Hubspot asks who do you love?

The good people at Hubspot never let me down.

I was doing my early morning scan of Twitter when I came across a tweet with a shoutout to send “LinkLove” to anyone you want (ie friend, colleague or favorite blog).  After a short music video starring Hubspot’s resident triple threat Rebecca Corliss (singer, dancer and inbound marketer), I checked out the lovefest.  All you have to do to share the love is enter your Twitter name, your friend’s Twitter name and “their URL”.  Like all good viral campaigns, the made it “stupid easy” to share and it wasn’t long before my Twitter stream was full of their #linklove hashtags.

So why all the buzz about #linklove?  For those of use trying to build a business organically (OK, using inbound marketing as Hubspot would say), inbound links are gold.  When they come from a site with stronger page rank, this is even better.  I feel pretty confident that Hubspot has more Google page rank than 90+% of the people on Twitter (Hubspot = 6 vs. Tangyslice = 3) so the once the “linklove” pump is primed, this was highly likely to go viral.  Everyone wants a free link from a site with more page rank.

Or so they would think…  OK, I’m not an SEO expert (but I play one on television).  A closer look, however, reveals that linklove.hubspot.com has no pagerank (yet).  Thanks to all those inbound links i would expect this to improve pretty quickly.  Would it have been better to put it on www. hubspot.com/linklove instead?  Any SEO experts out there to offer an more qualified opinion?

A more cynical marketer might also suggest that Hubspot is getting the better deal as the value of the aggregate inbound #linklove links to likely exceeds the sum of the link building value to all of us “lovers”.  It doesn’t take an MIT degree to figure that it just doesn’t matter.  Unlike many forms of marketing, there’s no cost to giving somebody a link so in the end this viral campaign is fun and everyone loves a free link.

I once again take my hat off to these guys (Rebecca, Mike Volpe, Rick Burnes, et al).  Half the battle is coming up the idea for the killer viral marketing campaign and the other is making it happen.  They did both really well…  Congrats.