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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How to Track Facebook Success Or Failure with Real-Time Stats

There’s been lots of gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands and pounding of keyboards about Facebook’s Edgrerank lately. “How dare they!” pontificate the social pure bloods. “We put forth the effort to get fans to ‘like’ our page, and now we have to PAY Facebook to reach them? It’s an outrage!” It’s not. Facebook [...]

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social media optimization 27  |  Add Yours

What Michael J. Fox Taught Me About Marketing

I like Michael J. Fox. I’m of the vintage that grew up with Alex P. Keaton, Teen Wolf, and Marty McFly. Further, I lost my grandfather to Parkinson’s a few years ago, and Fox’s efforts to raise funds to combat the disease are remarkable. So it was a thrill to see Fox give a keynote [...]

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Content Marketing 9  |  Add Yours

6 Reasons to Make Your Big Idea Small

Brad Van Orden is the most interesting man in the world. It’s not the Dos Equis guy, it’s Brad. A former product engineer for WL Gore & Associates, Brad is an expert telemark skier, mountain biker, mechanic, cook, humorist, and explorer. I got to know Brad and his wife Sheena when I lived in Flagstaff, [...]

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Social Media Research 14  |  Add Yours

Remembering the Dangers of Social Media Research

Numbers don’t lie. But sometimes we lie to ourselves about what numbers represent. Last week, I wrote a post about new research from ExactTarget that studied Americans’ digital channel preferences. It was a lengthy report, but what stood out for me was the finding that only 5% of us prefer promotional offers from brands to [...]

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Social Media Research 76  |  Add Yours

New Research: Americans Hate Social Media Promotions

Among other disruptive characteristics that have altered the nature of business forever (real-time interaction, every customer is a reporter, customer service is a spectator sport, etc.) a major way that social media changes the game is the Democratization of Voices. Your Company Needs to Be Human Because You’re Competing with Humans Social media is the [...]

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Content Marketing 15  |  Add Yours

The 6 Stages of Exposing Yourself with Content Marketing

In just 10 years we’ve moved from laggards pondering whether they even wanted a website, to a circumstance where “content marketing” and “corporate storytelling” are garnering serious budgetary resources. But have we let the pendulum swing too far? Is it always a net positive to create and give away content on behalf of your company? [...]

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The Real Reason Your Customers Don’t Like You on Facebook

In addition to the controversial redesign of the news feed, and announcements from the f8 conference about the new Timeline profile and app-fueled Graph Rank, was another very interesting Facebook-related development last week. My friends (and client) ExactTarget released part 10 of their social media research series. This one is called “The Meaning of Like” [...]

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mobile 103  |  Add Yours

Does QR stand for Quasi-Ridiculous? (an analysis)

I understand QR codes are the new “it” thing, the Taylor Lautner of calls-to-action. And indeed, given the increasing ubiquity of smart phones (41% in the U.S. according to new research by my client ExactTarget), many of your potential customers have the capacity to interact with your QR code. But whether they will or not [...]

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Social Media Marketing 173  |  Add Yours

Is Twitter Massively Overrated?

I was thunderstruck by new social media usage data released by Edison Research and Arbitron. In this thorough study of the media habits of Americans ages 12 and up (conducted annually since 1998), the survey authors have put a statistical fine point on something I’ve been pondering for a while: Is Twitter Massively Overrated? From [...]

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Why You’re Pissing Off Half Your Facebook Fans

Sure it has 600 million members and is significantly more compelling than any film made by Nicholas Cage in the past five years, but even with those inherent advantages, Facebook for business is hard. It’s not just that Facebook has a distinctly Favre-like approach to features and decision-making. Or, that Facebook is very clearly in [...]

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