Brian Halligan, CEO and Founder of Hubspot, was the first presenter at yesterday’s inaugural “What’s Next DC – Your Marketing Communications Roadmap” Conference. Brian opened in one of the two long time slots of the day (45 minutes) but gave a fantastic presentation on actionable steps businesses can use to take advantage of modern inbound marketing techniques by optimizing their websites to get found by more prospects and convert a higher percentage of those prospects into paying customers. View Brian’s Slidedeck. Takeaways included:

The Holiday Season is upon us! You may have noticed that Captico.com is experiencing some wintry weather – our developers are making it snow! Now the design team is getting in the festive spirit with an animated gif tutorial designed to make all of your images sparkle and shine!

Social Media Series with Emily Paterson: Twitter 101
In this 3-part series, Emily Paterson presents Social Media for Businesses, beginning with an Introduction to Web 2.0, then a quick look at Blogging 101, and finishing with an overview of Twitter 101.

Digital Capital Week (DCWEEK) is a 10 day festival in Washington DC focused on technology, innovation and all things digital. It took place from June 11th to June 20th, 2010 in venues across the city with the mission of strengthening the capital region’s digital economy via events focused on creativity, technology, entrepreneurship, marketing, content creation, and innovation.

The social networking behemoth Facebook offers a number of Social plugins to better connect your website with users and allow your content to spread organically. Below you will find links and information on how to take advantage of these features.

Clients often ask us, “What simple task can I do myself to improve my search engine results’ ranking and start appearing ahead of my competitors?” This Do-It-Yourself trick will get you moving in the right direction.

Get your scalpel ready, in this installment from our Twitter Series, we break down the anatomy of a tweet and define popular Twitter terms like: hashtag, retweet, and the @ sign. (We also have a great video to walk you through Twitter 101.)

Now that you know HOW to Create Your Facebook Fan Page, lets talk about the basics of managing it. If you are familiar with Facebook and have a personal account, managing your fan page will be fairly easy. If not, I’ll walk you through the basic steps and share some advice.

According to the BIA Kelsey Group, viewers engage more after watching a video, with clicks for more information increasing by 30-40% and phone inquiries by 16-20%. Web video is a proven selling technique and is far cheaper than traditional advertising.