How Myspace Led Me to HubSpot

A unique personal discovery

There’s just always been something about digital marketing that registered with me. The psychology behind figuring out what made people “click” — as opposed to what makes people tick — is something that I always found to be so appealing.

For me, it started with Myspace.

When’s the last time you thought about MYSPACE?

But I was that girl that wanted to know what made certain accounts get noticed — why did one person have 300 “friends” while another had 500,000?

I remember my senior year of high school when I came down with mononucleosis and was out of commission for October — that’s right, the entire month.

So what did I do? Why, what any crazy social media maven would do, I made it a goal to learn the ins and outs of Myspace. I taught myself HTML coding, I learned JavaScript, I figured out exactly what photos and quotes registered with my audience, I created really cool blog posts and I prided myself on having the kind of profile that had the right blend of music, photos and a compelling bio that made people want to “friend” me.

It wasn’t long before I realized that if I went to a new “friends” profile to thank them for their request, I would get another influx of new requests from people who were looking at their profile.

And it went on, and on, of trial and error, until I found myself with over 500,000 Myspace friends.

But for me, it wasn’t about having “friends” that made me excited — it was that I somehow tapped in to these peoples psyche, I somehow taught myself the magic mixture that made for a very compelling profile. I learned that I was essentially digitally marketing myself, as a brand, and gaining traction.

I was hooked.

The thing is, I never even considered making this a career. I went to college with no real idea of what route I wanted to take, all the while continuing to build an online presence just for the sake of understanding what makes people click. It genuinely never even occurred to me that I could take my passion for “figuring things out” in the digital space and transport that in to a lucrative job.

I mean, people are supposed to be stressed out by their jobs, right?

What I began to notice was a trend.

In any position that I’ve ever held, I always found myself trying to incorporate digital marketing. Whether that was creating social media profiles for businesses I was working for, to running their websites, to continuously taking the reins on figuring out how best to get their names out in to the world… each and every time, I found myself gravitating towards various forms of digital marketing.

But I always wanted to do it in a genuine way.

There was one position I held, a nightmare position as a stressed-out Sales Manager, overseeing the monthly goals of multiple salespeople, where I really started to see the differences between outbound and inbound marketing.

The company I was with really wanted us to be pushy. They wanted us to be in-your-face, down-your-throat, cold-calling maniacs that truly did nothing but drive customers far, far away and kept both my staff and myself eternally miserable. I mean sick to your stomach every day miserable.

So I chose to take my team in a different direction.

We built really fun social media platforms, we cared about our customers on a genuine personalized level, I would bring my team gifts (because who doesn’t love gifts?), and asked my salespeople to craft e-mails and phone calls that were REAL.

And know what happened?

My staff was much happier, our customers felt more relaxed, and our numbers were rising.

II started to realize that on that psychological level that I like to think digital marketing to be, customers (and staff) really just wanted to feel special.

And so it was then that I decided I didn’t want to focus on the “sales” aspect of a business any longer. It wasn’t my thing — figuring out the behind the scenes of what drives a really good digital marketing campaign is what I wanted, and what was naturally becoming, my thing.

So I began doing research (I love research), and I stumbled upon the HubSpot Inbound Marketing Certification.

I was reading up on it and it was like an explosion of sparkles and glitter and pizza and badassery all went off in my brain at once. This was exactly what I meant… and it’s a thing!?

I got certified in a day and a half.

And interestingly enough, the very next interview I went on my now (super awesome) boss asked me where I received my certification, and the exchange went something like:

Me: “I got certified via HubSpot. On my own. Just because I wanted to.”

Super Awesome Boss: “What? No. We just became a HubSpot Partner Agency.”

And we kind of both looked at each other like “Let’s do this.”

And I’m not looking back.

I am a Senior Inbound Strategist at Morey Creative Studios (Formerly Morey Publishing).