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

Speak No Evil – Why Trust Isn’t a 4 Letter Word in Social Media

Now is the summer of our discontent. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. For social media, one hand giveth (instant spread of the Bin Laden news) while the other hand taketh away (seemingly daily stories about a company or person doing it “wrong”). The most egregious occurrence of late [...]

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Customer Stalking – When Is Your Twitter Response Too Fast?

Guest post by Neicole Crepeau, an Online Strategist at Coherent Interactive. She blogs at Coherent Social Media. The other week, I was participating in Jay’s hashtagsocialmedia.com chat on social media. (It takes place every Tuesday at noon EST.) The exchange is below: @jaybaer #sm107 BONUS Q4. How important is speed of response on Twitter? And [...]

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Why Social Success is No Accident

If you read Convince & Convert on even an occasional basis, you know that I’m firmly in the social integration camp. You need to focus on how to “be” social as a company, and worry less about how to “do” social. This is because social touches do not occur in isolation. I’ve seen a LOT [...]

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Why Your Special Offer Isn’t

Social media and its impact on business only exists because of the larger trend of customer information and consequent choice making. 15 years ago, most of us didn’t care so very much about where our meat came from, or which rental car company we used, or what type of permanent marker we wrote with – [...]

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Why Social CRM Needs to Be Less About the Social and More About the Customers

Today’s guest post is by Kevin Troy Darling, Social Media Program Manager at iLinc Web Conferencing, who has been writing all his life, but only marketing pays. To paraphrase Tina Turner, we don’t need another acronym. The debate on Social CRM (sCRM) could easily become a distraction. We have many good tools at our disposal [...]

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Social Listening and Analysis for the DIY Inclined

If you are conducting any level of online reputation management or campaign tracking using social media data sources, you have to get beyond the obvious. The point of tracking software isn’t to determine how many tweets were sent mentioning a company, it’s to figure out what those tweets say, and what the business ramifications are. [...]

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Is Twitter for Business Even Worth the Trouble?

We built our own Frankenstein. We are spending countless employee hours tweeting, retweeting, responding to tweets, figuring out whom to follow, secretly following celebs and athletes, and designing custom Twitter backgrounds. Nobody forced companies to get involved with their customers in this way. There was no law, edict, or pitchfork-wielding band of angry citizens. We [...]

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Why Influence Mining is the Next Gold Rush

Inherently, we understand influence. It’s in our DNA. We know that a grizzly bear has a marked impact on its surroundings, and can change behavior in ways that even the fiercest badger cannot. The tsunami of data being created, collected and parsed every second of every day now makes influence identification instantaneous, and possible from [...]

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You’re Pissed Off at the Wrong Guy

Of course it’s upsetting when a customer slams you via tweet, status message, blog comment or humorous video. But it’s not like social media created negativity, it just puts a magnifying glass to it. Do you know why you don’t get angry when customers call customer service and say all kinds of crazy, depressing stuff [...]

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Kurrently Revolutionizes Real-Time Search With Twitter + Facebook Results

The future of real-time data didn’t come from Google. Or Microsoft. Or IBM. It came from a Canadian computer sciences student who uses his free time pretty damn wisely. Kurrently is a new, free real-time search engine that combines results from Twitter and Facebook in a simple, blazing fast format. “I built Kurrently in the [...]

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