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

The Geometry of Social Media – Why Triangles Rule

Whether it’s your Facebook page, your blog, your Linkedin group, or your private brand community, your social media home base operates like a sports bar. You first go to a sports bar for the amenities. The TVs. The food. The beer selection. But you return again and again not for the elements that brought you [...]

Continue Reading

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 [...]

Continue Reading

Social Media is About People, Not Logos

How will you be human? The people of your company are far more compelling than the company itself. Why they work for the company. Their dedication. Their interests outside of work. All of these provide “personality hooks” for your brand, and combined with a regular focus on your customers’ humanity, they are foundational elements of [...]

Continue Reading

Incinerate Your Social Media Checklist

Yes, there are holdouts, but social media adoption is as fast as anything I’ve ever seen. It took at least 7 years for companies to stop asking “why do we need a Web site?” We’ll have nearly universal social media usage at a corporate level long before then. If you believe Forrester’s predictions on interactive [...]

Continue Reading

Social Media Strategy in 7 Steps

Are you ready to add some “Why” to your “How”? Tired of chasing shiny objects, and setting up Twitter and Facebook accounts with clear direction, or social media metrics? Then this is the blog post for you. I presented today at Social Media AZ, a new conference for Arizonans interested in, and practicing social media. [...]

Continue Reading

11 Timely Social Media Takeaways

Thanks very much for your support of Convince & Convert while I was on vacation in Denmark and Norway. I really appreciate the readership, tweets, and comments about the fantastic guest posts that ran during my absence. Great job by the excellent team of guest bloggers. It just goes to show, Convince & Convert isn’t [...]

Continue Reading

Build Thought Leadership Through Social Networking

Remember, social media is about people, not logos. That’s why the most powerful form of social capital is personal, not corporate. That was the theme of my day-long workshop for the Association of Management Consulting Firms last week in New York. My friend and client Elizabeth Sosnow of BlissPR co-presented with me. Titled “You’re a [...]

Continue Reading

Let’s Stop Swooning Over Social Media

Are you overdoing it on social media? Just a little? I’m a proponent of social media. In fact, I’m a proponent that gets paid to convince others that social media is valuable. But, like in the early days of Web design, SEO, PPC, email, and banners before it, there’s too much swooning and not enough [...]

Continue Reading

Why Social Media Helps the Rich Get Richer

Do you accept the premise that “social media” has expanded well beyond its consumer-generated content roots to encompass a much larger trend of customer-centrism and candor? Do you believe that the core of a successful social media strategy is making your company more like a person and less like a machine? Do you believe that [...]

Continue Reading

Tweeting from the Tractor – 7 Secrets to Successful Social Media Farming

Farming may very well be the second-oldest profession. This will not come as a surprise, but I’ve never farmed personally. However, my family is from Nebraska (Go Big Red) and both sets of grandparents owned farms. So, I’ve spent more than my share of time in a corn field (terrible Wi-Fi). And while farming has [...]

Continue Reading