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

4 Steps to Drive Sales with a Social FAQ

One of the key benefits of social media that’s not talked about nearly enough is its ability to mitigate doubt and confusion among fence-sitters. Yes, your prospective customers are confused and uncertain. After all, why would they even be coming to your Web site unless they had questions about your product or service? To be [...]

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Are You Slow Enough to Succeed in Social Media?

Does this sound familiar? Within 12 months of its invention, 1,200 companies entered the radio “business” in some form or fashion. So said Malcolm Gladwell in a stirring speech given Monday to the AAA Annual Meeting in Scottsdale. In his own, story-filled way, he emphasized the point that we are in a period of unusual [...]

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Online Community With Purpose and a Plan

Lisa Beatty was at a cross-roads. This 40-something Florida Mom found herself undergoing several simultaneous life shifts, and realized that products and the communication about them didn’t resonate with her any longer. Companies didn’t seem to understand where she was, who she was, or what she wanted. So, Lisa Beatty build JaneNation.com, a new opinion, [...]

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7 Surprising Statistics About Twitter in America

Ah Twitter, we thought we knew you. A comprehensive survey (1,753 respondents) released today by Edison Research, paints a fascinating picture of Twitter and its role in America’s social media ecosystem. The full 49-page study is full of interesting graphs and data morsels, but these are the 7 findings that I didn’t anticipate: 1. Twitter [...]

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The Science of Inequality – Finding Your Influential Customers

Does social media breed inequality? Because our behaviors on the social Web leave a noticeable fingerprint, smart companies can modify the way they engage and interact with us, based on our social graph, purchase history, etc. Would the VP of Customer Satisfaction of Southwest Airlines have called Kevin Smith at home (after he was kicked [...]

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Information as Theater – The Power of Humanized Description

I am typing this on a US Airways flight from St. Louis to Phoenix, coming back from SocialFresh. I’ll probably fly 150 segments this year, which is a lot, but nowhere near Chris Brogan territory. Today, I’ve fortunately been upgraded to first class, which happens infrequently because I travel enough to make it exhausting, but [...]

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Is Social Media Too Big For Its Britches?

Maybe what we need is a little deconstruction. At Monday’s Social Fresh conference in St. Louis, I was delighted to join Sarah Evans, Jason Falls, Amber Naslund, and Zena Weist on the closing panel discussion. During the session, an audience question got me fired up (no surprise, as the Social Fresh attendees were a very [...]

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Nobody Said Social Media Was Easy

Social media isn’t inexpensive, it’s different expensive. In the QA portion of recent speeches, I’ve frequently been asked “this is great, but doesn’t it seem like it will take a lot of time?” Yes. It. Will. Succeeding on the social Web requires daily participation. Whether it’s brand reputation management, PR and influencer outreach, customer service [...]

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