Broadcasting live from Business of Software 2011 - OneForty Founder Laura Fitton (@pistachio) talks about the Business of Social and what it can do for you. Laura sold OneForty to Hubspot this year only a few years after founding it. Please pardon the rough notes - they're real-time. Also special thanks to Justin Goeres (@justingoeres) for contributing his notes - here's a combination of both...

It's not B2B or B2C -- it's H2H (human to human)

Laura is the founder of OneForty, acquired by HubSpot. In March 2007, she was a stayhome mom with 2 kids under 2. No business network in Boston. Started blogging on her own.

If you want to evangelize something, convince an evangelist first. She emailed Guy Kawasaki about a blog post and he jumped on board. Suddenly she was in Seth Godin's book.

Inbound Marketing - get found using Google, Social Media, and Blogs
Put ideas out there that are useful, and the world will beat a path to your door.

Would people pay money for your marketing? What if you created marketing of a quality/type that people would pay for?

Outbound doesn’t really work – too many messages. Marketing WAS about pushing messages out. Today it’s about pulling people in.
Give people things they want, love, need.

Your company solves a problem. It provides value. Share that material that helps people solve their problem.

Influence (WAS) attract attention to yourself. Not anymore.

Influence (IS) provide attention & value to others!

The Message is the Influencer. You get a lot further generating something awesome than you do spamming people like Guy Kawasaki, etc. to pay attention to you.

One to many is over. Now it's Any to Many. 5 Billion People have the potential to publish on Twitter.

Social media in two words: BE USEFUL

It's not about you anymore.

(Take your message and turn it inside out!). It's not about features and benefits, it's about something the user can read and say, "That's me."

Content needs to be about problems people know they have. If you're telling them they have the problems YOU WANT them to have, they'll call you on it.

Instead of <title of blog post><link>… use
<compelling quote from article> <link>

<provocative question><link>

Hubspot Grader is a great example - it provides value for people to use - it draws them in.

It's all about providing value. Hubspot ran diagnostics on people's websites and and emailed people at tradeshows this year, rather than collecting leads traditionally. No one wants to be a 'lead.' Great way to provide value and initiate a conversation!

Social Media in 4 words: Listen. Learn. Care. Serve.  Then keep circling back.

Learn and Care is the reason Dell is one of the best social media companies out there.

A lot of social media falls down because it stops at the top of the sales funnel.

http://bit.ly/inbound101

3 Steps to Inbound:

1 - Get Found. Don't be afraid to polarize. Make the cusotmer the hero of your story.

2 - Convert - Marketing automation is a little controversial -- nobody likes getting spammed.
In and of itself, it's OK as long as they know they're signing up, but it needs to be valuable content, not just me me me.

3 - Measure What Matters - Overall analytics. You want to A/B test both your product and your marketing. Do more of what works. You want screaming, raving fans.

Getting found - if you're not blogging about your keywords you want to be found for in Google, you are throwing money away. It's not easy to get to the top of SEO, but there are intelligent ways to do it... and they amount to being useful.

Marketing is a mess. So many tools! Blog, YouTube, Google, Twitter, Facebook, SalesForce, etc.

Guy Kawasaki likes to tweet the same content 4 times to hit all timezones. And most people don't click every tweet (you're doing well if they do). Most people just skim the stream.

You can always recycle content in creative ways - if you have an ebook or white paper, do a blog post or video.

All slides available on http://slideshare.net/pistachio