At the Winning Through Innovation conference in Glasgow last week I was joined on the stage by Kirsten Knipp from Hubspot - one of my favourite companies and one that’s apparently grown from around 15 people to 200+ in the last couple of years!

I’m not at all surprised really. If you don’t know them, Hubspot coined the marketing term “Inbound Marketing” and offers a hosted website solution that includes SEO, social media integration, monitoring, stats and more all in one package. The concept of inbound marketing is that business should publish high quality, “remarkable” content, optimise it with target keywords, then share it widely via social media. The goal is to attract customers to your content – like a magnet – hence, inbound.

At the conference Kirsten gave a good intro to the topic with lots of juicy stats and impressive case studies – and I think most people we’re inspired and impressed. It did cross my mind though, that creating remarkable content is much, much easier said than done. If your company is staffed by smart, creative, communicators, it won’t prove a problem. If, however, your team consists of engineers, mathematicians, analysts and developers who (to launch an unfair and sweeping generalisation) may not be terrific communicators, the task could prove near impossible.

I think this criticism lay at the root of the passionate, if slightly hysterical, criticism of inbound marketing posted by Jim Hamill on his blog the day after the conference. He protests about being labelled a “suspect” (i.e. the target of an inbound marketing campaign) and rails against the “noise” created by countless millions publishing and optimising mediocre content in the hope that it will attract new “leads”.

As Kirsten points out in her commented repost, if the content you publish isn’t remarkable and valuable, it won’t attract leads; so  the originator will cease publishing it and the noise will abate. But the point that interests me most is Jim’s proposal for an “Outside in” company, in which you focus communications and efforts on your existing customers and contacts, rather than fishing for new prospects. Evidently, you need both of these – but it highlights the quality vs quantity challenge facing many businesses today. Should you spend your valuable time courting millions of potential customers, or nurturing your existing customers and contacts?

My view is that quality always trumps quantity in social media. One true friend is worth a thousand fans. One great video is better than ten crappy ones, and one controversial, outspoken blog post is worth ten boring, inconsequential ones. Nice work Jim ;)

Buzz Stream – A powerful tool for monitoring social media mentions and building relationships with influencers.  From $50/month you can track a number of keywords and analyse the sites (and authors) engaging in conversations about them. The tool combines social media monitoring with influence analysis (MozRank etc.) and blogger outreach tools that can extract the blogger’s email address and LinkedIn URL.

Influence Finder – Matt Roberts from LinkDex, the VC-funded UK-based start-up that runs Influence Finder, attended the Meetup and gave an impressive description of this new SEO tool (backed up by Murray Newlands, who uses it). Apparently it excels at helping you identify high quality link-building prospects by cutting out irrelevant, valueless blogs and sites. It also offers powerful segmentation features, enabling you to identify blogs that are open to linking to your site (those that allow guest posts, for example). Sounds like a great tool.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth – Download Link Sleuth and run it on your site to check your internal links and identify pages that need more or better targeted internal links. Definitely a worthwhile thing to do once in a while and apparently it’s excellent at it.

Market Samurai – Once you get past the irritating sales video, this sounds like a useful tool for identifying target markets, finding suitable keywords, topics for blog posts you should write etc. Sounds like a good all-rounder. It currently costs $149.00.

Link Diagnosis – This site enables you to analyse who’s linking to your competitors sites, what types of links they are (such as no-follow) and what anchor text they are using. On the basis that sites linking to your competitors might want to link to you, Link Diagnosis could be a powerful weapon in your SEO armoury.

OpenSiteExplorer – Essentially a copy of Yahoo’s Site Explorer tool which identifies back-links to your site. It was apparently created by SEO giant SEOMoz following fears that, with Bing taking over Yahoo’s search capabilities, Site Explorer and other Yahoo API-based tools will be discontinued.

If you’re interested in Inbound Marketing, you should come to the London Inbound Marketing Meetup (monthly) or join the Inbound Marketing Forum on LinkedIn.