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Using the Web to build your brand is less and less about creating destinations, and more and more about creating content useful to the people you want to reach, then empowering them to access that content wherever and however they like.

 The key to this is creating something we call a “content hub.” A content hub is more than just a standalone site or application, it’s both the heart of a distributed network of information, and a destination for those that share the interest it supports.

Rather than explain the theory of a content hub in detail, it’s best to just build a quick-and-dirty one, and use it. Here’s the process I’d recommend to do exactly that:

1. If you don’t have a GMail account, create one, say acme@gmail.com. You’ll need this e-mail for all the logins, might as well use the same one.
2. Associate your logo with that e-mail in Gravatar.com; this will also come in handy later.
3. Create a YouTube account associated with the same Google ID.
4. Create a Flickr account. You may need a Yahoo e-mail account for this. Just create one.
5. Create a Twitter account, and customize the profile page to reflect your brand identity. Add an image, and a short bio line, for God’s sake.
6. Create a Facebook Page. You can do this from your personal Facebook account. If you don’t have one, you’ll need to create one.
7. Create a Posterous account, and activate the Group Profile feature to make it easier for others to post to the account. Connect your YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook pages to Posterous so that any content you send to Posterous bounces into the other accounts automagically.
8. Create a simple listening station in Google Reader. You’ll have access to Google Reader automatically having set up the GMail account above. Lots of smart people have described how to do this; just do what they say. Once you get the basics down, you’ll be able to pull any RSS feed into Reader, which I promise will come in handy at some point.
9. Click the Reader “Settings” at upper right, then the rightmost tab, which is “Send To.” Configure Reader to send content to the destination sites you created above.
10. Use the damn thing.

The “hub” of the system is your new GMail account. If you log into that each morning, you’ll have access to everything you need.

To distribute original content through the system, just use the Posterous account. This is dirt-simple straightforward… You can post everywhere by sending e-mail to post@posterous.com from your GMail address. Send images and they’ll go to Flickr as well. Send video and they’ll post to YouTube automatically, etc. Links to everything you create will appear on your new Posterous blog, and go out to your Twitter followers and Facebook fans, automatically.

“Curating” content is even easier. Whatever is in Reader can be sent through the system by clicking the “Send To” button. When you do that a drop-down appears with Twitter, Facebook, and Posterous as options (remember, choosing “Posterous” sends it everywhere). Begin to poke around in the local blogs and start raising your visibility. Leave short comments on others’ blogs to draw traffic to your own, and create the personal connection you need to deliver on the brand promise. (Gravatar is already set up if you followed the above, so wherever you log in to comment on someone else’s blog and use your GMail address, your icon will also appear and give you some exposure.)

You can also access your brand “listening station” in Google Reader. Just click “Reader” at the upper left of Gmail, and you’ll pretty much be able monitor any appearance of the brand online. You should add some influential local bloggers to the feeds there as well, and create folders for whatever else you like to read on the web.

So what happens now?

Start posting. Share the content you find interesting in Reader. Build some relationships. Get to know folks. Help people, and watch them help you back.

If you need something more industrial strength, please give us a call. But for 90% of the businesses out there, the truth is this is enough to get started building the relationships that will help build your business.

Michael Troiano is a Principal of Holland-Mark, a leading independent advertising agency in Boston.
Mike serves on the boards of several VC-funded technology companies, including that of Cambridge-based Crimson Hexagon. His blog, Scalable Intimacy, is listed on both the AdAge Power150 and Alltop, and he is ranked in the top 5% of the most influential people on Twitter.

This post is a re-post from the Holland-Mark Blog and has been re-posted with permission of the author.

As a young entrepreneur in the Boston community for the past half year, I have witnessed first hand a transformation; there is an incredible build up of momentum behind many initiatives and a growing buzz in the community.  New organizations are forming, old ones are evolving and there has been a dramatic increase in collaboration across the ecosystem. Innovative ideas, better ways of doing things and many new opportunities are the product of these efforts and it’s why John Harthorne is bullish about the community and I share his sentiments. 

