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
Integrated Marketing and Media 39  |  Add Yours

7 Critical Elements of Your Social Media Strategy

(Originally written for MarketingProfs Daily Fix) It’s fantastic that interest in social media is so high, but I’m alarmed at the number of brands and agencies that are ready to jump into social media to take “advantage” of audience concentration in Facebook, Twitter, and other fast-growth outposts. What’s lacking in most social media programs is [...]

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Digital Media 17  |  Add Yours

A Conversation, Not a Monologue – Digital Marketing for Colleges

I just finished giving a speech at the western region meeting of the National Council for Marketing & Public Relations in Sedona, Arizona.  NCMPR is the association of community and technical college marketers. A really interesting group that needs to harness social media and work with prospective students on an individual, relevant, highly personal basis.  [...]

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Agency Promotion 7  |  Add Yours

UPDATE: GoDaddy and the .Me Domain Disaster

UPDATE: Well, the .me registration was a complete and utter fiasco. Speaking from personal experience, and reporting from Mashable (soon to be joined by a lot of other reporting, I predict) – this was one of the worst examples of customer experience in my 15 years online.  It took one full hour to check out. [...]

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Agency Promotion 1  |  Add Yours

Flash Now Readable by Search – Usability Experts Panic

After a LONG waite, Adobe announced this week that Flash files are soon to be readable by search engines. This removes a major impediment to using Flash for Web sites, as previously all files created in Flash were essentially invisible to Google, Yahoo! and the rest. So, we now have the classic good news/bad news [...]

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Usability and Ease of Use 1  |  Add Yours

Simple techniques for making Web site visitors take action

Making the Horses Drink The Web is the most comprehensively flawed world-changing technology ever. The ways in which you can screw up a Web site are without limit. In contrast, it’s a lot tougher to botch a fire, a wheel, a toilet, an ATM, or one of those KFC chicken/potato/corn/cheese bowls. Like a really big [...]

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PR 2.0 1  |  Add Yours

Blogs and the new transparency of communication

Unless you’re a recently thawed caveperson, you’ve heard about blogs. No current-day buzzword is as buzzy as “blog” which leapt from geek-dom to mainstream faster than the evaporation of Bode Miller’s career. (author’s note: Since this was written, Mr. Miller has been resurgent and won this year’s overall World Cup skiing title. Apologies Bode) Blogs [...]

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Campaign Testing and Optimization 1  |  Add Yours

Swissarmyknife.com: Using Web strategy to improve integrated marketing

What does the Internet have to do with your print, TV, radio, direct mail and other traditional tactics? Plenty. Along with the oft-cited belief that half of all marketing dollars are wasted lies a corollary, which is that the traditional components of most marketing plans are evaluated using less than scientific means. In many cases, [...]

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Web site Analytics and Metrics 3  |  Add Yours

Botox For Your Web Site

Make these changes now to improve online results Thousands of Web sites built circa 2000-2002 are showing signs of wear and fatigue like a dot com Larry King. Today’s trend is away from flashy, narcissistic pandemics about why YOUR bolt and fastener company is the BEST, and toward obvious, easy-to-use, functional Web sites that respect [...]

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Campaign Testing and Optimization 1  |  Add Yours

Actions not Words: Most web sites can’t get visitors to do much of anything. How about yours?

In comparison to their human counterparts, Web sites have certain advantages as sales representatives for your company. They work 24×7, don’t complain about the commission structure, and don’t expense $273 for dinner with “Paul” the imaginary new business prospect. But otherwise, Web sites are generally terrible salespeople. Nearly all Web sites have (or should have) [...]

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Web Site Strategy 0  |  Add Yours

Making a List: Clicking it Twice

Consumers visit a limited number of Web sites each month. How can you make your site one of them? In the American way of thinking, if some is good, more must be better. Anything useful or interesting gets proliferated until it reaches gluttonous proportions. Cereal is good. But do we need nearly 100 varieties? How [...]

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