COMMENTS
I loved the closing line from the lawyer, "Warmest Regards". As if that makes everything okay.
But but but...I was learning. =( I knew I should have downloaded the classes to my computer when I had the chance! Thanks for the info Rebecca keep us posted and let us know what we can do to help! :)
Damn better not close IMU! I use that as my intro to inbound marketing material and make all my guys get that cert.
That's a great course, and useful. Looking at the Kronus site I somehow doubt that HubSpot needs to steal from
them.
Good luck guys. Knock 'em dead.
Hi.
Just wanted to let you know your Save IMU link under the video is broken.
@Nathan it was broken for me too but when I removed the "www" it worked fine.
You can still get the presentations here: http://nickinglis.com/education-a-training/inbound-marketing
nice way to move everyone to a new community.
A quick search on Kronus Media and I found the "Behind the Curtain" page. I'm glad there is no legal issue.
Good luck with this promotion. It's incredibly creative. Are you going to publish the results by any chance?
My, my, my how pathetic, have you seen Kronus's site? What the hell do they actually do? Exactly what intellectual property rights and secrects can they possibly have. I think this is a hoax. I tend to agree with Drew. They delivering an archaic service, if you have seen anything that you can sell on an e-bay antique auction it is the Kronus site. I think they won't even get their busfair home.
I call BS, Hubspot. Check the whois of Kronus Media's site. It was registered April 29th. The video is too ridiculous to believe. The lawyer's website was registered 9 days before that.
Come on, HubSpot...
What a joke. there is nothing in the letter specifying what was breached.
Rebecca, this reminded me of the Blair Witch Project. Great way to introduce some changes and take the IMU offline for a while. Nothing like drawing some attention to IMU!
Warm regards.
Interesting, but the payoff better be pretty big.
Didn't count on having any actual Lawyers on your list?
:-)
OK, I'll bite -
I want the last 3 minutes of my life back.
I took all the classes and getting ready to take my exam... Now what? i wanna cry :-(
Let us know how we can help Hubspot in this process
This kind of stunt is counter productive.
Keep it up and you may find that the rest of us are too busy trying to do our jobs to care about what you have to say next.
Nice video! It's so very "Blair Witch". Can't wait to see the next installment in this saga.
OK, how are people writing comments, but reading them. This is a great spoof, I guess. I am not sure how pretending to get a cease and desist is an inbound marketing tactic, but THIS IS NOT REAL.
There are too many holes in the story to take it seriously. And it takes only a couple of minutes to find major holes in the story so big, no company or lawyer would be threatened. I should send a C&D letter to Google and see if they take down their site...
I left Emma a message on her voicemail. hehehe~
Nice, Robert, I thought about doing the same. Figures the lawyer lives in the same area (Boston) as Hubspot (aka, probably a Hubspot employee cell).
I agree with you Parker. At least at this point, I can't see how this stunt is anything but a lying hoax that leads to mistrust and wasting other peoples' time.
I don't think that is using good inbound marketing principles at all.
Maybe we should all just cease and desist using Hubspot services for a little while...just until we send out enough "clues" for them to figure out what's going on.
I think HubSpot is working too hard at trying to be viral, eh?
Cute gag, but ultimately perhaps too cute.
This is like a stunt to see exactly how quickly inbound marketers can react. Things the community has done so far to see through smoke and mirrors:
-checked registration of lawyer's and KM's URLs.
-graded kronusmedia.com in websitegrader.com for fun 8/100
-googled
-called the lawyer
-emailed the lawyer
-pondered whether the origination of Kronus came from WWF
-looked up WhoIs info for URLs
-searched findlaw.com to see if Emma is real (no listing)
-searched linkedin and facebook...
what other IMU fun can we have....
I really think this link says it all. How could the files for a lawyers website ever get put onto a clients website? This makes it so obvious:
<a>http://www.kronuscorp.com/emmalewisesq/contact.html
The problem is, this makes me trust HubSpot LESS rather than more. Crying wolf to get me to look at your post. I looked this time, but I'm less likely to look next time.
Hey if anyone wants the slides I downloaded them to my slideshare. Happy to share.
http://www.slideshare.net/daniellemacinnis
Let's hope it is a bad joke!
HubSpot Customer. If this is a stunt, I will take my business elsewhere and figure out how to engineer a contract infringement. Three of my people are in the middle of classes at IMU so we can improve our utilization of HubSpot.
Is this for real? All the mystery, this email from Captain Inbound, we have to sign up to get clues on how to save IMU. Captain Inbound is the only one not ordered to cease and desist? I'm not an attorney, but I didn't think they had to name every individual employed by a company. The Kronus site was registered April 29th. I'm not signing up. This feels to me like an elaborate hoax and I don't want to waste my time. This could backfire on Hubspot if this is the hoax it appears to be.
I really think that, if this is a hoax, it is really stupid. We should treat business more seriously. If it's a joke, it's a silly one, for little kids, perhaps, not for adult professionals. Remember, if you play with fire you could get burnt.
If you take a novel idea and turn it into the next best thing, you'll wake up the others. This reminds me of the pharmaceutical companies in the early 1990's.
