HUGS 2011: Hubspot User Conference

Before this becomes obsolete, I wanted to write a quick post on my attendance to the Hubspot 2011 Conference this past Friday. The company I am currently employed utilizes Hubspot software for its online marketing initiatives, and I have since become an obsessed user since being introduced to the system about 6 months ago. Hubspot hosted a conference at the Boston Sheraton this past Friday, called HUGS 2011, and it was, for the most part, good.

{Powerful Closing Here} Such delicious Geekiness...

The day had a full agenda of seminars that were broken up into three tracks based on experience of Hubspot users. I felt torn between the Intermediate and Advanced sessions, so I attended a few of both. Some of the presentations were a bit better then others, but for the most part I felt as though I knew most of the material already, or was in a real-life Hubspot webinar. Which has its great moments, but wasn't what I'd expected.

The event itself was okay, you could tell that they still need to tweak things a bit to make flawless. For example, there was a  Q&A lunch session with the CEO and Founder that I really wanted to catch, but I had gotten a late seat at a table waaay in the back with lots of chattering marketers, so I had no prayer of hearing what was going on. One of their big speakers also didn't show up due to illness, which was disappointing

However, I do not regret attending. I got a great spreadsheet that I'm still wrapping my mind around to measure ROI of online marketing efforts. I got further inspired and was yelling "YES! YES!" in my head during a content seminar about blogging and have a slew of new ideas to get my company involved with our blog. Lastly, my favorite presentation was by Jeanne Hopkins, Director of Marketing at Hubspot. The seminar not only gave me great pointers on marketing collaborations, but I was able to snag her for a quick conversation on how to be a strong female leader in the male workplace.

You're on your way, Hubspot, and I like what you're doing. I believe next year will be even better!

If you went to the conference, let me know what you think ;)

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This bride came to me with the coolest vintage-inspired invites that I've ever seen. Using different fonts and styles to create an antiqued feel, the invitations came in a charcoal-grey color scheme that she requested for a custom color mix for her calligraphy for outer envelopes.

You can see from the images that she chose the spread out zip code with no dot accents between the numbers. The envelopes were great quality, looking almost woven, and thus great to write on. I used a C-5 calligraphy nib, and custom-mixed a grey using a mostly white ink bottle with limited drops of black. The result was a "not too harsh" ink color that really popped, and looked great against her invitations!

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