• Boston Globe, Monday, April 27, 2009 10:48 AM

Will Boston be to "inbound" marketing what Madison Ave. was to "outbound" marketing? That's the wistful concluding question of columnist Scott Kirsner's piece tracing the evolution of social marketing from 10 years ago when books like Permission Marketing and The Cluetrain Manifesto first appeared.

"Before, you had to buy access to the consumer in some way, like purchasing a direct mail list or buying an ad in the Yellow Pages," says David Meerman Scott, author of the book The New Rules of Marketing and PR. But now companies talk directly to their customers through blogs, social networks, Twitter, and video sites like YouTube.

Boston is home to several companies that aim to profit from the inbound revolution by selling software or services to help companies communicate with customers, including BzzAgent, Brand Networks, and HubSpot.

Few of the thought leaders of this emerging field hail from the biggest marketing, advertising, and public relations agencies, Kirsner writes. "When you see a paradigm shift come along, the people who dominated the previous age don't necessarily do well in the new ones," suggests Paul Gillin, author of The New Influencers.

Read the whole story at Boston Globe »