Change can be challenging, but at its core, it is truly exciting.

I am joining the marketing team at HubSpot in Cambridge, MA.

For nearly six years, I have lived in Raleigh, NC and loved every second of it. It is hands down one of the best places to live in the U.S. The social media community in Raleigh is thriving, and I am proud that I was able to be a part of it from the beginning. It has grown to a level of activity that I am not sure anyone expected. In making this change, I leave an amazing community behind, but Wayne, Jeff, Ryan and others will keep the Triangle one of the leading social media communities in the U.S.

Leaving Raleigh also means saying goodbye to my friends and coworkers at Howard, Merrell & Partners (HM&P). If you are looking for a full-service agency who is capable of great strategy and execution, then hire them. I mean it. They rock. I have learned a lot working with the smart people and clients of HM&P, and I leave convinced that the agency’s work will only continue to be stellar!

Raleigh will always feel like home and there is much I will miss. But it is time to look forward.

5 Reasons I Am Joining HubSpot

1. I Want To Change The World

At their core, I think everyone wants to change the world. I am no different. HubSpot is already changing the world. They have transformed the way that businesses market their products and services using the Internet. Inbound marketing is the future of business development. HubSpot has gone from an early stage start-up to a more than 100 person company that has taken the clear lead in the inbound marketing industry.

2. HubSpot Is A Platform, Not A Product

If you have spent more than five minutes talking to me, then you likely know that I firmly believe that great businesses in the future will focus on platforms instead of products. HubSpot has successfully created a platform that helps business owners more efficiently generate leads and sell products and services. HubSpot’s platform is similar in potential and scale to those built by other great companies, like Apple and Google.

3. Taking B2B Social Media To The Next Level

I have spent the last year contributing to SocialMediaB2B.com, a multi-author blog I started with Jeff Cohen. During the course of the past year, I realized that a great deal of education is needed to help B2B companies understand and improve how they use the Internet to grow their business. HubSpot has been helping B2B companies learn since the company started. This opportunity provides me with the ability to help more business owners understand B2B social media.

4. Marketing Services Are Becoming Commoditized

Marketing services companies, from big agencies to consultants, are about to go through a major change. Ideas and great content are more valuable now than ever before. However, the business models and structure of service-based companies are going to change due to the democratization of media, reduced point of entry into marketing provided by the web, and increased focused on ROI. The recent launch of the new HubSpot Service Marketplace provides solid insight into how the industry is likely to change and how HubSpot is positioned to succeed in this evolving market.

5. HubSpot Is Defining An Industry

HubSpot created the inbound marketing industry and is shaping how it evolves in the future. Being involved with a talented group of people who also have the opportunity to shape an entire industry is a rare opportunity.

I will be part of the marketing team at HubSpot, focusing a large part of my time making the HubSpot Blog the best Internet marketing blog on the web. I am excited to join the amazing team at HubSpot and becoming a part of the Boston community.

Thanks to my friends, family, colleagues, and especially my amazing wife, who have supported me during this transition.

If you want to learn more about HubSpot, please feel free to contact me at: KBodnarATHubSpotDOTcom

So things have been quiet here at Digital Capitalism for many reasons. The first I needed to take a break from the hardcore social media echo chamber, the second is that things over at Social Media B2B are going crazy good, and finally because I have launched a new personal project.  Jeff Cohen and I have been spending the past month working on a new video podcast that reviews wines made in North Carolina. We are calling it North Carolina Wine TV and it is a blast!

Our goal is to taste and review every wine made in North Carolina. With 80 winereies in North carolina each producing many types of wine that is going to be a long journey. We are publishing two video reviews of North Carolina wine each week. So far we have published our first six episodes and have found some good ones, but also some bad ones. Over time Jeff and I also plan to visit each of the wineries in NC as well. We will be doing our visit on June 27th at Raffaldini Vineyards.

The bottom line is I am having a great time and I am on my way back with more social media marketing related posts.  If you enjoy wine, I hope you will take a minute to watch North Carolina Wine TV.

The beauty of the self publishing platform that is the Internet is that most bloggers and contents creators start out at zero: 0 readers, 0 posts, and 0 everything. This is also the major reason that many blogs don’t get thousands of readers. Blogging, writing, and hell even life is about expectations. When you right blog posts that you think no one will read, they most likely will suck and you will be inclined to write less often then you really need to inorder to build an audience.

What If You Had 10,000 Readers?
If writing for no one makes you a crappy writer then shouldn’t writing for thousands make you better? Yes, it is all about competition and exceptions. First you need to make sure that you really do care about what you will be blogging, vlogging, tweeting, etc. about, because if you don’t care you will be worse then boring.

