Karen Rubin's Ramblings

It took just over a week, but today something MOMENTUS happened. Google officially found Karen-Rubin.com! As you can see from the HubSpot screen shot below, I am ranking #39 for the search term "karen rubin" and #71 for the search term "karen-rubin".

It's interesting that I am ranking higher for the term that is not my URL, but that's probably because I don't refer to myself as karen-rubin very often on the blog. In any case, I'll keep working to move myself up in the ranks and hopefully one day be able to claim domination!

There was a super interesting article in the New York Times yesterday about how internet users in developing countries are not profitable for advertising based websites. It was one of those stories that made me hit myself smack in the forehead and say, "Duh!" It makes so much sense and yet I had never thought of it before.

The gist is that companies like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and hundreds of others, make money by showing ads on their sites. These sites have been working to grow internationally and by doing so have had to make investments in the infrastructure required to do so (more servers & bandwidth.) While their traffic around the world has indeed gone up, what has become apparent is that this doesn't translate into more advertising revenue.

As the article explained, "there may be 1.6 billion people in the world with Internet access, but fewer than half of them have incomes high enough to interest major advertisers." This means that while the internet companies are working to pull to world together online, they aren't making any money because the advertisers aren't interested in a significant portion of the world's population. Some of these sites have even stopped allowing access to their sites for people in developing nations.

While I am ever the capitalist and want these companies to make money and thrive, it bothers me that individuals in developing nations may have limited access because advertisers don't find them sexy. There seems to be something we haven't figured out about globalization if these companies cannot bring their services to those in less developed parts of the world. It also is one more argument for figuring out a way to monetize these sites that is not entirely based in advertising.

Image Credit: http://www.thestrategyweb.com

 Update: A new tool was released today that tracks the use of Facebook around the world. Check Facebook has some supercool displays of use around the globe which they update daily. 

Tomorrow afternoon I will be at the MITX Digital Combine for a couple hours helping to recruit ROCKSTARS for HubSpot. The Digital Combine is a place where

"Job seekers have the opportunity to attend a series of afternoon panels designed specifically to educate them with the skills they need to stay competitive in today's market and meet with participating companies who will be showcasing their capabilities and talking about current or future individuals in the digital industry."

It sounds like a pretty cool event. You can get help with your resume or meet people from a vareity of companies. There are also a vareity of sessions on managing your personal brand and interview tips and techniques. 

If you are looking for work in Boston, I would say showing up is a no-brainer. Come say "Hi!" while you are there as well. 

Yesterday morning, while hunting through the Today Show archives for a piece they did early this week on personal branding, I came across an interesting article titled, Me, me, me! America's ‘Narcissism Epidemic'. Psychologists Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell have recently authored the book The Narcissism Epidemic. The article included a segment from the book as well as an interview with Ms. Twenge.

"People buy expensive homes with loans far beyond their ability to pay - or at least they did until the mortgage market collapsed as a result...People strive to create a "personal brand" (also called "self-branding"), packaging themselves like a product to be sold...High school students pummel classmates and then seek attention for their violence by posting YouTube videos of the beatings."

So if I understand this correctly, my site, Karen-Rubin.com, which I started to promote my personal brand is the same as if I went out and recorded myself "pummeling" a colleague and then posting that on YouTube? Really?

The excerpt then goes on to further explain,

"Although these seem like a random collection of current trends, all are rooted in a single underlying shift in the American psychology: the relentless rise of narcissism in our culture...Standards have shifted, sucking otherwise humble people into the vortex of granite countertops, tricked-out MySpace pages, and plastic surgery."

While I have never succumbed to plastic surgery or MySpace, I do have granite countertops in my brand new kitchen and what can only be described as a "tricked-out" Facebook page. (I mean it has photos and an RSS feed from my blog, that must be what tricked-out means, right?) Since both my Facebook page and my granite countertops have come since I started working at HubSpot, I have to assume I was a "humble person" until Mike Volpe taught me about the dark dark world of personal branding and social media.

What I find even more fantastic about all of this is that Ms. Twenge has her very own personal branding website! So does that mean personal branding is ok if you are an author going on the Today Show and it's just for the rest of us "humble people" that it's a narcissistic activity?

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this one. Are all of us social media busy bodies just narcissists dragging the country down into shallow values? Or are Ms. Twenge and Mr. Campbell correct that these activities can do no good? 

Yesterday Google took a step towards making their profiles more helpful by launching Google Me. If you go and type "Me" into Google, you will get the option to set up your profile (you can also go to here). Once set up, your profile will show at the bottom of the search results. 

