Let me know what you think!

Like in most instances in life – there is a hard way and an easy way.

The Easy Way:

The fastest and the easiest way to watch Hulu in Canada is to download Hotpost Shield. It is a program that runs in a background that promises to – “Protect the web for your security, privacy, and anonymity.” Although their promise isn’t 100% as my browser randomly started jumping to Hotspot Shield pages during my browsing sessions. Nevertheless, it does the trick. I suggest to have it running only when you want to watch something on Hulu.

The Hard Way (Set Up a VPN):

Lengthy process that only the true geeks will probably use but it works as well. James Golick has an awesome guide how to set up a VPN and I highly suggest you follow his lead. You can find it here.

Have fun people and don’t watch too much HULU, I hear it is bad for your relationships.

The world that we live in is a extremely fast-paced and being up-to-date can give you the ultimate edge. However, keeping track with all the talk isn’t always that simple and I am here to help you become a rock star of current emerging trends and events.  Being a rock star in this field will help you predict the cultural shifts that are constantly happening around us.

Why is this important? Staying up-t0-date will give you the ability to…

• Conduct real-time market research
• Know what people are talking about
• Have a conversation
• Know how to reach the public
• Analyze what works

Here are the tools that will help you achieve all of the above:1. Watch Youtube Most Popular/Most Viewed Videos

(Links: Youtube Most Popular, Youtube Most Viewed)

Why? Because Youtube is the second largest search engine and ranks as the 4^th most popular web site on the web. Take advantage and use it in order to get a glimpse of our current culture.

I know there is a lot of stupid stuff being watched on Youtube but as much as you might hate it – this is the culture. Take advantage and start creating content that is original yet uses similar techniques as these videos.

Also, look at the categories that fit to your own niche and analyze those videos as well.

2. Staying Updated with Twitter’s Trending Topics (Search)

(Links: Twitter Search)

Twitter has become the ultimate marketer’s tool as it lets you know what is popular before it even hits the news. There are many tools that can help you track emerging trends with the main one being Twitter’s homepage.

The hottest tool to stay updated with Twitter’s trending topics is TweetMeMe. What is TweetMeMe?  It “is a service which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular. TweetMeme categorizes these links into Categories, Subcategories and Channels, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what you’re interested in.”

There are also many other tools such as: Trendestic, Monitter, and Twitturly.

3. Keeping up with Google’s Trends

(Links: Google Trends)

Google not wanting to be swept away by Twitter’s trending topics has recently started updating their Google Trends to daily instead of monthly. Google Trends gives you glimpse at the most popular topics by analyzing the searches taking place on Google.

Google Trends is in still early stages of development and will definitely be adding more functionality in order to battle Twitter over being the source for emerging trends.

4. Social Bookmarking Websites

I can’t say it better than Wikipedia- “Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet.” And also a great method for you to analyze what is popular at the moment (may not be as up to date as Twitter). There are a gazilion number of social bookmarking websites but only a few truly deliver. Here is a few names – Mixx, Digg, Yahoo Buzz, StumbleUpon, and  Reddit.

Can you recommend any other ways to help us stay updated with the current pop culture?

Image Credit: Prima Vista

The obvious next step after unlearning is relearning. This is the most exciting part of the process as the skills that you acquire may excel you to a bright future. However, finding quality online marketing education can be difficult and costly. There are numerous of charlatans on and off the web promising to make you a social media expert if you just take up on their special limited time offer for the first 10000 people that sign up all for the low price of ($       ) – fill in the blank.

You certainly don’t want to be wasting your time or money, so why not get quality education for free? Quality and free, you might be thinking I’m crazy as often those two words never mix together in the real world.

However, Hear me Out:

I recently took part as a student in the first ever Inbound Marketing University (IMU) hosted by Hubspot. Wanting to strengthen my inbound marketing knowledge, IMU was the perfect choice.  And what is inbound marketing you may ask?

According to Wikipedia:

“Inbound marketing is marketing focused on getting found by customers.” As opposed to “Traditional marketing (outbound marketing) is where companies focus on finding customers by advertising (Trying to get attention).”

Of course there is a deeper meaning and importance than just what Wikipedia spits out. Because now it is more important than ever to educate ourselves of how marketing is changing with the influence of the internet.

What is IMU?

As defined on the website, “IMU is a free marketing retraining program for marketing professionals—as well as marketers between jobs—looking to gain new skills to get ahead in the competitive workforce.” It consists of ten, hour long webinars, one review session, and a certification exam. All the webinars are given by online greats such as Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott, Lee Odden, Rand Fishkin and more. They teach you everything from basics of blogging and social media to advanced SEO techniques.

Here are some of the webinars that you go through:

• How to Blog Effectively
• SEO Crash Course
• Social Media and Building a Community
• Successful Business uses for Facebook and LinkedIn
• Advanced SEO Tactics
• Calls to Action and Landing Page Best Practices

See a full class schedule and instructors here. And for the presentation slides check out HubSpot’s SlideShare page.

At the End of it All…

You receive knowledge and skills at an unbeatable price of FREE. But don’t think this is a bird university as according to Rebecca Corliss of HubSpot there was in total 5000 people who registered for IMU, 1000 took the exam, and 500 passed. So study hard as the passing grade is 75%!

The next IMU will take place in August and you can register for it here. I encourage anyone who is interested in increasing their knowledge in inbound marketing to register for this week long university.

For the Skeptics:

How can it be free? Just tell me the catch!

No catch… It is free because the nice guys at HubSpot are putting their money where their mouth by executing the same strategies that are a taught in IMU. Offer tremendous value to your clients and monitize an additional product or service that uses the value you passed on.  HubSpot offers inbound marketing software and if you choose to get advanced then you might as well choose them as they have provided you with a great benefit of helping you understand all the neat inbound marketing stuff.

As Alvin Toffler once said, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” The fast paced world that we live in requires us to quickly to do the three skills mentioned above – learn, unlearn, and relearn sometime on a daily basis. Formal education does teach us the fundamentals however we all recognize that the fundamentals are no longer enough.  And by the time we graduate from university or a college, the education we have received may be completely irrelevant.

This is why each and every one of us should pay close attention to new concepts, ideas, and movements that are happening around us. And try to educate ourselves as much as possible when the movement is here to stay.

If you are reading this blog you most likely grasp the above concepts and furthermore recognize that the marketing industry has transformed in the past decade. This doesn’t mean that the fundamentals are no longer relevant but it does mean that we should notice the alteration in the way we receive our information which is no longer TV or newsprint and do our best to adjust.

You may have already observed the switch within your peer group or your usage of mass media. Many are cancelling TV all together or just don’t spend the time watching it anymore.  And if you don’t want to take my word, there are numerous studies that prove this (Microsoft, IAB Canada). Hence, our attention and dollars are making their move online.

If you haven’t already, take the time to educate yourself about new media by doing research online, attending online webinars, workshops in your local area, or just stay updated with many of the useful thought leaders in the media community. My next couple of posts will be on where you can find this type of education and who should you follow and what you should learn.

What are the changes in your life and what do you want to learn more of?

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Thanks for visiting and keep in touch ~ Alex.