Since Tuesday evening the social media world and blogosphere has been blowing up with the news that Google, Salesforce.com and Sequoia invested $32 million in HubSpot. Most of everything I’ve read has been positive too. However, yesterday evening I came across an article by Matt Rosoff, Silicon Alley Insider’s West Coast Editor and contributor to BusinessInsider.com. The article was titled, “Google Just Invested in a Startup that Helps Companies Show Up Higher in Search Results.”
The article has some good information on the funding itself, Google’s recent JC Penny and Overstock.com debacle and the potential consequences of the fiasco. However, the title and premise of the article is misleading and has deviant intent. If a reader wasn’t familiar with HubSpot, Internet marketing and/or SEO they would be led to believe that Google is helping a company game their algorithms. This is because HubSpot is characterized as an SEO company that “helps companies show up higher in search results.”
This is a gross mischaracterization of what HubSpot does. I know this because HubSpot customers hire us to do their SEO. HubSpot merely offers a resource library of Internet marketing best practices and a content management system (CMS) with reporting tools that report known SEO metrics. It’s very similar to a score board. Does knowing your “SEO score” make you come up higher in Google? Does knowing how many points you scored in a basketball game make you a better player? Of course not.
HubSpot software allows businesses to streamline the management of their Internet marketing efforts by bringing content marketing, email marketing, lead nurturing, blogging, social media, analytics, SEO reporting, sales reporting, etc. under one consolidated roof. The alternative is to use 10+ different systems while attempting to manage all of the massive amounts of data required to be successful online.
If Matt was a marketing writer and not a technology writer he would have known the above. Internet marketing does not fall under technology. It falls under marketing. Technology is merely the tool used to communicate the marketing message. Should stories about billboards be listed under the architecture section of a publication? Of course not, and the story shouldn’t be written by an architect either. So, if you’re a technology writer consider sticking to your iPad, Microsoft, smart phone and video game stories.
Image Credit: publicenergy
