March is fast approaching, you know, and while I am more than usually excited about March because I’ll be heading back to London for OMGLondon2, this March I have something equally — if not more — exciting to talk about.

It’s called Writers for the Red Cross, it’s something that the altogether delightful Holly Tucker and I are cooking up together, and believe me, you’ll be hearing more about it. And not just from me, either.

The full website will be going up in mid-February, but you can learn a great deal about it on the placeholder site at www.writersfortheredcross.com.

Too lazy to click? I dig it. Here’s the scoop:

What is Writers for the Red Cross? This online event is intended to raise funds and awareness for the Red Cross and its work in communities across the country. We’ll be auctioning off publishing-related items and services donated by authors, publicists, agents, and editors. We’ll also have daily guest posts from authors about “What the Red Cross Means to Me” and a daily countdown of “31 Things You Didn’t Know About the Red Cross” on the official event website. All donors who give over $25 will also be able to select one free book from a range of books donated and shipped by publishers for the event.

Writers for the Red Cross will go live in mid-February, with active fundraising running from March 1 through March 31. It is modeled on the highly successful “Do the Write Thing for Nashville” fundraiser in 2010, which raised $74K in ten days following last spring’s devastating floods.

Why Writers? Writers share our commitment to community by bringing people together through their stories. And these communities continue to be strengthened as readers come together with writers in their local bookstores, in book clubs, online through social media…and through partnerships with national organizations with a similar mission of community: national organizations like the American Red Cross.

Why the Red Cross? If there were one word to describe the Red Cross, it would be “community.” Each year, in communities large and small, victims of some 70,000 disasters turn to neighbors familiar and new – the more than half a million volunteers and 35,000 employees of the Red Cross. Through nearly 700 locally supported chapters, more than 15 million people gain the skills they need to prepare for and respond to emergencies in their homes, communities and world.

Want to get involved? You can.

Join us on Facebook. Follow Holly on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter, if you don’t already. And stay tuned.

I’ve always been a bit of an academic at heart, and so I always feel like September is really the beginning of the new year, not January. How bizarre is it to think of January as the beginning of anything? But Autumn, now, that’s a clear, obvious, vivid transition period. The old passes away. The new begins.

I’m transitioning into a new role at HubSpot, where I have for some time now worked as a Premium Support Consultant, working one-on-one with our Premium customers. Starting next week, I’ll be working more directly with our entire customer base, as I’ll be moving into managing the customer forums and creating all the support documentation and instructional materials for customers and users of the software. It all adds up to much less time spent on the phone, one customer at a time, and more time spent on the computer, creating articles, videos, webinars, and such for the consumption of our entire online community.

I’m just about as excited as a person can be for this transition, because I really love writing, editing, and making little videos more than just about anything else.

Of course, I am also tremendously excited that Fall is almost here. I know that’s not a terribly popular position to take, but there it is. I am just much more of a Fall and Winter kind of person, Spring is OK, but Summer is really right out. Far too hot, for my tastes, and there’s all this pressure to be Spending Time Outside, which is vastly overrated, in my opinion.

It’s time now for baseball to get really exciting, for football to start (annoyingly) horning its way in on baseball’s airtime; for sweaters and jeans and scarfs and jackets. All those things spell “awesome” to me. Except maybe for the football. But whatever. You can’t have everything.

How was your summer? What’s on tap for Fall?

Image by Denis Collette

Nick Swisher

You know that old saying about advertising? The one that says we know that 50% of our billboards work, we just don’t know which half?

Knowing “which half works” has become a kind of Holy Grail in advertising and marketing. Lots of folks who haven’t yet made the leap into inbound marketing labor under the illusion that the type of marketing they are used to — outbound marketing (also known as broadcast marketing, or shotgun marketing) — is more measurable and traceable than marketing conducted via blogs and social media.

Not so.

Inbound marketing is actually quite a bit more trackable than outbound marketing, and it’s largely due to something called Tracking Tokens.

