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

Is Social Conversation a Myth?

Mitch Joel, whose blog and work I greatly admire, wrote a very interesting blog post recently that bemoaned the lack of conversation in social media. As coined by Joseph Jaffe (another good guy who was incidentally the very first guest on my series of live Twitter interviews), businesses have been trying to Join the Conversation [...]

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Social Listening and Analysis for the DIY Inclined

If you are conducting any level of online reputation management or campaign tracking using social media data sources, you have to get beyond the obvious. The point of tracking software isn’t to determine how many tweets were sent mentioning a company, it’s to figure out what those tweets say, and what the business ramifications are. [...]

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Is Starbucks the Most Dangerous Competitor to Facebook?

Today’s post is a collaboration with Clinton Bonner, community connectivity expert, futurist, and blogger at Everything to Everything. Starbucks is not only offering free Wi-Fi in all stores come this fall, but also unveiling their Starbucks Digital Network that all in-store web and mobile users will have the opportunity to enjoy (it’s a partnership with [...]

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Please Help Me Support Make-A-Wish Foundation

I need your help please. For every vote you cast for the keynote at South by Southwest featuring me and Amber Naslund, we’ll donate $1 of our book advance to Make-A-Wish Foundation®. Go to http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ If you don’t have an account, please make one. It will take just a few seconds Click the link that [...]

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The 8 Wrong Questions PR Firms Are Asking About Social Media

The enthusiasm about social media among public relations professionals is rampant, and encouraging. Wanting to be at the center of a new way to communicate to customers and prospects is a worthy objective. But, under pressure from digital and advertising agencies each looking to be the driver of the social media express, PR firms are [...]

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Blastoff for My New Social Media Newsletter

Last Monday was the world premier of my new social media newsletter, the 3-2-1. 3 must-read articles about social media (plus a bonus from the Convince & Convert vault) Sent twice per week (usually Monday and Friday) Sent at 1pm pacific time 3-2-1: it’s the greatest newsletter in the history of social media newsletters. If [...]

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Is Twitter for Business Even Worth the Trouble?

We built our own Frankenstein. We are spending countless employee hours tweeting, retweeting, responding to tweets, figuring out whom to follow, secretly following celebs and athletes, and designing custom Twitter backgrounds. Nobody forced companies to get involved with their customers in this way. There was no law, edict, or pitchfork-wielding band of angry citizens. We [...]

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7 Reasons I’m Moving to Bloomington Indiana

Top 7 Reasons I’m Moving to Bloomington, Indiana: Skin too dry. No idea what a Hoosier is. Decided to find out first-hand. Want to cheer for a historically mediocre college football team. Living near Sedona, AZ for 6 years is giving me vortex poisoning. Need to upgrade quality of locally grown corn. All these pine [...]

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Why Influence Mining is the Next Gold Rush

Inherently, we understand influence. It’s in our DNA. We know that a grizzly bear has a marked impact on its surroundings, and can change behavior in ways that even the fiercest badger cannot. The tsunami of data being created, collected and parsed every second of every day now makes influence identification instantaneous, and possible from [...]

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