Social Media Smarts

Social media is there and its almost free. Its time and smarts.Major corporate marketing departments can be outsmarted without making huge investments, and small brands can make big names for themselves.

Blendtec was a relatively unknown company selling $400 high-performance blenders. After seeing CEO
Tom Dickson testing the machines by blending two-by-fours, Marketing Director George Wright had
a brilliant idea for a series of viral videos. He started to blend everyday objects—glow sticks, iPhones,
Rubik’s Cubes, and television remote controls—and posted the videos to media-sharing sites such as
YouTube . The videos have now been watched more than 100 million times and have
garnered the company a ton of press and buzz.

A small specialty baker in New Jersey, Pink Cake Box, leverages nearly every type of social media that
exists to build a substantial brand. Employees write a blog that features images and videos of their
unique cakes. They post the photos to Flickr and the videos to the company’s YouTube channel. Pink
Cake Box has more than 1,300 followers on Twitter, and more than 1,400 fans on Facebook.

HubSpot, has invested a lot of energy in social media marketing with
some success. HubSpot blog has more than 19,000 subscribers (fueled by appearances on Digg, Reddit,
and StumbleUpon), the HubSpot company Twitter account has more than 16,000 followers, our LinkedIn group has more than 34,000 members, and our Facebook page has more than 6,000 fans. HubSpot  has launched a marketing forum, and have a lot of fun making amusing (and sometimes serious) videos for YouTube.