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

Social Media Success Summit 2011 – It’s On!

It’s an exciting day, and the lineup for the 2011 edition of Social Media Success Summit has been announced. As a presenter, I am of course biased, but this may be the best combination of social media thinking in one virtual conference ever assembled. Do you agree? For a limited time, for $297 you get [...]

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How to Humanize a Sketchy Industry

Social media is about people, not logos. I saw a presentation at the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Forum in Austin a few ago from Eric Granof, CMO of ExpertBail, which seeks to become the country’s first branded network of bail bonds companies. Like video stores before Blockbuster, and ice cream parlors before Dairy Queen, Expert Bail [...]

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Using a Social FAQ to Kick Start Content Marketing

If you conquered four words, you’d have a better social media program than 90% of all companies. If you just utilized “thank you” and “I’m sorry” appropriately and often, you’d be in pretty good shape. But getting to true sociability requires more than just replying to direct inquiry. You have to use content marketing to [...]

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Why You’re Pissing Off Half Your Facebook Fans

Sure it has 600 million members and is significantly more compelling than any film made by Nicholas Cage in the past five years, but even with those inherent advantages, Facebook for business is hard. It’s not just that Facebook has a distinctly Favre-like approach to features and decision-making. Or, that Facebook is very clearly in [...]

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Why I’m Competing With You. And You. And You. And You.

Social media changes the very fabric of corporate competition. It used to be that your competitors were the people that sold similar goods and services, or operated in the same geographical area. No more. Now, you’re competing with Coke. With McDonald’s. With Chevy. And Zappos. And Jet Blue. And every other company on the planet. [...]

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How to Be a Presentation God

Scott Schwertly is a rabid hockey fan and founder and CEO of Ethos3, a presentation design and consulting company in Nashville. (disclosure: Scott’s company build the presentation Amber and I are using for The NOW Revolution book tour). Yesterday, Scott released his first book, called How to be a Presentation God: Build, Design, and Deliver [...]

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7 Ways to Thank Someone for a Retweet

Guest post from Angie Schottmuller, an interactive Jedi, e-commerce expert, and multi-channel strategist at Interactive Artisan. If you’re an active Twitter user, you’ve likely seen a “Thanks for the RT!” post at some point. You’ve possibly even posted them yourself. So is a “retweet thank you” polite Twitter etiquette, or is it an over indulgence [...]

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Invitation Avalanches, Attention Infidelity, and the Science of the Social Break-Up

Is the golden goose poisoned before it’s even an adult? The current relationship between companies and consumers via social media and email is unsustainable. The backlash has begun, and abuse of any one channel has a spillover effect on consumer attitudes toward other channels. That’s one of my main takeaways from fascinating new research from [...]

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A Day I’ll Always Remember

And as one chapter ends, another begins. Today is the official release date of The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter & More Social, my new book co-written with my friend Amber Naslund about how companies need to retool from the inside out to meet the real-time business challenges presented by [...]

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Why Should Old Spice Get to Have All the Fun?

Guest post by Clinton Bonner, President of NoSox Productions; a character based brand story-telling firm out of Westbrook, CT. It was 2010… The Toyota Sienna Family somehow made mini-vans cool and the Old Spice Guy literally rode-in on a white horse and into our social lives. The emergence of amazing character-based brand storytelling on the [...]

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