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
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Digital Sharecropping – Why Most Facebook Customization is Wasted Effort

Part 3 of a 3-Part Rant The time, money, and overall exertion being spent on customizing Facebook fan pages is largely misspent. Just because you CAN replicate much of your corporate website functionality on Facebook, doesn’t mean you SHOULD. Your Facebook fan page is not a collectible automobile. You do not get extra brand advocacy [...]

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Mistake Math – Why We’re Valuing Facebook Fans All Wrong

Part 2 of a 3-Part Rant Brands are shouting from the rooftops about how many Facebook fans they have – and the number of “likes” does help you spread your message through the news feeds of your fans (more on that tomorrow). But let’s recognize it takes literally one click of one finger to “like” [...]

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Ra Ra Wrong. How Facebook’s Cheerleaders Are Blowing Smoke

Part 1 of a 3-Part Rant I realize it’s in the best interests of Facebook, the media, application developers, and sometimes even brands themselves to concoct pseudo-science that “proves” that people that “like” your company are instantly turned into a zombie army of influential advocates. But it’s simply not true. Despite a pile of coverage [...]

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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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Facebook Success Summit – 22 Sessions on Everything Facebook

Is Facebook important to you and your business? If it’s not now, it will be soon (see my post tomorrow for more on that). Now with more than 500 million global members, Facebook is changing the way we interact, communicate, share, and shop. Despite Facebook’s apparent addiction to public relations missteps and half-baked schemes, they [...]

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6 Degrees of Influence – The Value of Customer-to-Customer Connections

Guest post by Yael Davidowitz-Neu, a Sales Strategy Analyst at Google responsible for analyzing consumer behavior, search trends and market dynamics.  She is deeply curious, loves all things marketing and blogs less frequently than she would like at Stickystimuli.com. While many businesses are excited about opportunities to reach their customers on the social web, few [...]

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Tying Together Social Media and Corporate Social Responsibility

Guest post by Laura Hall, Managing Partner at PainePR. She leads the agency’s social media group, and has more than 20 years experience in consumer, technology, B2B and social media marketing. As the world continues to watch the devastation caused by the BP oil spill, it shines the light much brighter on the impact that [...]

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Crowdsourcing: Beyond the Basics

Guest post by Clinton Bonner, Director of Sales at Chaordix, specializing in the technology and services of managed crowds for open innovation and social research. What is the next generation of crowdsourcing? Crowdsourcing is evolving beyond the shiny contest model (Doritos’ “Crash the Super Bowl”) and into something more meaningful to the brands embracing it [...]

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Online Community With Purpose and a Plan

Lisa Beatty was at a cross-roads. This 40-something Florida Mom found herself undergoing several simultaneous life shifts, and realized that products and the communication about them didn’t resonate with her any longer. Companies didn’t seem to understand where she was, who she was, or what she wanted. So, Lisa Beatty build JaneNation.com, a new opinion, [...]

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