Marketing with Mike Volpe

We have an internal wiki that we use for almost all communication and collaboration at HubSpot.  I talked about it in my Atlassian Starter Day Presentation (we use their wiki product, called Confluence).  Recently, I got a question from someone who had seen my presentation that I thought was worth sharing here on the blog.

How did you get your sales team to use the wiki?

It wasn't easy, but here are some of the ways how we got our sales team to start using our internal wiki.

1. Get sales management buy-in - We were able to get the sales managers to agree that sales should be using the wiki, and that they would help get everyone in sales to use the wiki.
2. Put lots of valuable information on the wiki - We now have all of our sales scripts, sales tips, product info, competitive info, promotion info, marketing campaign info, and basically all the useful information a sales rep might need on the wiki.
3. Email sales links to wiki pages, instead of full emails - If you update information on a competitor, email the link tot he wiki page.  The wiki is richer since it has threaded discussion and links and videos and files, it is a better place to post and discuss information, but you can use email to drive people to the wiki content.
4. Use the wiki for projects involving sales - If you have a team of people doing a cross functional project (perhaps entering a new vertical), use the wiki to document and report on that project.  If the project involves sales, then you almost force them to start using the wiki and become familiar with it.
5. Talk about the wiki in every meeting - We mention that all the resources we are discussing in meetings are on the wiki, and tell people to go to the wiki after the meeting to get the meeting notes, slides, etc.
6. Use the wiki in new hire training - All new hires need to use the wiki to document what they learn each day in training, and also to follow along with all the training class presentations.  This helps make the wiki a part of the daily lives for the newest employees.

Today, our sales team uses our wiki for all sorts of things and are very actively engaged there, as much as other groups in the company.

Have you gotten your sales team to use internal collaboration tools in your company?  How?

This is a guest post written by Barbara Govednik, a Chicago-based writer, writing coach and communication strategist. She is also the owner of 423 Communication, writes the blog Being Well Said and contributes to the communication skills blog on Communitelligence.

Photo credit tnarik.

 

More often than not, good writing is the product of good editing. Think about it. There is a reason they are called "first drafts" and not "one-and-only drafts."

For some bloggers, the thought of editing sends shivers down their spines. “Blogs are all about self-expression and speaking in my voice,” as someone said to me at the 2009 BlogHer conference, eyeing me with pity and disdain.

She was absolutely right about self-expression and voice. But blogs are also about getting a message across to your audience. If your posts are an incomprehensible jumble of words, your message gets lost and you have to be cool with the fact that you are probably talking to yourself. If you are seeking a larger audience, embrace the concept of editing for clarity and sanity. It will make your content readable, engaging and authentic.

Editing for Clarity

Editing for clarity means injecting some of the basic rules of grammar and construction into your work. Don’t panic, we’re not about to start diagramming sentences. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Sentences should come to an end at some point. See if you can’t break the really long, complicated sentences – the ones that include all manner of ellipsis and dashes and parenthetical material – into smaller, independent sentences. They are easier to read. Vary the length of your sentences, too.
• Paragraphs give the reader a little break and signal that you are moving onto another thought. Reread your paragraphs and count up how many ideas you’re cramming into them. This number should be low.
• Basic punctuation (periods, commas, the occasional exclamation point) works like GPS and gives readers little signals about where you are leading them. Skip the fancy stuff like semicolons if you’re not quite sure how they work and you aren’t willing to look it up.
• And contrary to the dire warnings of my fourth grade English teacher, no one has ever died because of a sentence fragment. Or a sentence that starts with “and.” Those are conversational elements that give your writing authenticity and a sense that a living human wrote the words.

Editing for Sanity

The fantastic side effect of editing for clarity is that it also improves your sanity quotient. If you are paying attention to things like sentence length and basic punctuation, you have less of a chance of sounding like a rambling madman in your blog. Here are three more ways to avoid that fate. (If you want to sound like the Unabomber or Ryan Adams, skip this section.)