It all depends on where your paycheck comes from. Remember the movie 'Tucker' about the automakers.
Play it smart Hubspot, play it safe and offer great products, their strategy will only buy them time.
Be good,
D.
This is not good. Whether or not it's a stunt I can't believe it's creating goodwill for HubSpot.
Many of us HubSpot Certified Inbound Marketing Professionals have used up a great deal of our resources to promote the free classes.
And, now I cannot access the slideshow which I have promised to many participants involved in the course on my site!
Also a reverse lookup for the telephone number for Kronus, listed on their site, comes up as: "(617) 855-5005 is Unpublished or Unavailable".
This is not how legitimate businesses get found.
It certainly makes me feel that something is very wrong at IMU/HubSpot and I think we deserve an immediate explanation and correction of this matter.
Hi Everybody. Thanks for all your comments.
For those of your who are concerned or upset about this shutdown, please have a look at this post. It does a pretty good job of explaining what's going on:
http://bryanricard.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/blowing-their-hubspot/ Also, as one of the HubSpot folks responsible for IMU, I can assure you that we will get it back up, and soon. Please hang in there -- and let us know if there are any other questions we can answer.
Rick Burnes
@Rick Burnes: That is not an explanation or an excuse for anything that's taken place.
I'm totally disgusted. It was my intention this evening to download from IMU the free classes slideshow only to find out that HubSpot is playing unprofessional games that reek of unreliability.
Yes, I'm very angry that HubSpot has shutdown my access to IMU preventing me from following through on promises I've made based on faith in their ability to continue to provide the service they promised.
Well my concern is not about the value in a marketing experiment or a game. I think games are an incredibly important part of future developments in marketing.
However, the concern is within the principles behind which this game was played out. The issue is that the players did not volunteer to play. The only people that played the game were those deceived by the ringleader.
This experiment seems like a direct breach of trust and contrary to the principles of building community and inbound marketing.
We are starting a discussion on twitter here:
<a>http://twitter.com/imuglobalpr
#imtrust
I agree a breach of trust Speaks volumes!
Yes trust is beyond important in business and marketing. But trust involves a reciprocal faith in another's intentions and behavior. Trust is a two-way concept. For those of us who did nothing for Hubspot and just benefited from their free resource, there was no trust broken.
Relax guys! Trust violations? Are we really that wounded from this game? If you don't want to participate - don't. Since it's apparently vital that we not know it's a game for it to work, that's shot now that all these comments are about that anyways.
I posted a longer opinion
here but in essence, this is an interesting, if odd, experiment and I hope HubSpot gets good data off of it and the people that do participate have fun. As someone said earlier, some of us have companies to run and can't play :)
Well an PR must be good PR cuz this stunt is obviously working on account of so many comments and buzz. I heard about this from my staff member who doesn't even know about Hubspot.
So instead of being upset by it as some people are, maybe you should watch and learn how it's done so you can learn a thing or two!
This is crazy! I got my Inbound Marketing Professional certification in April and am SO glad that Hubspot offers this type of tool. I mentioned what is going on in my blog in the hopes that more people will get behind Hubspot. http://ourunemployedlife.wordpress.com/2010/06/03/dont-wait-educate/
I'm glad i can only read posts and have limited internet on my PDA enjoy the game, controversial as it may be, here you weed out the ones ready for growth and the ones that need to be weeded out. bye bye losers, hello to a cleaner, more fruitful pool of customers. as for people complaining bout how they look now cuz their referrals can't use the site... get over yourself are you that idiotic that you take blame if a site you suggest is down, no matter what the reason. if the people you refer look at you any differently, then dump the? they have no sense of reality. sites can be down it happens. regardless of the "stunt" there is a good reason for this.
scrap what i said before.... rouge tactic used to shift from current network to ning, which is widely known in my IMVA training resources and networks. the tactic is viral buzzy in nature definitely better than just closing or boring redirect. by the way the ning platform is great. embrace change or get out.
Thank you HubSpot for adding that this is an "Alternate Reality Game" at the top of this page.
And thank you for releasing access to IMU.
I hope your actions indicate that you are returning to being the stable, reliable, professional service that I have been promoting.
How can anyone possibly complain about a service that is free? Hubspot isn't obligated to give you anything! You need to take a lesson in relaxation.
I am always amazed at how incredibly gullible some people are!
"We will never change" and some of the other text from "Kronus Media" is rich, really rich!
The list of media: classic guys, really classic!
It's interesting the @mygirlgrey got an internship at Kronus at the same time her "intership" blog was created, at the same time the Kronus domain was purchased, etc. Someone forgot about WhoIs and BetterWhoIs so in mid-May they had to get the record deleted so we couldn't track it all back to...guess who?
Yup!
Rocket science it is not! Entertaining? Perhaps a bit!
He YouTube account isn't even a week old! She must be amazing...and she has violated the "We will not change" creed of Kronus Media by making that screamably funny video on YouTube! Too funny! How did she keep a straight face?
Professor John P. J. Zajaros, Sr., PhD (a.k.a, Captain Gullible)