I like the HubSpot blog. I really do. There’s a wealth of great information on their site.

But I hate posts like this: Create a Facebook Business Page and Tap 53 Million Users (For Free!).

The implication is that all you need to do is create the page and people will be lined up at your door like turkey-hungover masses breaking down the glass doors at Wal-Mart to buy a two-dollar toaster.

It’s not the case, and it never will be. You might as well say: “Open a hot dog stand in Manhattan and tap into 8 million hungry New York City residents!”

Uhhhhhh … what about the competition? The maintenance? The marketing plan? You get the idea.

A Facebook business page is a tool. It’s a pretty good tool, in many cases, but it’s no silver bullet solution to anything, and it’s not an end by any means. It’s simply one of many, many tools at the online marketer’s disposal. Whether or not it’s an appropriate tool depends on your company’s overall marketing communications strategy.

Please, people, let’s lighten up on the hype, okay?

Takeaway for marketers: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Duh.

How can you not love what P.C. Richard is up to this week?

Newspaper ads (see the image above) and a blog post (which gives you the full text of the ad) noting in part: “It is our opinion that retailers who choose to open on Thanksgiving Day show no respect to their employees and families, and are in total disrespect of family values in the United States of America.” Their Facebook page is racking up likes for the move.

Well played, P.C. Richard … well played.

Marketing Tech Blog has posted an infographic that serves as a nice digital primer for small businesses. Of all the tips you’ll find there, though, I think action item #1 is to nail down your professional email address.

It’s remarkable how many companies use a a google.com or a yahoo.com or a hotmail.com or a (shudder) aol.com email address as their primary business address. It’s wrong. Not that it’s wrong to have those email accounts — hell, I’ve had an AOL account since they were charging by the hour, and I still use it as the catch-all address for mailing lists, newsletters and such.

But if your business is not using yourname@yourbusiness.com as an email address, you need to fix that immediately. Anything else is just unprofessional.

The post on the 1918 blog begins:

“Today my wife received a certified letter from Casey Movers asking her to remove a negative Yelp review or they would sue for libel in District Court in Massachusetts.”

It gets better from there.

This is a fascinating case study that everyone who is involved in social media marketing and communications on any level whatsoever needs to read.

(Hat tip to Chris Abraham at Reputation.com for the heads up on this one.)

Takeaway for marketers: Read it and learn.

“I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.”
—Jon Stewart