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

Funnel Vision: Why Companies Need To See The Light At the End of the Funnel

  Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from Brian Solis‘s new book, What’s the Future of Business? Learn more about the book and purchase a copy at http://wtfbusiness.com. Over the years, businesses have developed sales, marketing, and service strategies around the sales funnel. The model of awareness, interest, desire, and action describes the likely steps [...]

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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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Empowering Employees with Social Business Strategy

Sandy Carter, VP of Social Business Sales and Evangelism at IBM, joins the Social Pros Podcast this week to discuss social media versus social business, the importance of innovation in social business strategy, and how to keep customers and employees alike most productive and loyal. Read on for some of the highlights or listen below for the [...]

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The Most Valuable Lesson a B2B Marketer Will Ever Learn

As a journeyman marketing writer, my job is to simplify stuff. It often works like this: I go into a meeting. My client invited a number of others because they really know the product and the market. These are experts. After the handshakes, card swaps and small talk, I go into listen mode. My digital [...]

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What We Can Learn From Me Getting Kicked Out of a BBQ Contest

If you wanted a group of 50 people to return to a location at a specific time, would you instruct them to “be back here in 10 minutes, at 11:40″ or would you say, “Be here at 20 after. Wait, I mean 20 before which I guess is 20 plus 20.” I was told the [...]

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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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Organizing Teams To Support Effective Content Delivery

Over the last several months, I have found the conversation around content to be slowing evolving from “Why is content important to my business?” to “How do we organize around content delivery?”.  The answer to this question lies in the recognition that content is not simply a one-dimensional SEO tool, but is ultimately how your [...]

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Social Pros 29 – Lauren Vargas, Aetna

This is Episode 29 of the Social Pros Podcast : Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media. This episode features Lauren Vargas of Aetna. Read on for insights from Lauren plus Eric Boggs‘s Social Media Stat of the Week (This week: 62% of adults use social media for fear of missing out.) Listen Now Click the play button to listen [...]

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Is Your Marketing a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing?

Last week, I wrote that social media stunts can do more harm than good, because they set an expectation among the masses that they will also be treated with extraordinary kindness. But they won’t, because highly individualized “wow” moments aren’t typically scalable. (Note: not everyone agreed with me on that, which is terrific. I don’t [...]

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Building Your Business With Internal Collaboration

Video production by my friends at Candidio. Fast, inexpensive, great service. (Abbreviated transcript below. Please watch video for entire interview.) Jay: Hey everybody, it’s Jay Baer from Convince & Convert. Joined today by a very special guest, Jacob Morgan, author of the book you see right there, “The Collaborative Organization,” and also the CEO, Founder, [...]

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