In my opinion, the most underrated aspect of the revitalization of the community is the renaissance for young entrepreneurs.  I’d like to highlight some of the reasons I think…there’s never been a better time to be a young entrepreneur in Boston.

1) Many Great Organizations 

In just the short time we’ve been managing an entrepreneur calendar at Greenhorn Connect, we’ve watched as the events have gone from about 20 per week to over 40.  Having attended many of them, I have found them all to be of very high quality and filled with hard working, passionate people very open to new connections. 

In the last year, I’ve seen the emergence of  quite a few new organizations with some of the best events in the community: Mass Innovation Nights, DartBoston, IdeaStorm, and UltraLightStartups. When you combine this with established events like WebInno, Open Coffee, Mobile Mondays and Tech Tuesdays, you have a robust networking environment and many great avenues for getting connected to the community.   

2) Renewed academic commitments to entrepreneurship

It’s easy to look at Boston and think it’s a two horse race (Harvard and MIT), but in recent years, many of the other schools in the region have refocused their efforts on promoting entrepreneurship.  From Northeastern’s IDEA program to Babson’s E Tower, to UMass Boston’s Venture Development Center, there are programs emerging everywhere to make students have more entrepreneurial opportunities.

3) Office Hours

Starting in November, local members of the community started hosting office hours to break down barriers to meeting investors and influential members of the community.  Since then, the movement has exploded with many organizations having weekly hours.  You can see all of them on our calendar; just search “office hours” to filter the other events. Because of these office hours, it has never been easier for a young entrepreneur to get connected to key members in the community. 

4) Workspace options

In the past, you may have been left with either paying an exorbitant amount of money for an office or working out of your bedroom or a coffee shop.  Today, companies are sharing their workspace, new coworking options are emerging and hybrid incubator-office space programs are opening.  There has never been an easier time to find a place to work.   

5) State Government that’s in it for the Long Term. 

The commitment level of our local elected officials and government staff is very impressive. While there are obviously budget constraints due to the recession, they’re making the most of the resources they can provide; whether it’s the Mass It’s All Here program, helping support MassChallenge or Governor Deval Patrick coming to recognize the significance of the expansion of the Cambridge Innovation Center, their commitment is unquestionable.   

On Monday I saw Secretary Bialecki’s presentation at the Rappaport Institute and was amazed at the depth of his understanding of the challenges the state faces in trying to improve the entrepreneur ecosystem from health care questions, to property issues to improving collaboration amongst companies and organizations in the community.  Most encouraging was his strong assertion that they’re thinking long term; they have a vision for 10 years out; not an election in less than 4 years. With a strong understanding of the immediate challenges and the patience to avoid quick fixes, Massachusetts is poised to be an even better environment for entrepreneurs in the years to come.

6) The Career Combine

One of the biggest challenges facing the community is keeping the locally educated talent in the region.  Currently, only 26% of Massachusetts college graduates who go on to start companies actually start them in Massachusetts.  Silicon Valley’s retention rate is more than two and half times better than ours at 69%.  Obviously, there is great room for improvement here and as Secretary Bialecki said on Monday, “if even 5 or 10% more graduates stay here, it would do wonders.”

I’m proud to announce that Greenhorn Connect is teaming up with MITX to address this issue with our event, the Career Combine.  The Career Combine was created as a collaborative effort with the goal of connecting job seekers with open positions in the Internet marketing, technology and entrepreneur community.  The Combine will also educate students, recent grads and entry-level talent on the innovative companies in New England and on the skills needed to find their next job.  We hope this event will help infuse the community with new talent and provide aspiring entrepreneurs with opportunities to join and learn from our local companies. 

As a young entrepreneur I see so many amazing opportunities and hope you’ll join me in taking full advantage of all there is available to us in this great community.   I’m very excited for the future of Massachusetts entrepreneurship and hope you are too.

Jason Evanish is co-founder of GreenhornConnect.com, which connects Boston startups and enthusiasts with the many resources and events in the region as well as educational and informational content. The MITX-Greenhorn Connect Career Combine is April 13^th 2010 at the Back Bay Events Center.

