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

6 Required Competencies for Social Organizations

Now, marketing is the center of American business. Why? because through social media, customers are praising and criticizing companies in public in a way that requires marketing to triage and respond. Three years ago, if Kevin Smith would have been kicked off a Southwest flight for being too fat, he would have yelled at the gate [...]

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Is Your Social Strategy Proactive or Reactive?

Is your social media program about asking, or answering? Like Sonny divorcing Cher (or was it the other way around?) there’s a schism coming in social media between companies using it for marketing, and companies using it for customer service and CRM. Thus, one of the first questions I recommend you ask about your social [...]

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Turn the Tables on Social Media with NutshellMail

Keeping tabs on your social media connections these days is like bar hopping, without the cocktails or pool tables with stained felt. You run over to check your Twitter account. Then you dash to Facebook to see what’s going on there. Then Linkedin. Maybe your blog. All the while you’re feeling like you’re playing catch-up, [...]

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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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Integrating Email and Social Media with Flowtown

Aren’t social media and email more alike than they are different? Both seek to keep your brand top-of-mind with customers and prospects, communicating in a relevant, timely way that ideally is measurable and testable. But the problem with email and social media is that too many people are positioning it as an either/or scenario. Several [...]

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The Social Impact of Friendships and Lies

Do you trust me? Social media relies on the premise that we’ll believe what people tell us more readily than if we were told the same thing by a nameless, faceless company. That’s why brands go to great lengths to humanize themselves on the social Web. But, a new study by Edelman (whose digital arm [...]

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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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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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Attacking the Social Media Lynch Mob

Can we put down the pitchforks? For most of the past year, there’s been a barrage of blog posts bemoaning the social media gold rush, and the number of self-proclaimed experts that seem to propagate like pink eye in a kindergarten class. In fact, there was much hand-wringing a couple weeks ago when Mashable breathlessly [...]

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Social Media Plus Sucking Equals Success

Sometimes being wrong feels so right. Truth and candor are in short supply these days. Perhaps it’s always been this way, but it sure seems like there’s an awful lot of politicians, celebrities, and athletes that have been unmasked as liars and losers. Soon we’ll have someone taking steroids while cavorting with hookers and debating [...]

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