Back to School

A few weeks ago I sat an exam for the first time in many years. It was the online certification test for Inbound Marketing University, a project driven by Hubspot, providers of a web based software solution that is designed to assist SMEs with, well, inbound marketing. The ‘professors’ of Inbound Marketing are all high level practitioners in their relative fields – it reads like a who’s who of ‘new marketing’ types.

What’s Inbound Marketing anyway?

Inbound Marketing is the antithesis of many elements of traditional marketing – it’s about creating relationships and establishing a presence, making potential customers aware of you in a more natural way than interruptive tactics like TV advertising.

Course overview

Read the rest of this entry »

Why Twitter needs to take credit for links

So Twitter are spending time amping up the retweeting functionality on the site and in the API. All well and good but that’s not really going to make a huge difference.

Here’s an idea that will benefit both Twitter and webmasters the world over

If you use Twitter via the web interface and click a link in a tweet, most URL shorteners (which is how most links are presented in tweets) correctly pass the referrer value in the format ‘twitter.com/username/’ or if from an individual tweet: ‘twitter.com/username/status/tweetid/’.

If you’re using a third party Twitter client and you click on a link, no referrer information is sent with that to the site you visit. In terms of analytics, that information is lost, so that traffic is presented as direct traffic.

Read the rest of this entry »