Last Thursday, I had the distinct honor of acting as emcee for the NEXT event, celebrating emerging entrepreneurs in Massachusetts. The event was organized by the MA Office of Small Business & Entrepreneurship and hosted at the UMass Venture Development Center, both of whom did an amazing job.

Around 125 people came to celebrate four startup teams from Massachusetts that Businessweek identified as among the 25 best entrepreneurs under 25 years old. FTR, this is the second year in a row that Massachusetts produced more promising young entrepreneurs than any other state, including California which has almost 6 times more people than Massachusetts. Pretty amazing.

• Emergent, Jesse Gossett, Jayson Uppal, Chris Jacobs
• IdeaPaint, John Goscha, Jeff Avallon, Morgen Newman
• SCVNGR, Seth Priebatsch, John Valentine
• Wistia, Christopher Savage and Brendan Schwartz

Diane Hessan of Communispace was the keynote. She is an awesome role model for aspiring entrepreneurs: smart, funny, collaborative and highly successful – another incredible female entrepreneur in Massachusetts. Next time you see Diane, ask her to tell you about the hobo entrepreneur ….

My favorite part of the event, though, was John Goscha’s anecdote about a fellow entrepreneur who had experienced a spate of recent successes. When asked how he did it, the entrepreneur replied simply “I get up. I hustle. I sleep. Then I do it again.

I think that really sums it up. Entrepreneurship is hard work. Nothing comes easy when you’re forging new territory. There’s no time for self-pity. You just have to commit yourself to your vision and then hustle like mad to get there. That’s also why it’s so important to care about the business you’re launching. There’s just no way you can keep up the pace necessary to succeed if you don’t love what you’re doing.

I know the MassChallenge team and I are having a blast. We’re especially excited to shift our focus from planning to actually supporting entrepreneurs. They are the reason why we are working so hard to make MassChallenge a huge success. It’s a nice reminder to meet people like Diane Hessan, John Goscha and the other entrepreneurs in attendance at NEXT – all of them have taken significant risks and have hustled relentlessly to achieve their vision and improve their community. Made me proud to be around them.

So, to all you entrepreneurs out there:

                                 stop reading and get back to hustling

Author: John Harthorne is the CEO and Founder of MassChallenge.

I can’t resist commenting on this post as it combines two of my favorite things in life, renewable energy and beer. Eric Fitch of PurposeEnergy has found a way reduce and reuse waste streams created in the beer production process. While the approach of reducing waste in a production process is not new, Eric has found a market that produces organic waste that can be transformed into clean energy and even help fuel the production process. This is similar to the model Brazil uses to produce sugar ethanol for cars (which you technically can also drink). In Brazil, the stalks and waste from the sugar fields are used to fuel the ethanol production, which is one reason it is cheaper and has a better carbon footprint than US produced corn ethanol. Let’s hope that more breweries realize the benefits PurposeEnergy can provide, giving us all just one more excuse to drink beer, “I’m saving the environment!”

… Fitch’s aim is for his company, Arlington, MA-based PurposeEnergy, to excel in the beer market, and then let its first customers become the startup’s loudest advocates as it expands into other industries.

Brewing and bottling beer creates organic byproducts at almost every step of the process, from spent grain and yeast to protein deposits. The resulting waste is mostly water with a high concentration of solids, which companies have to pay to transport offsite to treatment facilities that charge by the pound to make the water safe enough for disposal.

PurposeEnergy, incorporated in 2007, has come up with system that uses a process called anaerobic digestion to turn the byproducts from brewing into renewable fuels. Installed on-site at a brewery, the “PurposeEnergy Biogas Facility” would convert much of the organic waste into methane, the main component of the natural gas that most breweries use to fuel their plants. In doing so, it would cut costs for energy and byproduct remediation by about 40 percent at its first brewery partner, according to Fitch, PurposeEnergy’s CEO. Fitch developed the technique as a hybrid of a few different anaerobic digester methods mostly used in farming, a world that Fitch is familiar with, having grown up in Wyoming….  (for full article see http://bit.ly/aMMnL6)