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

Free Social Media Worksheets Worth Every Penny

Convince & Convert is all about hype-free social media. Practical, achievable advice you can put into place in your company or organization today. To that end we’ve developed a series of free social media worksheets that you can use to help keep elements of your social media program on track. We’ll keep adding these worksheets [...]

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Who’s Watching Now?

Social media doesn’t close at 5pm. Or take weekends off. Or go on vacation. I’ve been watching today’s very successful Labor Day-only Chick-Fil-A promotion. If you wear any sort of sports team shirt or hat to a Chick-Fil-A today, you get a free sandwich, driving awareness of the company’s Chicken Wave fan group and contest. [...]

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How to Create a Share of Voice Report

Social Mention is a free Web site that monitors and organizes social media chatter on Twitter, blogs, discussion forums, and elsewhere. Social Mention is not nearly as powerful or customizable as paid social media monitoring software like Radian6, Scoutlabs, or Spiral16, but it’s free and easy to use. Once you launch your social media program, [...]

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Can Social Media and Lead Generation Coalesce?

By now, we all know that social media is a fantastic tool for gauging the audience and communicating with previous and current customers. But, can it also be used to lure in new customers? Can social media marketing be paired with other lead generation tactics to create new business opportunities? My initial response was, ”mmh, [...]

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Use Online Listening for Competitive Research

Guest post by Mike Corak (@mikecorak) who oversees strategic planning, Web development, and marketing services for Tempe, Arizona integrated agency Off Madison Ave. Are your customers telling you everything you need to know to improve the bottom line? Conducting primary market research and audience research, and purchasing secondary studies are fundamental ways communicators inform and [...]

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A Social Media Gun to the Head

I’ll admit it. I fish on Twitter. Sometimes, I’ll talk about a brand just to see if they’re listening. Too often, they’re not. Or, maybe they’re listening, but not responding. Some companies seem to have a policy of responding to positive comments, but not responding to negative comments. I think this falls into the “we [...]

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4 Ways to Increase Share of Voice

The concept of “listening to the conversation” which is at the core of most social media programs, and is the foundation for many companies that sell listening tools, is really just a pseudonym for tracking content your customers create based on their satisfaction, or dissatisfaction. It’s often described as “share of voice” – the percentage [...]

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Amber Naslund – The Twitter 20 Interview on Making Friends and Listening to People

Amber Naslund is like the post-modern, social media version of that girl in high school that everyone loved. The geeks. the stoners. The jocks. The auto-shop dudes. The home economics apron-wearers. The goths. The teachers. Social media is about people and connections, and like Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk, Amber’s passion for people shines through [...]

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Is Social Media Too Fast?

One of the greatest challenges of effective social media outreach is the need to be always on. Speed kills in social media, and that’s a difficult transformation for marketers (and especially agencies). If a consumer tweets something negative about your company, addressing it quickly before it festers and is retweeted everywhere is the best practice. [...]

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Yoda Was Wrong – Trying Counts

Are you too caught up in getting social media “right?” Yoda said “Do or Do Not. There is No Try.” When it comes to social media at least, the little green guy is full of it. If you accept the fundamental premise that social media’s power lies in its ability to change the nature of [...]

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