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 – Marketing Without a Shelf Life

In marketing, social media is the gift that keeps on giving. The trouble with traditional communication is that it’s ephemeral. Your print ad, TV spot, outdoor ad or press mention can have tremendous marketing value, but only while you’re paying to make it so. It’s like trying to communicate with rainbows – momentarily fantastic, but [...]

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6 Ways to Revolutionize PR and Press Releases

Audiences are continuing to fragment. The explosion in TV channels, radio stations and magazines, combined with Tivo, the Web, and iTunes has made it possible for everyone to live the long tail dream. To create for themselves a hyper-targeted reality where they watch, listen and read precisely the things that reflect their personalized tastes and [...]

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Sloths Die. Why I Want My Guacamole NOW

Is your email list acquisition program too slow? If you’re going to ask consumers to divulge personal information in exchange for a special offer, the chances that your customers will participate go up dramatically if you fulfill your end of the bargain with haste. If I sign up to download a Webinar, I get access [...]

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7 Ways to Use Social Media to Build Stunning Brands

Social media is perhaps the most misleading name for a marketing-related concept ever, given that it’s grown to represent a philosophy of consumer empowerment and brand/customer partnership – far beyond it’s humble roots of user-generated content. As a result, social media has different meanings and connotations to different people, many of whom utilize social media [...]

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Shannon Paul – The Twitter 20 Interview on Social Media and PR

Shannon Paul burst onto the social media scene like a runaway freight train. Her blog is a must-read, and she’s transformed the social media stylings of the Detroit Red Wings, and most recently the innovative financial services company Peak6. Shannon’s insights on attaining internal alignment around social media, and the new role of public relations [...]

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Is Social Media Too Fast?

One of the greatest challenges of effective social media outreach is the need to be always on. Speed kills in social media, and that’s a difficult transformation for marketers (and especially agencies). If a consumer tweets something negative about your company, addressing it quickly before it festers and is retweeted everywhere is the best practice. [...]

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If Ford Can Embrace Chaos – What’s Your Excuse?

Much excitement today as Ford officially unleashes the Fiesta Movement project. To market the Fiesta’s introduction to North America, Ford selected 100 “Agents” from 4,000 applicants. The winners receive use of a Fiesta for six months, provided they create and post comments about their impressions of the vehicle, and participate in “Missions” Ford has cooked [...]

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Taking Consumer Reviews Viral with Facebook

The rating of movies is integral to Netflix and its ballyhooed recommendation engine. The more movies you rate, the more accurate Netflix recommendations become. Rating Ben & Jerrys ice cream flavors might not be as mission-critical to that brand as movie rating are to Neflix, but both companies are leveraging Facebook to ratings a group [...]

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Are New Customers Killing Your Company?

(Originally written for MarketingProfs MPdailyfix blog) I’m sure you’ve heard the maxim that it costs a lot more to get a new customer than it does to retain an existing customer. It makes perfect sense, right? So why is it that we spend so much time and money in violation of that credo? At the [...]

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The Answer Man – The Future of Business?

The family and I are headed to Anaheim, California for a hockey tournament and Disneyland as I write this. (my wife is driving, I’m blogging) We just went through Needles, California (near my hometown of Lake Havasu City, Arizona) and my wife asked semi-rhetorically “Why would you name your town Needles?” “There’s no positive connotation. [...]

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