Ellie Mirman's Startup Marketing Blog

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.

It's about time that Inbound Marketing makes it to the big YouTube screen. Check out this hilarious music video, featuring, among others, yours truly...

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.

It's been a busy couple of months for me, in preparation for tomorrow's Inbound Marketing Summit. My friends and family are looking forward to seeing me again (only partially serious...) and everyone at work and all the registrants I've spoken with are very much excited for the event.

Today I took some time to mentally prepare myself, get psyched and put some final things in place.

Some things I'm looking forward to:

• Meeting marketing gurus like Seth Godin and all the other speakers and sponsors I've communicated with over email and phone for the last 6 months
• Seeing some social media friends and customers who I haven't seen in a few months
• Getting (literally) the whole HubSpot team involved and excited in this event (by so graciously staffing parts of it)
• And, of course, sleeping when it's all over

This week has been quite the whirl-wind (even though it's only Tuesday). I was at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Boston, which turned out to be quite a blast. I got to spend two full days with all marketers talking about topics I find really interesting (and happen to address in my job) like blogging and social media.

After another amazing month at work, we of course went out on Friday night to celebrate with a few beers and rounds of pool. And funny enough - though not surprisingly - many of our conversations devolved into a conversation about work and Internet marketing. Sound familiar?

My friend recently asked me this question and here was my answer:

We are in the Age of the Geeks, where everything "geeky" or "dorky" is actually cool and awesome.  We are all embracing our inner geek.  And my inner geek just can't help but love these wonderful articles:

Microsoft's new ad for its mp3 player, Zune, has definitely surprised me by how cooky and cool it is.