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

19 Top Takeaways from B2B Forum

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum in Boston. As usual for MarketingProfs‘ events, it was a superlative, intimate mixture of excellent speakers and smart, eager attendees. For me, the highlights were the presentation by Sandy Carter of IBM on their use of social media, [...]

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Twitterati Says Email Isn’t Dead Yet – 6 Findings

Every conference I’ve been at, and at least 10 blog posts I’ve read this year have proclaimed the death of email. Social network messaging, and its 1:1 relevancy and real-time immediacy will inexorably make email the Edsel of digital communication, goes the theory. It’s not true. Firstly, this isn’t a zero sum game. The notion [...]

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CC Chapman – The Twitter 20 Interview on Telling Stories and Humanizing Brands

CC Chapman is a lot of desirable things. A legendary podcaster that embraced that medium from its very earliest days. A grizzled blogger, with entries dating back to 2001. A co-founder of the buzzlicious non-traditional marketing agency The Advance Guard. A devoted father that doesn’t let the digital tsunami swamp his boat. Between conference speaking [...]

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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 [...]

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Why Can’t PR Do Digital?

Why aren’t PR firms offering digital marketing services to their clients? On Sunday, David Anderson from Off Madison Ave and I presented this roundtable at the PRSA Counselor’s Academy conference in Palm Desert. The title is: Revenue.com: Launching Digital Marketing Services to Grow Retainers. Note we only had ~30 minutes, so this isn’t as comprehensive [...]

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Closing the Gap with Social Media

I moved to a smallish town (60,000) from a big city (3 million) nearly 5 years ago. I used to work in an office with 50 people. Now, when I’m not traveling to conferences or to see clients, I work from home. Usually half-dressed. Staring out at a forest. Other than our cat that I [...]

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5 Steps to Setting Social Media Limits

Feeling overwhelmed by social media and social networks? Does it occasionally seem that all this connectivity comes at the expense of your free time? Struggling to decide whether to follow back or friend up that guy you met at the local Chamber of Commerce event whom you don’t really know, but might be a useful [...]

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Amber Naslund – The Twitter 20 Interview on Making Friends and Listening to People

Amber Naslund is like the post-modern, social media version of that girl in high school that everyone loved. The geeks. the stoners. The jocks. The auto-shop dudes. The home economics apron-wearers. The goths. The teachers. Social media is about people and connections, and like Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk, Amber’s passion for people shines through [...]

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5 Ways to be a Social Networking Smash

1. Be Helpful Distribute what you know. Make people smarter. 2. Share It’s not all about you. For every time you talk about your own stuff, talk about other people’s great content 8 times. 3. Be Personal People gravitate toward people, not robots. Show what you’re really like. Just don’t be a freak. 4. Ask [...]

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8 Ingredients of Intoxicating Blog Posts

Is there a method to your blogging madness? Blogging isn’t new, but the notion of blog authorship contributing to marketing effectiveness is very much gaining favor in the U.S., resulting in a flood of new bloggers, especially B2B. Encouraged by inbound marketing proponents like Hubspot, Chris Brogan, Michael Gass, (and me), organizations are jumping on [...]

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