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

Building Your Blog Community: It’s a Matter of W FACT

Are you building a community, or an audience? In the last couple weeks, I’ve had two experiences that really shook me up on the topic of community. First was Chris Brogan’s simple but devastatingly effective post about the difference between audience and community being the direction the chairs are facing. Second, was a conversation I [...]

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Crowdsourcing Your Dog Food

One of the most overlooked benefits of building or facilitating an online community around your brand is the market research opportunities. Your brand community – even if nascent and emerging – consists of hundreds or thousands of customers that are familiar enough with your company (and care enough about it) to self-identify as a fan/friend/member. [...]

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Valeria Maltoni – The Twitter 20 Interview on Conversation and Community

Valeria Maltoni is one of the most widely respected marketing voices in the world. And for good reason. Her extensive background spans marketing, public relations, and social media. If it exists in the realm of communications, she’s done it. Valeria was also an integral nucleus of the Fast Company Company of Friends, a business intelligence [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Delegation Equals Death in Social Media

Are you just a social media cheerleader? Almost every time I work with a public relations firm or corporation on social media, I hear a version of this statement: “Us old dogs don’t really understand all this new social media stuff, but we’ve got this brilliant young guy right out of school, and he’s getting [...]

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Observations on Day 365

This week makes it one year since I started writing this blog, and I wanted to take a moment to say a sincere thanks to every one of you that occupies even a minute of their increasingly precious time by reading Convince & Convert. The volume of high quality, free, online content (especially about marketing) [...]

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4 Ways to Increase Share of Voice

The concept of “listening to the conversation” which is at the core of most social media programs, and is the foundation for many companies that sell listening tools, is really just a pseudonym for tracking content your customers create based on their satisfaction, or dissatisfaction. It’s often described as “share of voice” – the percentage [...]

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Why Twitter Needs Its Bottom Spanked

I see Twitter being in real danger of becoming MySpace and SecondLife. Do you? If Twitter doesn’t get it’s act together and improve customer experience for the masses of new users signing on, it’s going to end up as an irrelevant, niche community for a self-referential subculture. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that [...]

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Advice for Facebook Marketing – ebook Showdown

Is your company appropriately serious about Facebook? Facebook’s sweeping changes to the “Pages” function last March has made the popular social network much more viable as an interactive, satellite online presence for brands. Some companies are even using Facebook as the core of their social media strategy, and Vitamin Water and others are tagging their [...]

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