A longtime fan of the Dead, David co-wrote the book with HubSpot co-founder and fellow deadhead, Brian Halligan to share the brilliant innovations the Dead brought to the business of marketing music and building an incredibly passionate community of brand enthusiasts.

While we were both speaking at the Vocus User’s conference in Washington D.C. last month, David took a few minutes with me to do the following video interview on his new book:

Here’s a summary of the book and the lessons we can all learn about marketing, social media principles and thinking outside the “rules” of business as usual:

“The Grateful Dead broke almost every rule in the music industry book. They encouraged their fans to record shows and trade tapes; they built a mailing list and sold concert tickets directly to fans; and they built their business model on live concerts, not album sales. By cultivating a dedicated, active community, collaborating with their audience to co-create the Deadhead lifestyle, and giving away “freemium” content, the Dead pioneered many social media and inbound marketing concepts successfully used by businesses across all industries today.”

The book can be ordered on Amazon.

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HubSpot software now features social media lead intelligence, automatically connecting Twitter, LinkedIN and Facebook profiles to a company’s leads, allowing marketers to lean about a potential customers’ interests.

The company’s software also creates social media follow and sharing buttons on almost all marketing content, so marketers can grow their audience and reach.

"Including unstructured social media data in useful and integrated ways within HubSpot will help businesses build more dynamic relationships with their prospects and unlock the value of social CRM," said Brent Leary, co-founder of CRM Essentials, a CRM consulting/advisory firm focused on small and mid-size enterprises.

"HubSpot’s tools are making social an element of every sales and marketing activity and will ultimately help companies build on social media intelligence to innovate and create more compelling content, products and services that will help them win in a crowded marketplace."

HubSpot says its software covers four Social CRM use cases including social marketing insights, rapid social marketing response, social campaign monitoring, and social sales insights.

"Social media is permeating all parts of business today," said Mike Volpe, VP Marketing at HubSpot. "Small business owners and marketers are uniquely positioned to move quickly and leverage social media to build new and lasting relationships since they aren’t encumbered with process and policy.
 

Below, you can see a graph of Twitter’s monthly growth rate.  It hit 13.0 percent in March of last year, but in October, was nearer to 3.5 percent.  That’s a sort of keeping-up-with-inflation figure, not something that an international hit is supposed to generate.

Making matters worse, of course, is the fact that Twitter’s growth rate appears to have still been on the decline in October.  If Twitter doesn’t manage to do something about it, it’s hard to imagine that the site will be able to hold users’ (and potential paying users’ and advertisers’) interest.

Still, Twitter’s doing all right for now.  Indeed, loyalty among its existing users actually seems to be increasing.

HubSpot reported that the average Twitter user has become more engaged since July, following more people and making more updates.  More users have supplied bios, Web addresses, and their physical locations in their Twitter profiles, too.

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"Marketers have been aware of the effectiveness of building relationships and trust with content since long before the Internet," said Gordon Plutsky, Director of Marketing and Research, King Fish. "Technological change has rapidly increased media channel options and the patterns of information consumption among consumers. More and more marketers are abandoning old media — and traditional advertising — to venture out on their own with original content."

Findings from the study include:

- 86% of respondents’ companies are currently creating or plan to create original content for their customers and prospects in the coming year.

- 81% believe that brands and companies can create content that is as engaging and informative as content created by media companies.

- 74% feel that original content and media are most effective for generating marketing ROI.

- 70% are spending more today to reach customers and prospects directly with branded content than they did three years ago.

The entire report is available for free download. It gets into responses about the most effective way to communicate with customers and prospects, marketing budget, in-house/outside resources, measurement, etc.

The survey "The State of Inbound Marketing" asked 167 executives and business owners about their marketing strategies.

Respondents said that blogging is currently viewed as the most important lead generation channel as compared to other social media, with 75 percent of those that have tried blogging saying it is "useful" or better.

Other social media that is considered useful or better includes StumbleUpon (55%), YouTube (52%), Facebook (48%), Delicious (47%) and Digg (47%). MySpace was thought as being the least useful (22%).

With millions of blogs on the Internet, businesses are using them to offer compelling content to their customers. Nearly half (48%) of survey respondents say they publish a company blog. More than  of these company blogs publish content at least weekly. This reveals that many corporate bloggers are committing to publishing content at a reasonable consistent rate.

Corporate blogging does face challenges. Respondents said their biggest frustration with blogging was "time."

"We believe as companies understand the effect blogs are having on sales leads, they will dedicate greater amounts of staff resources to blogging, helping to alleviate such problems," the report concluded.