• Scan your work for jargon, acronyms and arcane references that may be foreign to your audience. (See Unabomber and Ryan Adams, above.) You can use a little, particularly if you include a bit of explanation or a link. But it’s best to treat them like the jar of red pepper flakes at the pizza joint. A shake or two may spice things up but too many make the whole thing unappetizing.
• Beware the non sequitur. Random spasms of unrelated content will leave your reader scratching his head. For instance, if I suddenly started to explain how I always laugh at the cartoons of Wiley Miller, you’d probably think, “umm, who cares?” And you’d be right.
• Watch out for your writing ticks. We all have them. One writer I work with is way too fond of the word “it.” Another types “manger” when she means “manager” without fail. A third has a tendency to use the sentence construction “not only (whatever he’s writing about), but (another related thing)” in every paragraph. Go back and reread some of your older blog entries. What pops up as a recurring theme? Watch out for and edit those repeat offenders.

Edit Yourself Today

The best editor is always someone who didn’t write the original blog entry. Give your draft to a writer you trust, a business partner, the barista when he has some downtime. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do a first run-through yourself using the guide above. All of these little niceties make your blog a comfortable place for readers to hang out.

I use video a lot for creating marketing content, mostly because I hate to type and I think and speak a lot faster than I can type.  So for video I do marketing webinars, a great marketing video podcast, this smaller marketing podcast and lots of other marketing video through and with the team at HubSpot.

To be honest, for most people the first steps are easy.  I do all these "Marketing with Mike" videos just using a webcam and a PC and edit with either Windows Movie Maker (free!) or Camtasia (expensive).  You can use Quicktime Pro ($30) to convert the video formats if you need to, because Windows Movie Maker does not do a good job of supporting the iTunes formats.

What is much more important than the equipment is the content.  For all these videos, I have notes to guide me, and I try to take topics from videos that come directly from people I have met in person or online, so I know the videos will be on topics interesting to all of you (hopefully).

Remember, think content before production value.

Download video for iPod and iPhone.

One possible technique for online marketing is to take your articles and copy and paste them onto ezine websites around the web to get more links into your website.  Does the increased inbound links to your website balance out the negative effects of having duplicate content?

Probably not.  The links will not be that valuable because the search engines do not give a lot of authority to websites that consist of mostly duplicate content.

Download video for iPod or iPhone

I've been doing a bunch of work this week to put onto (virtual) paper a lot of the best practices we use at HubSpot for using online video for marketing.

I wrote a blog article about SEO for YouTube, and today Karen Rubin and I are doing a webinar on How to Use Video for Online Marketing.  It will be interesting to see how a webinar format is different for us than www.HubSpot.tv

Here are the slides from our webinar - download PPT slides.  Enjoy!

 

I did a short interview with Matthew Mamet from Permission TV at the last WebInno event.  We chatted about some of the things to think about when using video for marketing.

We use a lot of video in our marketing at HubSpot:

• Lots of marketing webinars
• A live weekly marketing video podcast 
• An iTunes channelwith archived HubSpot TV and our webinars
• Viral videos on YouTube
• Our blog features video interviews
• We also have product demo videos on our website

In the video we talk a bit about how to think about using video in marketing.

UPDATE: For anyone having trouble with the video, here is a link to another version you can try.

We're launching a $50,000 Viral Marketing Contest at HubSpot.

If you think you can create some cool content, you should enter!  Both blog articles and videos are eligible.

Please enter!!!  I have a meeting this afternoon with one of our VC investors and I will need to explain why I'm just giving away $50,000 of their investment...

Any good sales person knows that you don't give the same sales pitch to every prospect. You customize your materials and presentation to what the prospect wants to hear based on a bunch of factors (industry, experience, business challenges, etc.). You can also get custom golf clubs made for you, and it costs about the same as a similar set of "normal" clubs. And Cafe Press has made a whole business out of making apparel and promotional merchandise one at a time. Finally, there are technologies to allow billboards to change content based on time of day and weather conditions. So, if the web is the new and best medium for marketing and sales, and software and web pages are just code that can be altered easily and automatically by computers... why do so few websites customize content based on who is using the website? The answer is because there are no good tools to allow most businesses to do this easily. For those of you who know me well, you know that I am joining a startup, and this is one of the problems we will be addressing. You can check out the HubSpot online marketing website to learn more.