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:

Tomorrow several members of the Captico Team will be joining social media, new media, and technology experts from across the country (and perhaps the world!) for the “What’s Next DC” Conference in Washington, DC. The event promises to be jam-packed full of real data, case studies, real experts (no fluffy “gurus” here), networking opportunities and roving discussions.

Facebook is looking to encourage user check-ins through their Places feature by providing brick and mortar stores with a new (and currently free) viral marketing opportunity through “Deals”. Deals allows you to create special deals on Facebook through a claimed Facebook Place – meaning you have to have claimed a Place to begin with. It can be managed through your Fan Page, and there are different types of deals you can create based on your needs. Read on for a visual walk through on how to create a Deal.

A new social marketing tool was launched over the Thanksgiving holiday – just in time for the shopping frenzy that is the Holiday season. And as today is “Cyber Monday”, (or the monday after “Black Friday”) I thought it would be a good time to do a write up to introduce you to the fledgling site and clever tool that is GoPromoIt.com.

In a move to garner buzz and media attention, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD is hosting a ” Tour ‘n’ Tweet” this wednesday, October 27, 2010. The event promises to offer an exclusive opportunity to tweeting multimedia journalists, granting access to tour facilities of Goddard that are usually closed to visitors.

While perusing the Captico Twitter feed this morning, I ran across a tweet about a pocket projector being promoted by our friend @bullseyevideo (actually 3 tweets… but that just means he really wants it, right?). And since pocket projectors are AWESOME, and shwag is usually free (also called: swag, schwag; its the stuff companies hand out at trade shows with their brand name on it) I decided to investigate.

While brands and companies often use Twitter and other social media sites to issue discounts and coupons, Earlybird may eventually offer a broader demographic base than advertisers don’t have already as well as attract purchases from users who may not be a “fan”.

While BP battles the ever increasingly disastrous oil spill in the Gulf, their PR department is trying to conduct a brand cleanup through traditional and online media. You may have seen the TV ads featuring Darryl Willis, the VP of Resources at BP America, featuring him as a Louisiana-born “volunteer” eager to help citizens file their claims. (Apparently CEO Tony Hayward wasn’t quite cutting it, and so a new “face” for the company was chosen.) But BP is also embracing new media methods such as Search Engine Marketing and Twitter. In this article, we take a look at how BP and its detractors are using Twitter to connect with the world.

DCWEEK has finally come to an end for creatives in the Nation’s Capital and now its time to recap the bits of knowledge gleaned by roving reporter yours truly. 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.

Forgive me if you’ve already run across “Promoted” Tweets in your Twitter stream (as I believe they launched in April of this year). Perhaps I don’t follow enough major brands, perhaps they haven’t run until now, or perhaps they just haven’t been run on a big enough scale. Whatever the case may be, I’m seeing them now. And sadly (or luckily?) its to promote something I love. The Toy Story franchise.