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
Email Marketing Advice 39  |  Add Yours

Invitation Avalanches, Attention Infidelity, and the Science of the Social Break-Up

Is the golden goose poisoned before it’s even an adult? The current relationship between companies and consumers via social media and email is unsustainable. The backlash has begun, and abuse of any one channel has a spillover effect on consumer attitudes toward other channels. That’s one of my main takeaways from fascinating new research from [...]

Continue Reading
Book Reviews 5  |  Add Yours

Threadless Shares 10 Years of Insights and Inspiration

Threadless – everyone’s favorite T-shirt purveyor and example of crowdsourcing and customer community success – recently published a terrific 10th anniversary book that combines company history with dozens of its best designs. It makes for very interesting reading, and the production values and design elements make it a suitable coffee table book, and an excellent [...]

Continue Reading
Social Media Marketing 26  |  Add Yours

It’s More About the Social Than It Is About the Media

Sure, the gadgets and gizmos and the apps and androids of social media make it more convenient for us to interact with one another, and with brands. But it’s not really about the bits and bytes and data and Dick Costolo, is it? It envelopes us, but technology is only the third most important “ly” [...]

Continue Reading
brand communities 51  |  Add Yours

Mistake Math – Why We’re Valuing Facebook Fans All Wrong

Part 2 of a 3-Part Rant Brands are shouting from the rooftops about how many Facebook fans they have – and the number of “likes” does help you spread your message through the news feeds of your fans (more on that tomorrow). But let’s recognize it takes literally one click of one finger to “like” [...]

Continue Reading
brand communities 61  |  Add Yours

Ra Ra Wrong. How Facebook’s Cheerleaders Are Blowing Smoke

Part 1 of a 3-Part Rant I realize it’s in the best interests of Facebook, the media, application developers, and sometimes even brands themselves to concoct pseudo-science that “proves” that people that “like” your company are instantly turned into a zombie army of influential advocates. But it’s simply not true. Despite a pile of coverage [...]

Continue Reading
Guest Posts 15  |  Add Yours

3 Reasons To Dig Deeper In Social Listening

Guest post by Connie Bensen, the Director of Community Strategy and Social Media at Alterian, which provides leading marketing products for the enterprise. She also blogs at http://communitystrategist.com. Brands have realized that social networks offer an opportunity to interact directly with consumers. They create pockets of communities where like-minded people share information and seek advice. [...]

Continue Reading
facebook 1,110  |  Add Yours

R.I.P. 3 Ways Facebook is Killing Your Website

The game used to be relatively simple. Build a website. Make it useful and at least moderately pleasing to the eye. Keep it updated. Make your content at least semi-friendly for search engines. Bingo! A digital marketing success story. Not now. Like print newspapers, basketball players under 6 feet tall, and the McRib sandwich, the [...]

Continue Reading
brand communities 84  |  Add Yours

Facebook Success Summit – 22 Sessions on Everything Facebook

Is Facebook important to you and your business? If it’s not now, it will be soon (see my post tomorrow for more on that). Now with more than 500 million global members, Facebook is changing the way we interact, communicate, share, and shop. Despite Facebook’s apparent addiction to public relations missteps and half-baked schemes, they [...]

Continue Reading
brand communities 184  |  Add Yours

6 Degrees of Influence – The Value of Customer-to-Customer Connections

Guest post by Yael Davidowitz-Neu, a Sales Strategy Analyst at Google responsible for analyzing consumer behavior, search trends and market dynamics.  She is deeply curious, loves all things marketing and blogs less frequently than she would like at Stickystimuli.com. While many businesses are excited about opportunities to reach their customers on the social web, few [...]

Continue Reading
brand communities 245  |  Add Yours

Crowdsourcing: Beyond the Basics

Guest post by Clinton Bonner, Director of Sales at Chaordix, specializing in the technology and services of managed crowds for open innovation and social research. What is the next generation of crowdsourcing? Crowdsourcing is evolving beyond the shiny contest model (Doritos’ “Crash the Super Bowl”) and into something more meaningful to the brands embracing it [...]

Continue Reading