What if you:

• pretended that  10,000 people we going to read whatever it is you are writing about. Would that change what you were writing?
• asked yourself “is this really interesting, would I read it?”
• made it a competition i.e. have X number of readers in 30 days. X number of subscribers in 90 days. etc.
• asked yourself “is this really how I sound? Am I covering up the real me because I think people don’t want to hear it” Stop doing that NOW

You Don’t Have To Know It All
Ignore people that talk condescendingly about blog SEO, blogrolls, and all of the other things that you MUST know about blogging. Honestly those things are really nice to do and can help a lot, but trying to learn it all at once will be confusing and stop you from actually creating compelling content. You will figure it out, it really isn’t that hard. We all want it to be cool, so that we can be cool, but the truth it is good writing which is nothing new…

Winning in the emerging social economy is about taking action. It is not about having 10 great blog post ideas, instead it is about publishing one great post. The social web is kind of like Darwinism for hustle. Those who hustle and take action; win. Those who sit around and talk about their “great” ideas lose. Chris Brogan, isn’t the smartest person on the web, but many think so because he is disciplined enough to publish frequent content that is also thought provoking.

Being First Is Better Than Being Better
Individuals and companies need to get of the idea of “waiting for perfection” out of their thick skulls. The web is about revisions. Online, it is quick and cheap to edit or change something almost anything. Failing to realize this will only result in failure.

Take a look at Twitter. By traditional business standards it would have been a complete failure. Here is a company that doesn’t have a model to make money, a service which was down and unusable through much of its start up phase, and an inferior technology platform.  All of those things are true. Services like Pownce, Rejaw, and Identi.ca were all better services that were more stable.

So how did Twitter succeed? They were first. Now Twitter is the only word you hear on the TV and Pownce doens’t even exist. If you don’t think this applies to traditional businesses doing business online, then you are fooling yourself and your employees.

With Action Comes A Plan
If you have read this far then you must agree with me or must be a complete sadist. If social media is about action then every person or organization should then have an action plan right? What would that look like?

Keep it simple. I use a plan that works like this (though I use different numbers and have some added layers):

Each Day Do The Following:

• Publish 1 Blog Post or Video
• Leave 5 comments on relevant industry blogs
• Learn 1 new application
• Share 20 links that you think will help others
• Offer to help 1 person with a project
• Read one piece of in depth research or information that is longer than a blog post.

Sure it is a lot, but it works. This is only a mockup of a plan, I suggest you create one that works well for you.

Now tell me, how do you hustle?

I spend a good bit of my free time creating content online in all forms: written, images, and video. One of the questions people most often ask is what type of video camera do you use? or what mic are you using? The short answer is, that it doesn’t matter. Equipment doesn’t make your video more interesting, you do. I think a lot of time we get caught up on the equipment, so that we don’t have to focus on the hard issues, like being interesting.

I suggest that you use what ever you have to get started and as you get better at creating good content you will figure out what the next best step in terms of buying equipment is for you. But this doesn’t answer the bigger question of: How do I make sure I am interesting?

Here are my ideas:

• Be yourself – If you try to be someone else it will be clear and you will be irrelevant.
• Establish a “trademark” – Create a saying, style, or prop that is unique to your content.
• Learn from others – Look at the content creators that people are most interested in. What are they doing that others are not?
• Understand you audience – It is impossible to create relevant content if you don’t know who you are talking to.

Bonus:
Here is a quick video Wayne and I did at SXSW to talk about how to live stream. Should give you some basic how-to information:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Everyone wants to know the secret to winning in a world dominated by social media. Well I am going to tell it to you:

“Create valuable and engaging content and tell people about it”

That is it…… Those who are succeeding in social media are doing that. More importantly they are doing it rather than talking about doing it.

Sometimes I feel the need to write quick and short musing posts about the web after having a quick random thought. This is one of those posts.

Since the beginning of the social web economy savvy start up entrepreneurs have had to face one major obstacle in their quest for fame and riches.  By their nature social web applications need a large population of users to become useful. So how to you get users to use a service before their are really enough people on it to make it useful? This problem has been the downfall of many great ideas and million is venture capital funding.

However, I think that this is a problem that is STARTING to go away for two reasons:

1. Location:
Location based technologies and the rise of the mobile web offer a lot of solutions to the problems of getting users because you can now use real world locations as “users” and let people find new friends that they hadn’t discovered before. By populating new connections around places, the need to have “old friends” on new networks will decrease greatly.

2. Facebook Connect:
Love it or hate with its recent changes to its API Facebook is quickly become a defacto social ID for the web. Which means new web services will be forced to use Facebook Connect in their service because of it marketing and user population potential.

Neither of these change the web’s obsession with piling up new users for each service, but they do offer a change to previous approaches…

Last week, I sat in front of the computer and watched one of the best interviews on technology, innovation and the social web that I have ever seen.  Marc Andreessen’s interview with Charlie Rose was a captivating and engaging view into one of the pioneers on the web that developed technology that directly impacts how we all use the Internet today. Andreessen is brilliant and has his own absolute idea of the future and you can tell through his investments that his bets normally win.

