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 to Maintain Your Brand’s Authentic Voice

Brooks Thomas, Communications Specialist at Southwest, joins the Social Pros Podcast this week to discuss the progressive setup of the Southwest social media team, the widespread success of a long-running corporate blog, and keeping an authentic voice for a large brand. Read on for some of the highlights and tweetable moments, or listen to the [...]

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Google Reader’s Demise is Irrelevant for Blogs

In this edition of The Baer Facts, I talk with Kyle Lacy of ExactTarget about the demise of Google Reader and how it’s overblown. Back From Australia Yes, we’re returning to a weekly schedule of Baer Facts videos. I had to miss a couple weeks while doing a series of speaking engagements in Sydney that [...]

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When Pictures are Not Enough: The Art of Blogging

Erik Deckers - writer at ProBlogService, co-author with Jason Falls of No Bullshit Social Media, and co-author with Kyle Lacy of Branding Yourself - joins the Social Pros Podcast this week to discuss ghost blogging, the ongoing value of words, and the weight of a blog comment versus a tweeted link. Read on for some of the highlights or listen below for the full podcast. [...]

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Don’t Tell Me I’m Wasting My Time

Guest post by Marjorie Clayman, resident blogger at www.margieclayman.com. She works at Clayman Advertising, Inc., her family-owned full-service marketing firm. I know that it is impossible to please everyone in any scenario, but most especially in the online world. Because of that, I most of the time let snide remarks roll off me like water off a [...]

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Calculate Your Blogging ROI in 9 Steps

Blogging isn’t free. Creating and sustaining a good blog for yourself or your company is a highly labor-intensive proposition. The people (maybe you) working on the blog could be doing something else that helps the company make money, save money, or both. Thus, blogging presents a serious opportunity cost to the company. Smart organizations methodically [...]

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Lifting the Fog of the Blog: 8 Strategic Questions Before You Write 1 Word

There are more than 150 million blogs, according to Technorati’s “State of the Blogosphere” report. Given competition of that magnitude, why should people spend time reading yours? As a frequent blog consultant, I find the success impediment isn’t really the effort required, but rather a planning deficit. Most blogs fail not due to quality, but [...]

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What Are Your Go-To Social Media Resources?

Ian Greenleigh, the social media manager for Bazaarvoice, and a guest poster and commenter here at Convince & Convert has launched a survey to determine what blogs marketers read to find out about social media and marketing strategy. There really isn’t any research around what marketers are reading, other than mathematical rankings like AdAge 150 [...]

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Bloggers Get Two Free Copies of The NOW Revolution

We can’t believe The NOW Revolution is almost here. Less than a month until it debuts, and we couldn’t be more excited. The hardest part is wondering whether all of you will like it as much as we liked it when we wrote it. So, let’s find out. If you have a blog (and not [...]

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The 10 Social Media Thoughts You Liked Best

Looking back on an exhilarating 2010, I wanted to take a second to just say thank you. No frills, no flourishes. Just thanks. There’s a LOT of places you could go to get you social media and digital marketing fix, and I’m incredibly honored that you choose to spend time here. As part of my [...]

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Blogging Success Summit – 23 Tips From Blogging Top Dogs

If you want to take your personal or corporate blogging to new heights in 2011, here’s an opportunity to get a leg up. The Blogging Success Summit kicks off in February, with 23 presentations from a murderer’s row of blogging luminaries (+ me). And for a short time, you can save 50% on registration at [...]

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