The Rocky Mountain News published its last issue on Friday February 27th 2009, just two months shy of its 150th anniversary. In San Francisco the main newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, is on its last legs and may shut down leaving San Francisco without a major newspaper. Today I watched a video HubSpot TV - Print Industry Crash with Paul Gillin that spent 20 minutes talking about the fact that newspapers are dead.
I'm a customer of HubSpot; they offer an awesome Internet based inbound marketing platform that helps you get found on the Internet. It's very cutting edge stuff and they're all about the Internet, social media and search engines, everything they do is on the Internet. At HubSpot they twitter and tweet, get linked, Digg, blog and stumble, if it's happening on the Internet the people at HubSpot are involved one way or the other.
The funny thing is yesterday, Friday afternoon, I received a package from one of the support people at HubSpot thats been helping me with an ongoing technical issue. Inside the package were a bunch of printed products promoting the HubSpot brand. They sent me a T-shirt with their logo on it, a printed mug with their logo on it, a bunch of logo pens, a bumper sticker with their logo on it, another sticker, and a nicely designed note card thanking me for being a customer.
Old technology meets new technology, printing and promotional products equal branding and name recognition. Here's a new company completely focused on the Internet using the old technology of printing to promote their brand because it works. Printing and promotional items are are a proven way to get in front of customers and prospects and more importantly stay in front of them, this is true no matter what kind of company uses them. I'll use that coffee mug over and over again creating multiple impressions of the HubSpot brand in my mind. It's an unbeatable way to create frequent exposure at a very reasonable cost.
Anyway thanks for the "swag" HubSpot, and thanks for confirming what many of us already know, printing is alive and one of the best lowest cost ways to create exposure for your company and your brand. Now all I need to do is get HubSpot to buy all their printing and promotional products from Dataguide.