Ellie Mirman's Startup Marketing Blog

I recently read Seth Godin's newest book, Linchpin, and not only loved the book but also found that it so shockingly well described my office. So much so that I've started recommending it to recent grads interested in marketing, alongside Inbound Marketing and The New Rules of Marketing & PR, of course.

Whenever I get into a conversation about the meaning of life, I immediately roll my eyes. I honestly can't stand that conversation because it seems so irrelevant to me. In my opinion, there is no singular meaning of life and it's not worth our time and energy to discuss it.

As perhaps the unofficial official blogger of my family, and also a well-intentioned member of society, I feel it is my duty to share this wonderful read. The Will to Whatevs is the ultimate self-help book for dealing with all of life's twists and turns, from school to marriage to death. Perhaps in that order, but perhaps not.

There's nothing like a great conference to really get lots of thoughts and ideas jumping around in your head, just waiting for a blog post to flush them out. Yesterday I drove down to Randolph, MA for Geek Girl Camp Boston to talk to women about how to use inbound marketing and, specifically, Facebook, for business and afterwards I was so energized with blog post ideas about marketing and Facebook and social media newbies.

It's been a crazy week for us over at HubSpot - and I swear this time it's crazier than usual.

In my earlier post, I talked about concreteness - or, more specifically, concreteness as a form of constraints - in helping our minds focus and be more creative.

In school, I think you're taught to write the body of a paper first and then go back and write the introduction and title. I could never do that. I needed to write the title first, and then the introduction, to frame my thoughts and prepare myself for writing the rest of the paper.

I've just started reading Chip & Dan Heath's Made to Stick and already I'm loving it. Wish I had read it months ago (when I first received it from Amazon). The book is all about what makes ideas "sticky" or, in other words, "why some ideas survive and others die" (taken right from the cover...). The book exemplifies exactly why I ever got into marketing, namely, the coming together of psychology and language to explain how the very way you communicate something can have a dramatic effect on how a given idea or statement is received. But beyond that, I'm also really learning from this book. You may think, as a marketing professional with a degree in the humanities, I certainly must be able to communicate effectively already. Well, I am not so bold as to say that I could not use some improvement.