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
Blogging and Content Creation 297  |  Add Yours

5 Ways to Make Friends with Strangers on Your Blog

Remember in high school, when someone would throw a party when their parents were out of town? At first, you knew everyone at the party. They were all friends of the host, nervously alternating between drinking Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers, and trying not to break anything. But then, it all changed. The party got [...]

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Blogging and Content Creation 155  |  Add Yours

How to Match 10 Key Success Metrics to Your Blogging Strategy

If you’re blogging for business, rather than blogging about your cat, baby, fashion addiction, or crush on Taylor Swift, you need to set some success metrics. Without a statistical measure of your blogging progress, adding content to your blog on a regular basis can be an incredibly lonely proposition. Is anyone out there? Does anyone [...]

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Blogging and Content Creation 979  |  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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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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Blogging and Content Creation 182  |  Add Yours

11 Mind-Blowing Reasons Your Company Needs Facebook

Join me and 21 other speakers for Facebook Success Summit 2010, a Webinar series with everything you need to know about Facebook for business. Sessions start October 5. Go to http://bit.ly/facebooksuccess to save 50% for a limited time. Wow. Remember when MySpace was the dominant social network? Seems like a long time ago, as the [...]

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Blogging and Content Creation 73  |  Add Yours

The Chicken and the Egg Social Media Conundrum

There are many ways social media differs from traditional marketing. It’s approachable and human. It’s a two-way dialog, rather than unilateral declarations. It treats the customer as a teammate, rather than a target. But there’s another big difference. In social media, the audience comes after the message, not before. Remember that when you buy a [...]

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Blogging and Content Creation 81  |  Add Yours

Is Your Company More Interesting Than My Wife?

If you’re going to succeed on Facebook, you don’t just have to be more interesting than other companies, you have to be more interesting than my friends and relatives. Are you prepared for that? My friend Jeff Widman runs BrandGlue, a consultancy that helps companies better manage their Facebook fan pages. He told me recently [...]

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Blogging and Content Creation 133  |  Add Yours

Should a Blog be Your Social Media Hub?

The divine corporate blogging expert Debbie Weil recently asked this question on her blog, as part of a Kindle version refresh of her excellent book “The Corporate Blogging Book.” Debbie asked me to think about whether a blog should be the social media hub – your epicenter, the place where you’re trying to bring your [...]

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Blogging and Content Creation 114  |  Add Yours

4 Ways Bloggers Differ From Reporters

You have to pitch bloggers differently than reporters. The marvelous Dave Fleet writes a lot about this topic, and Chris Brogan produced a terrific, straightforward post about blogger pitching recently. Here’s my thoughts on some advanced blogger pitching ideas and the key differences between bloggers and reporters. Influence is Made Not Born Guess how many [...]

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