Tracking Tokens are little bits of code — just strings of letters and numbers — that are placed at the tail end of any old URL, so that when that link is clicked, some piece of analytics software somewhere knows where it was clicked, and by whom. It tells you which billboard worked.  Which campaign got you to take the next step, and click?

For a great example of the use of tracking tokens, check out what Major League Baseball is doing right now to assign the final two places on the roster of the All-Star Game next week. From now until Thursday at midnight ET, fans can vote for one final player to send to the American League team, and one to send to the National League team. It’s a big honor to be selected for the All-Star Team, even if some of your more jaded and spoiled athletes don’t treat like the honor it is. In fact, one of my main criteria for who should be selected — all other stats being equal — has always been how excited is this player to play in the All-Star Game?

Allow me a short digression? Well, I’m a big baseball fan. I’m a Yankee fan, in fact, a detail that I tend to keep under my hat most of the time, as I live in Red Sox country and I have more than once gotten a door — literally! — slammed in my face by folks round here when they see a Yankees T-Shirt on my chest. But my rants about sportsmanship and courtesy will wait for another day.

My point is that my favorite player these days is Nick Swisher, primarily for the unbounded enthusiasm he brings to the field every single day. When he started playing for the Yankees last year, my husband and I joked that he must be drinking about 25 Red Bulls every day before the game, because he was out there practically doing cartwheels in the outfield, he was so pumped up to be playing that game. In every post-game interview, he was practically wagging his tail with excitement. Love that guy.

So I was sad to see that he didn’t make the first cut for the All-Star Team, because he is absolutely qualified, stats-wise. But he’s not a huge name, you know. So Nick is one of the last few players who are contending for the last slot on each team. End of digression.

Nick Swisher Leader Board

So Major League Baseball is running a very nifty campaign whereby the fans can vote for these final two players, and each fan can move up a kind of Leader Board of vote-generators by asking their friends, family, and co-workers to vote, too.

How do they know which votes have come in via your efforts? They generate a unique tracking code, of course. Check out the graphic to the right. If you campaign on Facebook, it generates a certain tracking code. Ditto for Twitter and email. There’s a button to create an all-purpose tracking token URL for any other mode or platform you might use, like by posting the link on LinkedIn.

Now, when votes come in, not only do I get credited for them, but MLB knows a fair bit about my network, and which platforms are most likely to be populated by baseball fans, or at least by people who are likely to respond to a request from me.

Imagine if that was your own data, about your own customers, prospects, members, and fans? Imagine if you knew that, even though you had fewer followers on Twitter than on Facebook, your Twitter followers were more likely to respond to a suggestion than your Facebook fans were? What if you could precisely quantify it? Or you could slice the data to discover that the differential only existed when you appealed to Twitter and Facebook simultaneously on a Saturday — but that the response was equal on each platform on Monday afternoons?

That’s the power of tracking tokens. And most people don’t use ‘em. Or if they do, they use them only occasionally, sporadically, or unscientifically.

Measure how well your billboards work. Why wouldn’t you?

Oh, and do me a favor, would you? Send Nick Swisher to the All-Star Game.

Seriously.

I’ve always been of the firm belief that a blog just isn’t a blog unless you’ve got comments enabled. Without comments, it’s just a website that sort of vaguely, structurally resembles a blog.

But isn’t the whole point of a blog to stimulate conversation and feedback?

But how many of us really make it a practice to comment on other people’s blogs? How many of us think about how important it might be to supporting the general ecosystem of the social web — never mind what it might do for our businesses?

Not too many of us, I am guessing.

And yet, as bloggers ourselves, we probably spend a fair bit of time fretting over how few people comment on our own blogs.

I wrote a post on the HubSpot inbound marketing blog about how to comment on other people’s blogs like you mean it. I’d love to hear what you think.

