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

Corporate Twitter Account Train Wreck! The 3 Types of Self-Destructive Tweets

Twit happens. As more and more companies ramp up their Twitter presence, the likelihood that something off-message will slip by the digital goalie goes up considerably. The question is not whether your company will have to deal with self-destructive corporate Tweets, but what kind of tweet it will be, and by whom. There are 3 [...]

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Blinded by the White: Social Media and Diversity

Over the past couple weeks, two events got me thinking. At South by Southwest in Austin, I was at several events attended by the “social media mafia” – the 300 or so folks that create much of the content around social media nationally. Bloggers, consultants, community managers, et al. There are of course many excellent [...]

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Why Social Success is No Accident

If you read Convince & Convert on even an occasional basis, you know that I’m firmly in the social integration camp. You need to focus on how to “be” social as a company, and worry less about how to “do” social. This is because social touches do not occur in isolation. I’ve seen a LOT [...]

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3 Ways to Tell a Social Media Problem From a Crisis

What constitutes a crisis? Discovering that someone has left a review saying they saw a mouse at your restaurant is certainly disconcerting. But is it a crisis? No. The social media monitors in your organization need to have a mutual understanding of what is a real crisis and what the subsequent escalation procedures are. Merriam-Webster [...]

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6 Parts of Your Company That Should be Listening to Social Conversations

“Once upon a time, customer contact was centralized around the switchboard, and the phone was the preferred method for communication between companies and customers. When it rang, you answered, because it was likely a customer or a potential customer on the other end of the line. Now, the calls are coming through online, via the [...]

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3 Key Roles to Make Your Social Team Scalable

One of the continuous discussions and questions surfacing in the social media chatterbox is that of “who owns social media?” Is it marketing? Public relations (PR)? Customer service? The answer is . . . yes. For the long-term, anyway. You’re not likely at the point yet where you have social media wired into everything. Right [...]

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The New Small – How Technology Levels the Playing Field

Phil Simon is a technology cupid. Whatever your company’s issues or objectives, he can recommend the optimal platform, rollout strategy, and operational considerations. In his work as a tech consultant, he’s realized the days of “big iron” – solving problems with huge, expensive systems are gone. Now, it’s the nimble, inexpensive technology that rules. So [...]

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The 5 Critical Social Media Skills You Need to Disperse

Your customers, prospects, and the people looking for you online don’t care about your company structure. If they find you on Twitter, or leave a comment on your blog, they’re looking for a response from anyone who can help, regardless of what department that person represents or what someone’s official job title is. Everybody in [...]

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The Dirty Secrets of Time, Priorities, and Honesty

I hate excuses. And the one I despise most of all is “I don’t have time.” Bullshit. You can find the time. It exists. You choose not to devote the time, and there’s a big difference. I don’t work out. (people that have met me in person are LOLing about the understated nature of that [...]

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5 Attributes of a Healthy, Real-Time Culture

The future of business is not in measured, scrutinized answers or carefully planned initiatives. Business will soon be about near-instantaneous response; about making the best decisions you can with the extremely limited information you have; about every customer being a reporter, and every reporter being a customer; about winning and losing customers in real time, [...]

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