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
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Social Media Excellence and a Side of Fries

Mary is awesome!! She is always smiling, has a great attitude, has a kind word to say and makes you feel special. I am a big Mary fan.

- posted by Dora Yee Kwok on the “I Love Mary @ McDonalds/Chandler” Facebook group

social media mcdonalds 300x192 Social Media Excellence and a Side of Fries Mary Moss may be the most successful headset-wearing brand ambassador in the country. She’s manned the drive-thru at a McDonald’s in Chandler, Arizona for four years, and during that time has developed quite a following.

The McDonald’s restaurant where Mary works doesn’t have a following, SHE does. After all, the secret to McDonald’s corporate success is sameness and replication. Having a disproportionately awesome anything at a single location throws off the whole business model. But Mary is defiant in her ability to stand out. She embodies the principle of social media being about people, not logos.

Imagine how many drive-thru employees you’ve encountered in your life. How many do you remember in a positive connotation? Of those, how many would take the time to “fan” on Facebook?

But yet, 722 people are fans of Mary Moss on the official Facebook page dedicated to her drive-thru prowess, a page that she had nothing to do with, and didn’t even know about until a drive-thru regular (she has groupies) told her.

Says Mary about the secret to her success (in an article in the Arizona Republic):

“I think a lot of people just expect quick service, and it surprises them when they get a certain amount of personal attention. Sometimes all it takes is a smile and a quick compliment to turn their day around.”

Mary has it exactly right. In your struggle to find the perfect social media strategy, to out-execute the competition, to create something “viral” it’s all too easy to forget that almost every big thing started out as a very little thing. And most of those little things became movements (amazing manifesto by Spike Jones here on movements), for one very simple reason: they exceeded expectations.

If you’re looking for the social media breakthrough for your organization, think about Mary. Consider how you do business every day, and how you could alter those processes just a bit so that you’d be delivering something exceptional – something that exceeded expectations.

How will you find your Mary? Are there other examples of small things becoming big things?

(photo by Tony the Misfit)

pf button both Social Media Excellence and a Side of Fries
About Jay Baer

Jay Baer is a hype-free social media and content strategist & speaker, and author of Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help not Hype. Jay is the founder of http://convinceandconvert.com and host of the Social Pros podcast.

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