YOUTILITY

Why Smart Marketing Is About Help, Not Hype

The difference between helping and selling is just two letters. But those two letters are critically important to your company’s success.

You’re not competing for attention only against other, similar products. You’re competing for attention against everything. To win in this hyper-competitive environment, you must ask “How can we help?”

If you sell something, you make a customer today, but if you genuinely help someone, you create a customer for life. This is Youtility.

Includes interviews with dozens of companies practicing Youtility, and provides 6 blueprints for building Youtility in your company.

Available for pre-order soon (get up to 7 exclusive bonuses) at http://YoutilityBook.com
Guest Posts 179  |  Add Yours

Do You Know Your Customers Enough to be a Social Media Hit?

Guest post from Susan Baier, a 20-year marketing strategy veteran with an MBA in Entrepreneurship. Her company Audience Audit provides strategic marketing support and audience segmentation research that helps organizations understand their customers better. Being relevant to customers isn’t about just using their first name in an email. True relevance grows from a deep understanding [...]

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Conferences and Events 136  |  Add Yours

6 Required Competencies for Social Organizations

Now, marketing is the center of American business. Why? because through social media, customers are praising and criticizing companies in public in a way that requires marketing to triage and respond. Three years ago, if Kevin Smith would have been kicked off a Southwest flight for being too fat, he would have yelled at the gate [...]

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social crm 260  |  Add Yours

Is Your Social Strategy Proactive or Reactive?

Is your social media program about asking, or answering? Like Sonny divorcing Cher (or was it the other way around?) there’s a schism coming in social media between companies using it for marketing, and companies using it for customer service and CRM. Thus, one of the first questions I recommend you ask about your social [...]

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Email Marketing Advice 104  |  Add Yours

Turn the Tables on Social Media with NutshellMail

Keeping tabs on your social media connections these days is like bar hopping, without the cocktails or pool tables with stained felt. You run over to check your Twitter account. Then you dash to Facebook to see what’s going on there. Then Linkedin. Maybe your blog. All the while you’re feeling like you’re playing catch-up, [...]

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Blogging and Content Creation 978  |  Add Yours

The 39 Social Media Tools I’ll Use Today

Amazingly, it seems like there’s more social media tools than Jonas brothers, with the gap growing every day. I don’t feel the need to experiment with every new piece of software that emerges from its chrysalis, but I do feel a responsibility to you and my clients to have some idea of what’s out there [...]

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Blogging and Content Creation 86  |  Add Yours

Social Media and Email – More Alike than Different

From a business objectives standpoint, isn’t uni-directional social media more similar to email than it is different? Social network connectivity is becoming the post-modern email newsletter. A way for consumers to stay up-to-date with the brand, hear about special offers, and occasionally advocate to their friends. This puts significant pressure on email to be more [...]

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Guest Posts 28  |  Add Yours

Is It Curtains for the App Store?

Guest post by Bob Dennis, freelance Web designer with experience in everything from audio production to social networking. After two-and-a-half years, iPhone app developers are getting fed up with Apple’s lengthy and often inconsistent approval process. Also, $0.30 may not seem like much, but the fact that Apple is taking 30% of all app profits [...]

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Email Marketing Advice 100  |  Add Yours

Integrating Email and Social Media with Flowtown

Aren’t social media and email more alike than they are different? Both seek to keep your brand top-of-mind with customers and prospects, communicating in a relevant, timely way that ideally is measurable and testable. But the problem with email and social media is that too many people are positioning it as an either/or scenario. Several [...]

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facebook 67  |  Add Yours

The Social Impact of Friendships and Lies

Do you trust me? Social media relies on the premise that we’ll believe what people tell us more readily than if we were told the same thing by a nameless, faceless company. That’s why brands go to great lengths to humanize themselves on the social Web. But, a new study by Edelman (whose digital arm [...]

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Blogging and Content Creation 62  |  Add Yours

Please Help Me Pick a New Look For My Blog

I’ve been making a few tweaks to Convince & Convert recently, with the help of my friend (and WordPress/SEO ninja) Chuck Reynolds. We’ve added Disqus as the commenting system. Changed the sharing tools to incorporate Sexy Bookmarks plug-in (Michael Stelzner at Social Media Examiner turned me on to it). We’re working on tweaking the subscription [...]

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