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 Our Addiction to ROI Killing Social Media?

Guest post by Matt Ridings, founder of MSR Consulting, a Digital Relationship Marketing Agency in St. Louis. He’s @techguerilla on Twitter. I had an interesting phone call with a prospective client. I didn’t know him, and hadn’t worked with his (large) company. He was looking for a social media vendor, and was referred to me [...]

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Travel, Tweets, Trends – Social Media Runs Rampant in Adventure Travel

There’s been a lot of talk (and rightfully so) lately about industries where social media adoption is as slow as a Brett Favre farewell. Financial services. Utilities. Pharma. And a lot more. I’ll write more about those issues soon, but today let’s turn our attention to an industry where social media is thriving like Cher’s [...]

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microMARKETING Requires Bayonets, Not Grenades

As an experienced marketer who has worked with dozens of big companies in his agency career (he’s currently a VP at Powered), Greg Verdino has had a ringside seat for the evolution of communication. He successfully documents that evolution in his new book microMARKETING: Get Big Results by Thinking and Acting Small. Written with a [...]

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Why Social Supports Email in the Interactive Marketing Hub

A big distinction between email marketing and social media marketing is the difference between actual audience and potential audience. Email is all about actual audience. If someone signs up for your email updates when you send one out, that person will receive it in almost every case. Will that open it? Approximately 25% of the [...]

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Content Lessons Learned From 25 Popular Blog Posts

I’ve been writing Convince & Convert for more than two years, and have produced more than 300 posts. Mostly from me, with some terrific assistance from talented guest authors. Last week, I was on a content marketing discussion panel (moderated by Jeff Rohrs) at the ExactTarget Connections conference. I was joined by Joe Pulizzi from [...]

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Why Are Companies Not Valuing Judgment As A Critical Element

Guest post by Noemi Pollack, CEO & Founder of The Pollack PR Marketing Group, a 25-year old integrated PR and marketing agency in Century City, CA. Inevitably, when corporate America seeks a PR agency to support their communications effort, the Request for Proposals (RFP) asks for critical capabilities that can help a company sift through [...]

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5 Step Process for Social Media Success

Social media makes big companies feel small again, and gives small companies a natural advantage because they are closer to their customers. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, you have interesting stories to tell. Finding and sharing them is the first step toward social media success. What is your process for harvesting stories within [...]

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Why Social CRM Needs to Be Less About the Social and More About the Customers

Today’s guest post is by Kevin Troy Darling, Social Media Program Manager at iLinc Web Conferencing, who has been writing all his life, but only marketing pays. To paraphrase Tina Turner, we don’t need another acronym. The debate on Social CRM (sCRM) could easily become a distraction. We have many good tools at our disposal [...]

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6 Lessons Learned From the Demise of MySpace

Once the undisputed king of social media (at least in the U.S.), MySpace last week declared what amounts to a post-modern armistice, announcing that they will integrate status updates with Facebook (and Twitter). MySpace used to be Janet, and now it’s LaToya – at best. While the erosion of the MySpace user base has been [...]

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UNcanny Insights From UnMarketing

The new book UnMarketing from Canadian viral marketer and Twitter gadfly Scott Stratten takes the rules and purees them, Blendtec style. Here’s what makes UnMarketing an unusual, yet worthy use of your marketing education time: UNpretentious Unlike so many marketing books, Stratten doesn’t overcomplicate the subject matter. He believes that common sense should prevail, and [...]

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