Do you comment on other people’s blogs? Do you think it’s important to the success of a blog? Do you wish more people would comment on your own blog?

Is a blog a blog, if it doesn’t have comments?

I’ve always driven Hondas — literally since my very first car. My Dad was kind enough to give me his old Honda Civic hatchback shortly after I graduated from college in 1993, and ever since then I have been a loyal Hondaist. And now I am in the market for another one.

To be sure, each and every one of my Hondas has been a high mileage veteran. I tend to buy ten-year-old models with at least 150,000 miles on them, get five or six great years out of them, and then donate them to charity when their time has come.

I’ve never paid more than $2,000 for a car, and I have always felt it was a sort of privilege to be the last, loving owner of these steadfast vehicles.

But over time, I will admit that I have grown weary of unexpected repairs and breakdowns, of non-functioning air conditioning and feeble heat, of having to wait ten years for basic safety features like side airbags and stability control, and of being a decade behind the curve on other upgrades, like CD players, remote key systems, and satellite navigation systems.

So now that I find myself comfortably stabled with a good salary, after years of freelancing, school, and other less-than-lucrative pursuits, I consider myself ready to (oh my goodness — my father should probably stop reading now) Buy a Brand New Car.

In the process of exploring my purchase options, I have naturally come across the many leasing deals out there. Never having been in the new car market before, I never really gave these options too much thought. But it’s gotten me thinking — about leasing, about buying, and about how our reactions to these questions change, depending on what it is we are considering buying.

Should I lease or should I buy?

Now, there has been lots and lots and lots written on this topic, ever since the option to lease a car came about.  I’m not really here to recap it, summarize it, or even try to come down on one side or the other of it. What I’m more interested in is how we think about purchases and use-of-product these days, and how that varies with the type of product concerned.

My good friend Cindy is a die-hard leaser. She loves knowing that her car is new, that it will not break down on her, and that if anything goes wrong it is under warranty.  She, like me, spent a long time driving old cars that frequently broke down, and she got sick of it and started leasing — and vows that she will never go back. She says, “I’m happy to rent an apartment if it means I can call the landlord whenever the toilet breaks. Why shouldn’t I rent my car?”

The Software-as-a-Service Metaphor

How is this like Software-as-a-Service? One of the great things about SaaS is that you don’t have to buy one great big piece of software, install it on your own servers, with all the uptime and maintenance responsibilities that implies, and then have to shell out even more money every time an upgrade or new edition is released.

When you buy software as a service, however, the issuing company hosts and maintains it, and assumes the responsibility of keeping it up and functional. New upgrades, improvements, and editions are rolled out to subscribers as they become available. Unless you choose to hold back on any given update, you are always rolling with the most recent version of your software.

As a heavy user of SaaS across a number of different platforms (and an employee of a SaaS company), I am clearly strongly in favor of this model. So why so much resistance against applying this model to the purchase (or lease) of a car?

I realize there are issues of equity and residual value and the time value of money — but for the sake of argument let us assume that I have resolved those issues by deciding to invest an appropriate amount of money in a long-term, interest-bearing account that will make up for any possible monetary loss incurred by leasing.

Is it purely a matter of category?

It seems to me that a car is simply — for most of us — in another category altogether. We feel more personally connected to a car than we might to a computer system or a piece of accounting or marketing software. But should we?

I think we still feel like anything related to “the internet” is somehow less real, less true, less vitally important, than the things we can see and touch every day.  Friends I make and maintain on social networks are considered by many of my less tech-savvy friends to be far looser ties than they really are.  Businesspeople who are new to the concepts of inbound marketing frequently struggle with prioritizing the time and effort it takes to write a blog, and to engage on social networks, over the time and effort (and money) it takes to advertise in magazines, at trade shows, or on billboards.

We still think there is a difference between “Real Life” and “The Internet.”

There isn’t.

Can this account, at least in part, for why we are willing to “rent” software, in return for consistent maintenance and frequent upgrades, but we are largely unwilling to do so for a car?

