Why I nearly killed myself at Hubspot London

Ok I maybe wrong here. Maybe the whole day was not aimed at people like me. MAYBE it was aimed at people who have NEVER read a Hubspot e-book, blog or have only just discovered the internet.
If I’d gone to this day two years ago I would have punched the organiser if I had met them in a bar later on in the day.

When salesforce.com come to town they BLOW YOUR MIND. You leave inspired to do well just so you can use all of their products, even if you don’t need them.
I missed David Meerman Scott, but he answered my Grateful Dead tweet which made my day and by all accounts he was the highlight of the day. The day plodded on with thinly dressed Hubspot demo’s which produced comments over coffee like “why is it that tech companies always have to do a demo?” Somehow this is to be expected but it could have been done in a cooler way, over all my gang said it was useful – even with the demo.

Then Alex Balfour gave a round up of London 2012 stats – this for me is essential listening. The web stats from the London 2012 games are great to crack the skulls of CMO’s who still think emailing is a new thing. 15 million people downloaded a London 2012 app – so maybe 2013 will finally really be the year of the mobile! Usually I’d run a mile from a slide deck with this much data but I am in love with it – click here.

Then everything took a real nose dive, my gang all sat with pencils sharpened for a breakout on content marketing and instead listened to a rehashed “social media revolution” talk by someone who-used-to-but-now-does-or-started-and-now-is-not -(£uIt takes a lot for me to leave a session but we did, I felt Like I was watching a Nokia N70 demo the content was so old. 

Over to a room on social media – we had avoided this but had to do something. Hootsuite were telling us how good Hootsuite is, I love Hootsuite so was able to stomach this. Nimble came on and Richard shared why Social CRM was useful rather than do a complete Nimble demo. He also made the connection between ALL those contacts and social (so obvious but people are still amazed that people in their outlook database might have a LinkedIn profile), I like listening to Richard, he has forgotten more about CRM than most people will ever know. 

Then someone said something about their product and LinkedIn, by this point we were injecting the contents of the fire extinguisher into our eyeballs to learn something new.
I expected a lot more, especially after reading reviews of Inbound in the States, a lot of the people I follow had raved about that event. I felt like I had gone to see David Bowie live and instead been given Gary Glitter. 

Anyway, I left early and listened to a Mitch Joel Podcast on the way home, learnt something new and missed the rush hour.