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

How Social Media and Smartphones Breed a Petri Dish of Negativity

It’s time to recalibrate your expectations about customer complaints. 57% of Americans will have a smartphone this year, meaning that the majority of your customers (and in some industries, the vast majority) now possess two things, at all times, in their pants: Access to almost the entirety of the world’s knowledge Several different mechanisms to [...]

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The 2 Ingredient Recipe for the Social Media Magic Middle

Silos are for suckers. Your customers do not care about your org chart. To them, it’s irrelevant how your organization is structured, and the internal power plays and land grabs that unfold across your company are immaterial. Your customers, potential customers and fans only care about two things in social media: They want to be heard. [...]

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Social Customer Service is Now a 2-Headed Monster

In this edition of The Baer Facts, I talk with Kyle Lacy of ExactTarget about customers using Facebook more and more as a customer service channel. Interesting new research from Social Bakers uncovers an important finding: The volume of questions posted on Facebook has increased 26% in 6 months. (tweet this) Historically, brands have put more [...]

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The New Skill Every Social Media Marketer Must Possess

In The NOW Revolution, Amber Naslund and I predicted that social media would become a skill rather than a job. As companies take more steps to “be” social, and incorporate social business initiatives alongside the more common and obvious social media marketing programs, employees from all divisions and departments will utilize “social” to be more [...]

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Convergence of Marketing and Journalism is a Recipe for Better Content

In this week’s Baer Facts, Kyle Lacy from ExactTarget and I talk about a recent blog post by social business smartie David Armano that illustrates an emerging marketing team structure that includes journalism/editorial guidance. This is an interesting and exciting development, as it wasn’t that long ago that marketing and journalism were like two beta [...]

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5 Keys to Effective Social Media and Content Insourcing

Last week, I wrote about Marcus Sheridan’s concept of “insourcing” and the need to expand your social media and content marketing beyond a centralized, command and control structure (typically led by marketing). At Convince & Convert, we get involved in these “insourcing” programs often, working with corporate clients to create social business structure that facilitates [...]

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A Guru or the Gang: The 4 Ways to Staff Social Media in Agencies

I’m an agency guy. Convince & Convert is the fifth marketing services firm I’ve started or operated, and I work with many agencies every week to help them package, price, staff, and sell social and digital. In the past two years alone, I’ve helped more than 25 agencies build a social media practice. During these [...]

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How to Fight For More Social Media Resources In Your Company

Paradox: in an age of technology advances being gobbled like Pez, marketing and customer service are somehow getting more labor-intensive, not less. Social media and the rise of self-serve content requires that we actually attempt to fulfill the decades-old promise of 1:1 marketing – winning hearts and minds a few at a time with unprecedented [...]

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Please Aggravate Me: Is Gamifying Customer Service a Reality

Lisa Loeffler (@LisaMLoeffler) is Research & Analysis Lead at Convince & Convert. She is also founder and principal of Genuine Media, a marketing agency that helps clients build their individual and brand reputation through social media. We all know waiting on hold for-EV-ver on the phone, or standing in a l–o–n–g line, are a few [...]

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