Click here to view the embedded video.

One of my takeaways from the interview is that many of us on the social web have lost our vision. The information overload provided by  social web applications has led us to become obsessed with “right now” and any vision of the furture we have is limited to thirty or sixty minutes ahead and not much more. I was captivated by Marc, not just because he his brilliant, but because I needed to fill a vision craving that wasn’t being filled else where. The social web as we know it today is in the beginning of its infancy.  It will see huge changes in the next 5, 10, 20 years, but few spend time talking about this. We hear talk of next week or maybe next month, but we get too swallowed up in the current “buzz” to step back and think about how we can build a social web that has meaningful staying power and application. I am going to make a concerted effort on this blog to examine ideas for the future and to look at exisiting and potential technologies that can solve problems and solidify the next generation of our economy and relationships.  I hope this post encourages you to do the same? Do you agree, are we losing our vision? P.S. If you read this and know Marc please tell him to start blogging again! His posts are great and we need more commentary like his.

Just like everything else in life, social media isn’t free, far from it.  Free is the lure that got most of us started in social media and the fact that it was new and shiny didn’t hurt either.

Free Applications: The Gateway Drug
We are all lured into participation in social media by the idea of free, but though the apps are free, being active in social media isn’t. Lets do a quick break down a some realistic costs for being active in social media today. For many people free works, but for many others free leads to the need to “upgrade” both hardware and software.

So what does it really cost to have a blog, share videos and photos, be active on networks like Facebook and Twitter?

The Breakdown:

Equipment Needed:

• Computer: $500 – 5,000
• Camera: $50-$2000
• Smart Phone: $50 – $400
• Cellular Data and SMS plan: $20-$60 per month
• Video Camera: $80 – $5,000
• Photo and Video Editing Software: $200 – $3,000
• Bags, cases, tripods, and accessories: $50 – $500

Software Related Expenses:

Blog: Price Tag = Entry Level – Free (blogger, wordpress.com, tumblr.com, etc.) Mid Level – Paid $5-$15 per month (not selfhosted: Typepad, Squarespace, etc) and Top level – Hosting ($5 to $100 per month)  Design work or premium themes ($50 – $30,000 in fees)

Paid Media Sharing Web Applications:

Flickr: $20 per year
Vimeo: $60 per year

So if you take the low end of all of my cost esimates from this post you are looking at a cost of $1,325 to equip yourself in the first year with the entry level equipment and services needed to be an active online participant and this does not include the time investment that goes with that price tag.

Are you ready to make the investment is takes to equip yourself?

What other costs did I forget? Anybody think I am offbase with this post?

Today we saw Barack Obama the 44th President of the United States take office, and I expect him to to do many things in his first term as our president, but today he did one really big thing, that should not go unnoticed. Today, Obama started a true shift in how we as a society receive and share news and information.

Today’s inauguration marked a major shift in how traditional media organizations deliver news. The major highlight of the day seems to be CNN.com’s live streaming of the inauguration event that involved a partnership with Facebook to integrate friends comment along side the streaming video.  C.C. Chapman has done a very good video review of how the integration worked:

Mashable has a great post on the “Mindblowing” success of the CNN and Facebook partnership which saw CNN stream nearly 14 million live video feeds online between 6 a.m. and Noon today. Facebook also saw 8,500 updates in the first minute of Obama’s speech.  These numbers help to reinforce the point that C.C. made in his video and the one that I am trying to make in this post. Something really historic happened today in the world of media. The computer screen surpassed the living room TV in providing entertainment value and interactivity.

Today, people didn’t need to turn on their TV’s to watch history nor did they have to pick up the phone to call their friends for their reaction. Today CNN and Facebook gave both to people for free on their computer.  It makes sense that we see this integration first with a cable network, but the question is how will networks and hardware manufacturers work together to bring this into the living room?

The Government Gets Social:
Something else happened today while those millions of people were watching on CNN.com. Today at 12:01 before President Obama was sworn in the new Whitehouse.gov site for his administration went live.

I hope that any one who reads this post goes and take a couple of minutes to navigate around Whitehouse.gov. Not only is the design great, but it is a solid hub of information, most companies that I know do not have such as social and information rich sites.  When do you ever remember hearing that the government was better than most businesses when is came to marketing and communications? Never!

This is a big deal, and hopefully the work that Obama’s team has done with Whitehouse.gov will lead to the change of other government communications as well as how those in the private sector view the importance of social media in their marketing strategy.  This team has create a government Web site that is so information rich that I plan to visit it on a regular basis.

Today’s events have forced traditional media to embrace citizen journalism and make news more social, while our government has jump far ahead of most in the private sector in leveraging social media for community building.  Today was a good day…