I think it has something to do with it.

What do you think?

This post was written by guest blogger Barbara Oliver, a nonprofit communications professional on Cape Cod.

What can Twitter really do in a person’s life? Can it move you to re-examine your past, and to re-imagine your future? Or is it just a lot of nonsense about what people ate for lunch?

Can a tweet change your life?

I am admittedly a twitter slacker.  I was so enthusiastic when I first began to tweet that I convinced a few friends to do so as well.  Since then I have all too often let my twitter participation languish and dwindle. But a few months ago, as I checked out the public timeline, I zoomed in on the following tweet:

We’ll have a q&a w/ @elyssaeast about her fab book #Dogtown in the JAN @bostonmagazine. Art, witches, murder!

Dogtown?  Were they tweeting  about my Dogtown?

I replied, “Is your tweet about Dogtown in Gloucester, Massachusetts?”  She replied back that it was and that I should check out her book, Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town. I did.

I lived over a decade of my life in the city of Gloucester on Cape Ann, which lies on the northern coast of Massachusetts.  I commuted to Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts by train, I miantained a darkroom, created paintings, encouraged the kids I worked with to make art, had an art-to-wear business, waitressed at the old Harbor Cafe and Blackburn Tavern and made life-long friends.

Dogtown

Dogtown comprises an approximately 300-acre area of the Cape Ann peninsula, and includes both Gloucester and Rockport. The area was the epicenter of Gloucester’s colonial settlement and was increasingly abandoned as folks moved closer to the sea to live by fishing and trading. Over time, all that remained was a small group of impoverished war widows and eccentrics, along with their canine protectors. It was these last inhabitants that gave the region the name of Dogtown.

Some evidence exists that women escaped from the Salem Witch Trials to a relatively peaceful existence in Dogtown; some say occult practices secretly continue there today.   As nature reforested the abandoned land, it became a supernal wilderness of fauna, rock formations, vernal pools,  bogs, and quarries. To many “Cape Anners, “ It remains sacred land, where nature’s heart beats unimpeded.

So I began to read East’s book and it hooked me.  It explored Dogtown’s history, its natural beauty, the brutal murder that occurred there in 1984, and the citizens’ subsequent movement to reclaim their spiritual paradise.  And as I read, I was remembering the many years that I had lived in Gloucester.  Sure, I had hiked the paths of Dogtown, but but I had been blind to the history of the place.   Why had I not devoted more attention to this paradisiacal land that had inspired so many creative souls, including the artist Marsden Hartley and the writer T.S. Elliott? It had been right there all along — a mysterious, multi-faceted gem right under my nose.

Have you ever gone “back home” to discover it anew?

When people talk about trips “back home,” their stories are usually tinged with disappointment about commercial over-development and what’s been lost.  The miraculous thing about Dogtown is that while Gloucester has been somewhat over-developed, Dogtown remains largely untouched.

It all began with a tweet and now I’ve been called to new explorations of a big chunk of my past life with all of its associations and consequences.  I’m feeling, well, compelled, and on my next trip to Gloucester (which will be soon), I’ll be heading straight to Dogtown.

Barbara Oliver lives on Cape Cod and is the communications director of a nonprofit organization.

Tonight I spoke at an undergraduate management class at Simmons College. I got my MBA at the Simmons School of Management not that long ago, so I was excited to work with the latest crop of students from the other side of the desk, as it were.

The topic was Professional Networking Online and Off.  Here’s the main gist of what I had to say:

The Rules Are The Same, Regardless of Venue

I don’t care if you’re trying to meet people at a job fair, a conference, a dinner party, or the laundromat. The basic “rules” that I try to follow are:

• Focus on the person you’re talking to
• Ask them about what matters most to them
• Find out how you can help them
• Help them

The problem with formal “networking” events is that these events practically force us to be on the make in one way or another, and let’s be honest, it stinks. Nobody likes being treated like a target, or a lead, but at professional networking events, that’s how we’ve all been trained to behave.