Who knows what this means for now, but I am going to guess that it's a great move for personal branding. They allow you to include your Gmail name as the URL, so my Google Profile URL is, http://www.google.com/profiles/Karen.Roy. I was a bit bummed that I couldn't change this to Karen Rubin at first, but I should have known Google would figure it out. When you search for Karen Rubin, my Karen.Roy Google Profile does show up. Smart folks over there at Google. 

Over at Mashable there is some concern about the amount of information this allows Google to know about you. I have to admit, I gave up that battle a while ago and fully embrace Google knowing all there is about me. When they take over the world, perhaps they will be nicer to people who have supported their domination.

Recently I have been an interviewing maniac. In the last couple weeks I have conducted more than 20 interviews, most with customers, but one very fun interview with Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter.

I am fairly new to interviewing, having only started conducting interviews since starting my job here at HubSpot, but the one thing I have learned is that researching the person you are interviewing is of utmost importance.

No matter the interview type (customer or HubSpot.tv) the more I know about the individual the more interesting the conversation will be. If I am talking to a customer, before I get on the call I want to find out what their business does and what their roll is. I want to know how large their company is and who their target customer is. All of these things ensure that the questions I ask will be relevant and the interview will help me learn more about them and their business. 

When I am planning for a HubSpot.tv guest I want to learn about what projects they are working on, what they are passionate about and what they have worked on in the past. With HubSpot.tv guests, I am trying to ask interesting questions that are different from what everyone else asks them, so I also want to look into other interviews they have given. 

A few months ago I was completely surprised when McHammer showed up for HubSpot.tv. Mike had mentioned that they were trying to get him, but I didn't believe for one second that he would come, so I didn't do ANY research. When he showed up, not only was I completely start struck, but I didn't have anything significant or relevant to ask him. All I knew of him was his old school hammer pants and 2 Legit 2 Legit to Quit! 

If you compare the McHammer interview to the Biz Stone interview above, you can easily tell which I was more prepared for. If you are conducting interviews of any type, my only recommendation is to figure out as much as you can about the individual you are talking to and prepare a couple questions. It will help keep the conversation going and ensure that you both get the most out of it. 

Here at HubSpot we frequently talk with customers about how they shouldn't worry as much about the design of their website as they worry about the content on their website. I believe this to be true, and when throwing Karen-Rubin.com online yesterday didn't worry so much about what it looked like. The goal is to create good, interesting content that people want to read, not win design awards.

During the course of the day, I showed the site to exactly 3 people. My mom, my dad and my friend Kyle Paice, 2 of the 3 said "Ewww, you did the header in Comic Sans?" Sure enough this was the header I had used, 

Kyle then showed me this tweet he sent earlier that same day, 

Apparently I am completely behind on font etiquette. My dad sent me this article in the Wall Street Journal this morning through which I learned there has been a movement to ban the use of Comic Sans since 1999! Apparently the over used font conveys either a "fun, breezy, silly or vulgar and lazy" meaning, neither of which is exactly what I am trying to do here.

Not being a designer or a typographer, I don't know what the different fonts mean. I have changed the header to Impact, and  acording to Wikipedia "Its ultra-thick strokes, compressed letterspacing, and minimal interior counterform are specifically aimed, as its name suggests, to "impact." Which, I guess, is more in line which what I am trying to do here, make an impact!

The moral of this story is to ask for advice when trying something new. Two heads (or 3 in this case) are better than one. I didn't know the message I was conveying with my font selection, but was able to find out pretty quickly. If you are launching a new site, blog, newsletter or anything else, ask a couple people you trust for their thoughts before throwing it out to the world. 

I spend plenty of time talking about personal branding on the video podcast I host with Mike Volpe, HubSpot.tv, but up until this morning hadn't created a site to help with my personal branding!

I hesitated because the domain I wanted, KarenRubin.com was taken by a talented photographer in Colorado. I have slowly been working my way up the Google rankings for the term "Karen Rubin" and my Twitter account, Linked In profile and foodie blog now show on the first page. I knew I didn't stand a chance of getting the coveted #1 position as long as I didn't have a domain that was at least close to the search term. 

I finally realized having something was better than nothing, and thus the birth of Karen-Rubin.com.  I hope to use this as a place to share interesting things I am learning and doing at inbound marketing powerhouse HubSpot.com. The goal is to continue building my brand and ultimately take over the number 1 place on Google for people searching Karen Rubin. 

 If you don't have your personal domain locked in, now is the time to go buy it. Perhaps you aren't ready to start a site, but you don't want to wait until you are only to find out someone else has snagged the URL!