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

Content Lessons Learned From 25 Popular Blog Posts

I’ve been writing Convince & Convert for more than two years, and have produced more than 300 posts. Mostly from me, with some terrific assistance from talented guest authors. Last week, I was on a content marketing discussion panel (moderated by Jeff Rohrs) at the ExactTarget Connections conference. I was joined by Joe Pulizzi from [...]

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5 Ways to Make Friends with Strangers on Your Blog

Remember in high school, when someone would throw a party when their parents were out of town? At first, you knew everyone at the party. They were all friends of the host, nervously alternating between drinking Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers, and trying not to break anything. But then, it all changed. The party got [...]

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Get More Bait in the Water

How can you catch more fish? By using more poles. If you’re going to create social media content to establish or perpetuate thought leadership for you, your company, or your clients, you can’t silo your ideas. The old method of thought leadership was to create a white paper. A carefully crafted, highly edited, incredibly boring, [...]

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Does Your Corporate Blog Measure Up

There’s a fair amount of agreement on principles on an effective blog, and even widespread head nodding regarding what success metrics are important. However, there’s very little available with regard to blog metrics benchmarking, and how your blog compares to others. I’m hoping to change that. And you can help by taking this short survey. [...]

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11 Must-Dos for the Serious Blogger

First in a three post series this week about social media case studies. 11 Must Dos For The Serious Blogger  View more documents from Jason Baer. If your blog is essentially a post-modern diary where you share your deepest, personal feelings about life in a cathartic way, this is not the post for you. However, [...]

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Finally! A Blog Post Scoreboard

Knowing which of your blog posts are most successful, and in what way, is invaluable in the never-ending process of honing your blog’s content approach and community orientation. Bloggers have always been challenged by on one hand having both a surplus of potential success metrics, and a scarcity of data aggregation tools. The new PostRank [...]

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Free Social Media Worksheets Worth Every Penny

Convince & Convert is all about hype-free social media. Practical, achievable advice you can put into place in your company or organization today. To that end we’ve developed a series of free social media worksheets that you can use to help keep elements of your social media program on track. We’ll keep adding these worksheets [...]

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Make it Bigger – The 4 Types of Corporate Blogs

Is your blog broad enough? Despite all the hoopla and teeth gnashing about micro-blogging like Twitter, and medium-blogging like Posterous, the good old blog isn’t going anywhere. For many social media objectives, the blog just works better. It’s more searchable, more convincing, and more flexible. But often, it’s also too narrow. Yes, I’ve advocated strongly [...]

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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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Why Blogs Will Kill Dissent

While newspapers and magazines make increasingly Draconian decisions to try to escape their inexorable spiral of decline, the very future of publishing comes into question. Will life as we know it stop once the Grey Lady and her sisters cease to exist in their historical form? No. Even without papers and mags, Britney will still [...]

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