It’s All Just Relationship Building

If you’re a new business on Twitter, or Facebook, trying to generate interest in the goods and services you sell (or you’re trying to sell yourself as a job candidate online), the funny thing is that you should probably try talking about those goods and services (or yourself) on Twitter and Facebook very, very sparingly.

Here’s an idea of what to do instead:

• Focus on the person you’re talking to
• Ask them about what matters most to them
• Find out how you can help them
• Help them

We are naturally inclined to think well of those who find us fascinating. We tend to think that these people have really good taste. We might even get excited about what you have to sell.

But to go for “the sale” right away is like meeting somebody for the first time and trying to make out with them five minutes later. Does it occasionally work? Do you once in a while find somebody who wants to leave the party with your room key in their pocket?

Sure, it can happen. But you’ll end up alienating a whole lot more people in the process than you end up going home with.

Image by Kid Paparazzi

If I know you in life, or you follow me on Twitter, then chances are you already know about the side projects that have been consuming such a vast amount of my free time.

But in case you haven’t heard, I’m very pleased to announce two new website launches:

An Accomplished Young Lady

More of a redesign than a launch, really, as this is the blog that I started with, back in 2004. I recently redesigned and relaunched this site, to better reflect the focus it maintains on my passion for 19th century fiction, history, biography, manners, crafts, and dress — and a more personal take on my life in a tiny house on Cape Cod.

An Accomplished Young Lady

Eggplantia

A homebase for the ever-growing number of projects I co-produce with my best friend, Melissa Averinos. Includes the full library of the short stop-motion film series known as Unicorn Stories, BronteAlong, Handmade for the Holidays, and anything else we might dream up in the future. Wondering where we came up with the name? Read all about it.

Eggplantia

I’m still blogging here, and on the HubSpot inbound marketing blog, of course. But on the off-chance that any of this is your cup of tea, I thought you might like to know.

I’ve got another new post up at the HubSpot Inbound Marketing blog — and this one is kicking off a brand new series!

Sense and Sociability – Your Guide to Social Media Etiquette

It’s my new Jane-Austen-inspired etiquette guide to social media and online behavior.

Yes, I am that kind of geek as well.

The logo was designed by my good friend Jim Hill over at Digital Quill.  Jim is also an aspiring children’s author and illustrator, and he just launched a brand new blog called HeyJimHill.com — you should check it out!

If you have your own questions about social media manners for the semi-fictional but always well behaved Miss Jane, send them to me at sense@hubspot.com.

I am a big fan and supporter of the UnConference concept, especially as exemplified by the many and multiplying PodCamps in the world today.

So I’m pleased to see that the format is being applied in other ways, too, such as at the MassChallenge UnPanel in Fall River, MA, March 3.

Aimed at entrepreneurial types and those involved in the startup space, the event promises to offer a refreshing alternative to the pre-packaged panels one encounters so often of close-but-not-quite the people you wish you could listen to for an hour.

From the MassChallenge description:

Experienced entrepreneurs are available for group discussions (max 10 people/table)

You select the panelist/topic that matches your interests

You sign up for three 20 minute discussions

Following the UnPanel, chat with panelists and attendees

MassChallenge, if you’re curious, is a global gathering and competition for startups and innovative businesses.

In their own words, they are:

“…using a combination of public and private funds to catalyze growth and jobs by launching the worlds largest global startup competition in Massachusetts. The competition is industry and geography agnostic — anyone can enter, with any startup idea, from anywhere on the planet.Every entrant will receive access to training, mentors, executives, other team members and sources of funding. Experts from the Massachusetts ecosystem will identify the highest potential startups, which will receive cash prizes and will qualify for privileged access to funding sources from across Massachusetts and New England.”

Sounds like a blast to me — what do you think? Will you go?