizona, mentioning perhaps the charms of spending a day wandering Old Town in order to be able to throw in that your business and several others are also located in Old Town, then make sure that the meat of the article is actually based on offering unique and real insights that visitors to that part of town might find useful. If the same article and tips you offer could also have been written about Austin, Texas, then your article will probably not pass the test of being specific enough.
Before you begin writing with the objective of placing your business into a broader local context, you need to be able to articulate what makes your town or part of town unique in order succeed at the art of writing location-based articles. Once you are able to put yourself in your customers shows, identify those unique items and legitmately associate your business with them in a way that doesn't seem self-serving, then you’ll be heading in the right direction towards writing writing the useful location specific articles people are looking for that can also improve your local search rankings, and help bring new leads and customers to your local business.
Substitution Test – When you’re writing an article targeting local search, use the substitution test to confirm that your article has enough location specific information. Simply substitute any other location name in the article title and body. Does the article still make sense? If so, then your article isn’t quite unique enough to the locale.
And venture capital thinks it will be. Sixty-five million dollars have poured into the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup.
By Avery Stone FORTUNE
Blogging. Social media. Old-fashioned cold calling. Getting consumers' divided attention can be difficult – especially for mom-and-pop shops with tiny marketing budgets. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based HubSpot wants to change that. The startup aims to gives small firms an affordable way to reach new customers the way much larger businesses do. The company's service, which starts at about $3,000 a year, automates a medley of basic digital marketing must-haves, including search engine optimization, online analytics and social media like Facebook, Twitter and Digg. On a tear, HubSpot has snagged 5,000 subscribers and managed to acquire a close competitor.
Venture capital has flowed in too, $65 million in all, including a recent $32 million round led by Sequoia Capital. Founded in 2006, HubSpot is the brainchild of two MIT classmates, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. Halligan affectionately refers to the pair as the "mere mortal and the geek." The idea came when Halligan, then a venture-capitalist, realized that traditional marketing was being tuned out. "And, at the same time," he says, "the way people shop and learn is changing because they're spending more and more time on social networking sites."
Halligan believed he could merge these two realizations. Enter HubSpot. Halligan and Shah entered a precursor in MIT's $50,000 business plan competition and were semi-finalists. When they had both graduated, they "plunged in and just stared doing it," says Halligan. Jumping into HubSpot is easy for users too. Web visitors can request a live demo with an expert to show them how the software works. They can then sign up for a 30-day free trial. If this goes well, they can subscribe to one of three software packages with varying features and price points. The model quickly took off. Schwartz Communications, a Boston-based PR agency that turned to HubSpot raves about the service. Senior Vice President Ross Levanto says the tool has quickly become crucial, and "a great way to innovate new ideas for our clients." By using HubSpot, Schwartz gets a Twitter and Facebook page, help getting to the top of Google search results, and detailed reports about visitors to his website. And it has proven successful. In the last calendar year, Schwartz's revenues from digital services have tripled. Forrester analyst Suresh Vittal agrees that HubSpot is onto something with its unique premise. "They've created and defined this idea of inbound marketing. The fact they're integrating all of these elements sets them apart," he explains. Inbound marketing, a term coined by Halligan, refers to a way of being found online by more qualified visitors through tools like blogging, social media, and analytics instead of more traditional ways of advertising such as email spamming. Success isn't guaranteed. As it expands, HubSpot faces the threat of a larger and more established company offering similar services at discounted prices, potentially pushing it out of the market. But for now, HubSpot is in growth mode. In July, the company launched the HubSpot App Marketplace -- similar to Apple's (AAPL) App Store save all apps are marketing-related. Currently, the Marketplace houses about 30 apps, both free and paid, that only HubSpot clients can access. (Eventually, it'll be open to everyone.) And, if Halligan has his way, that's only the beginning.
Original Article
Just about everyone is familiar with Facebook's "Like" button, which allows you to see what your friends like and recommend.
Google is making a big play to get into the social sphere, and launch their own "+1" Button several months ago. The way it works and its use are very similar to the Facebook "Like" button. Because it is a Google product, search will now be influenced as well by those things that your friends and contacts have recommended, because these recommendations are judged by Google to likely be more relevant to you than another search result. The "+1" Button can now also be used on postings outside of Google search results, and can be included on your website or social postings.
For a bit more about Google's +1 Button check out the video above.
To get your own code to place Google's +1 Button on your website or blog simply plug your information into the widget in this link then take the provided code and place it on your website.