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

7 Skill Sets for Nurturing Open Community

Guest post as part of the virtual book tour by Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer to explore concepts from their new book Open Community: a little book of big ideas for associations navigating the social web. We come from the association industry and for many of us “membership” people, community is old hat. It’s what [...]

Continue Reading

Digital Sharecropping – Why Most Facebook Customization is Wasted Effort

Part 3 of a 3-Part Rant The time, money, and overall exertion being spent on customizing Facebook fan pages is largely misspent. Just because you CAN replicate much of your corporate website functionality on Facebook, doesn’t mean you SHOULD. Your Facebook fan page is not a collectible automobile. You do not get extra brand advocacy [...]

Continue Reading

The 7 New Roles Agencies Must Play to Survive Real-Time Business

Change is all around us, in many shapes and guises. Yet the nucleus of most of the shifts that have us feeling like we’re in a transformational maelstrom is speed. Everything happens faster now. Awareness can be captured more quickly than ever before. Sales can be closed instantly online. Customer service issues can be resolved [...]

Continue Reading

3 Reasons To Dig Deeper In Social Listening

Guest post by Connie Bensen, the Director of Community Strategy and Social Media at Alterian, which provides leading marketing products for the enterprise. She also blogs at http://communitystrategist.com. Brands have realized that social networks offer an opportunity to interact directly with consumers. They create pockets of communities where like-minded people share information and seek advice. [...]

Continue Reading

6 Timely Tips for Twitter Success

New research from Sysomos shows that 92.4% of all retweets happen within the first hour after the tweet has been sent. This demonstrates that Twitter users are not browsing the public stream (or even their own lists) to find and interact with tweets from earlier in the day. Consequently, WHEN you send your tweets has [...]

Continue Reading

Travel, Tweets, Trends – Social Media Runs Rampant in Adventure Travel

There’s been a lot of talk (and rightfully so) lately about industries where social media adoption is as slow as a Brett Favre farewell. Financial services. Utilities. Pharma. And a lot more. I’ll write more about those issues soon, but today let’s turn our attention to an industry where social media is thriving like Cher’s [...]

Continue Reading

Why Social Supports Email in the Interactive Marketing Hub

A big distinction between email marketing and social media marketing is the difference between actual audience and potential audience. Email is all about actual audience. If someone signs up for your email updates when you send one out, that person will receive it in almost every case. Will that open it? Approximately 25% of the [...]

Continue Reading

Do You Have the Guts to Expect Social Media Failure

The fastest way to get your company to be on the social media sidelines is to get your company involved in social media. There’s a huge gap between the perception of social media as an instant, free, can’t miss marketing opportunity and the reality of social media as a long-term, time-intensive customer loyalty and brand [...]

Continue Reading

Social Listening and Analysis for the DIY Inclined

If you are conducting any level of online reputation management or campaign tracking using social media data sources, you have to get beyond the obvious. The point of tracking software isn’t to determine how many tweets were sent mentioning a company, it’s to figure out what those tweets say, and what the business ramifications are. [...]

Continue Reading