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

5 Steps to Winning Fans with Content Strategy

Guest post by Mike Corak, Vice President of Strategy at digital consultancy Tallwave, and blogger at Digital Marketing Strategy. About a year ago, I wrote a guest post here titled “Use Online Listening for Competitive Research. The post explored the topic of utilizing common interactive marketing tools in unintended ways to tap into consumer demand. [...]

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Social Media Monitoring Tools – How to Pick The Right One

Guest post by Katie Van Domelen, the social media manager at Off Madison Ave in Tempe, Arizona. She specializes in social media strategies that lead to actionable plans to achieve real world objectives. I’ve spent a lot of time working with various social media monitoring tools and I’ve whittled my list of favorites down to [...]

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Are You Ready for the Opportunity Economy?

Sure, the speed and always-on nature of the real-time Web makes it a daunting and challenging environment. A single tweet, YouTube video, or blog post can be the spark that sets off a firestorm of controversy. But while companies are rightly trying to get their heads around the concept that every customer is now a [...]

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Kurrently Revolutionizes Real-Time Search With Twitter + Facebook Results

The future of real-time data didn’t come from Google. Or Microsoft. Or IBM. It came from a Canadian computer sciences student who uses his free time pretty damn wisely. Kurrently is a new, free real-time search engine that combines results from Twitter and Facebook in a simple, blazing fast format. “I built Kurrently in the [...]

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Ignore Foursquare at Your Peril – An Analysis of Potential

Are you too dismissive of Foursquare (as well as Gowalla and the other geo-location apps)? I’m starting to hear a lot of smart people scoff at these services, primarily along these lines “Why do I care where someone is eating for lunch?” The last time I heard that line of reasoning en mass was when [...]

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4 Reasons the Social Business Evolution Starts Now

Is today the day we start thinking about social media as part of an integrated program? My friends at ExactTarget announced a moment ago that they have acquired CoTweet, the leader in enterprise Twitter management, and will be building a social products lab to add tie-ins for Facebook, YouTube, and other elements of the social [...]

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Take Off the Social Media Blindfold

Among the many exceptionally interesting data snacks in the recent MarketingProfs’ State of Social Media report is one showing that businesses of all sizes and types are primarily using Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, and blogging. And while it’s on one hand a positive that we’re stating to see some norms and best practices emerge within [...]

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5 Sure-Fire Ways to Operationalize Social Media

This post was written originally for Valeria Maltoni’s excellent new ebook about marketing in 2010. It includes terrific, thoughtful insights from Shannon Paul, Olivier Blanchard, Danny Brown, Amber Naslund, Jackie Huba, Gavin Heaton, Mark Earls, Rachel Happe, Jonathan MacDonald, and of course Valeria herself. Download it for free right here. Change Is At Hand Marketing [...]

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Is Social Media Monitoring Ready for Prime-Time?

Microsoft announced recently that they are launching their own social media listening software tool (currently in closed beta), called Looking Glass, which will according to Microsoft “make social media actionable for business.” Pricing for LookingGlass has not been established. Impacts of Big Boys on Social Media Monitoring Microsoft’s entrance into the social media monitoring software [...]

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Social Media Makes Everything Marketing

It’s truly fantastic that so many companies are starting to monitor the social media conversations around their brands and their industry at large. But what’s not fantastic is the reflexive apoplexy when some of those conversations inexorably are less than complementary. I have seen corporate marketers (and even PR firm folks who should know better) [...]

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