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

The Ultimate Social Media Quote

As I go dark for a few days to enjoy some family (and snow shoveling) time, I wanted to give you this quintessential social media quote – which I believe is suitable for cutting out and taping to your desk. Think about it as you consider your plan for 2009, which will be the Year [...]

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The Incredible Efficiency of Social Media

(originally written for TalentZoo) The explosion in marketing and message conveyance opportunities is simply breathtaking. We’ve gone from 3 TV stations to 500+. Satellite radio. Hundreds of new magazines. Out-of-home advertising on every available surface. And a little something called online advertising that’s now larger than radio in ad dollars spent. As a result, audiences [...]

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Build Your Brand by Marketing Sideways

Marketers have been told for years to focus on benefits, not features. In this new era of marketing, you can toss both out the window. I wrote a post recently on Marketing Profs Daily Fix about finding your one thing in social media, and building your outreach efforts around it. The one thing isn’t something [...]

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Ann Handley – The Twitter 20 Interview about Social Media, Content and Journalism

Ann Handley is kinda busy. She’s the Chief Content Officer of Marketing Profs, crack editorial overlord of Marketing Profs’ Daily Fix blog, contributor to the Huffington Post, author of the Annarchy blog, and a mother. She also co-founded the digital marketing portal ClickZ. In addition to her lengthy resume, she’s truly one of the best [...]

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7 Ingredients in the Perfect Twitter Profile

People are drinking the Twitter Kool-Aid like it’s the last day before Prohibition. It’s fantastic that so many are finding value in something so simple that can be so powerful.  But many in the latest wave (more like a tsunami) of Twitterers seem to be overlooking a fundamental premise of the Twitter follower/following paradigm, which [...]

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3 Absurdly Simple Ways to Tie Together Social Media and Email

Increasingly, active email marketers are wondering how they can engage with their subscribers in social media. It’s a bit scary, because most email is still of the “batch and blast” variety, and that dog will not hunt in social media, where the marketing is conversational and the name of the game is relevance. But, assuming [...]

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BL Ochman – The Twitter 20 Interview about Social Media and Blogging

BL Ochman, author of the What’s Next blog, and a veteran of digital marketing since 1996 and a public relations powerhouse before that, agreed to withstand the crucible of a Twitter 20 interview (20 questions live on Twitter). Here are BL’s thoughts on blogging, email, social media, and getting the job done right online. 1. [...]

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Think Bottom Line, Not Top Line, on Social Media ROI

There’s been a lot of conversation lately about social media ROI but the hand-wringing about it is totally misplaced. True ROI (return on investment) calculations are possible in cause/effect marketing scenarios where you can isolate tactics and variables to determine incremental revenue generated. Today, the only marketing programs that can semi-reliably generate “real” ROI calculations are SEO, [...]

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The Power of Truth, Woot-Style

On a recent trip to New York, I was pondering the future of the in-flight magazine and bemoaning its general editorial shoddiness when I stumbled upon an extraordinary interview with Matt Rutledge from Woot about their policy of telling the truth and acknowledging mistakes. (hat tip to US Airways Magazine) Since the first caveman painted [...]

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An Amazing True Story of Cars, Bribes, and Customer Service

(Originally posted on Off Madison Ave blog) Earlier this year, I received a FedEx envelope unexpectedly. It was from Infiniti (Nissan Motors USA). I purchased an Infiniti EX in late December, 2007. Turns out, according to the letter enclosed in the FedEx, the window sticker on my vehicle listed a “rollover sensor” as standard equipment. [...]

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