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
Blogging and Content Creation 62  |  Add Yours

Please Help Me Pick a New Look For My Blog

I’ve been making a few tweaks to Convince & Convert recently, with the help of my friend (and WordPress/SEO ninja) Chuck Reynolds. We’ve added Disqus as the commenting system. Changed the sharing tools to incorporate Sexy Bookmarks plug-in (Michael Stelzner at Social Media Examiner turned me on to it). We’re working on tweaking the subscription [...]

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Blogging and Content Creation 179  |  Add Yours

11 Mind-Blowing Reasons Your Company Needs Facebook

Join me and 21 other speakers for Facebook Success Summit 2010, a Webinar series with everything you need to know about Facebook for business. Sessions start October 5. Go to http://bit.ly/facebooksuccess to save 50% for a limited time. Wow. Remember when MySpace was the dominant social network? Seems like a long time ago, as the [...]

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Blogging and Content Creation 73  |  Add Yours

The Chicken and the Egg Social Media Conundrum

There are many ways social media differs from traditional marketing. It’s approachable and human. It’s a two-way dialog, rather than unilateral declarations. It treats the customer as a teammate, rather than a target. But there’s another big difference. In social media, the audience comes after the message, not before. Remember that when you buy a [...]

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Blogging and Content Creation 81  |  Add Yours

Is Your Company More Interesting Than My Wife?

If you’re going to succeed on Facebook, you don’t just have to be more interesting than other companies, you have to be more interesting than my friends and relatives. Are you prepared for that? My friend Jeff Widman runs BrandGlue, a consultancy that helps companies better manage their Facebook fan pages. He told me recently [...]

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social crm 71  |  Add Yours

Take Off the Social Media Blindfold

Among the many exceptionally interesting data snacks in the recent MarketingProfs’ State of Social Media report is one showing that businesses of all sizes and types are primarily using Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, and blogging. And while it’s on one hand a positive that we’re stating to see some norms and best practices emerge within [...]

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brand communities 24  |  Add Yours

US Speedskating Finds Fans In Social Media

Did you know the United States Speedskating team has won 75 Olympic medals, making it the most successful U.S. winter Olympics sport? But the global economic bear doesn’t take medal count into consideration, and last year the speedskating team was without a title sponsor when Dutch bank DSB went bankrupt. (Why a U.S. bank didn’t [...]

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Blogging and Content Creation 133  |  Add Yours

Should a Blog be Your Social Media Hub?

The divine corporate blogging expert Debbie Weil recently asked this question on her blog, as part of a Kindle version refresh of her excellent book “The Corporate Blogging Book.” Debbie asked me to think about whether a blog should be the social media hub – your epicenter, the place where you’re trying to bring your [...]

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Blogging and Content Creation 114  |  Add Yours

4 Ways Bloggers Differ From Reporters

You have to pitch bloggers differently than reporters. The marvelous Dave Fleet writes a lot about this topic, and Chris Brogan produced a terrific, straightforward post about blogger pitching recently. Here’s my thoughts on some advanced blogger pitching ideas and the key differences between bloggers and reporters. Influence is Made Not Born Guess how many [...]

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crowd sourcing 26  |  Add Yours

HARO Gets Serious About Crowd Sourced Journalism

Help A Reporter Out (HARO), the uber-simple brainchild of hyper-active, skydiving, PR wild child Peter Shankman has gone big-time. Born humbly as a simple way for reporters to connect with potential sources, HARO has grown to more than 50,000 participating reporters, with 150,000 people receiving three daily emails stuffed with requests for sources. Not surprisingly, [...]

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Social Media Marketing 266  |  Add Yours

Attacking the Social Media Lynch Mob

Can we put down the pitchforks? For most of the past year, there’s been a barrage of blog posts bemoaning the social media gold rush, and the number of self-proclaimed experts that seem to propagate like pink eye in a kindergarten class. In fact, there was much hand-wringing a couple weeks ago when Mashable breathlessly [...]

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