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

The 2 Most Important Words in Marketing are What If

In this edition of The Baer Facts, I talk with Kyle Lacy of ExactTarget about the recent spate of real-time social media incidents, including the Poland Springs Water zeitgeist moment and the hack of Burger King’s twitter account. Crisis = Danger + Opportunity It’s widely believed (although perhaps inaccurately) that the Chinese symbol for “crisis” [...]

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How to Mitigate Social Media Disasters

This week on the Social Pros Podcast, Jay Baer and Eric Boggs take over when the scheduled guest has to cancel last minute so she can address a social media crisis in her own company. They discuss crisis management and mitigating disasters in social media with several fascinating case studies. Read on for some of the [...]

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5 Reputation Management Lessons from Prince, Dell and Beyond

Difficulties arise. Mistakes happen. Reputations become tarnished — this is the way of the world, particularly when an error occurs after a company brand achieves a leadership position or a human being becomes famous. As we’ve seen time and time again, when a problem is avoided or “hushed up,” the blemish becomes more pronounced. But [...]

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Corporate Twitter Account Train Wreck! The 3 Types of Self-Destructive Tweets

Twit happens. As more and more companies ramp up their Twitter presence, the likelihood that something off-message will slip by the digital goalie goes up considerably. The question is not whether your company will have to deal with self-destructive corporate Tweets, but what kind of tweet it will be, and by whom. There are 3 [...]

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Panic in the Aisles – Airborne Social Media Lessons

I was on a flight home from Kansas City last week when a bit of condensation apparently emitted from the air conditioning as we were preparing for take-off. A passenger shouted “there’s smoke in the plane” followed by a second passenger, then a third, etc. The flight attendants were a bit stunned and immediately got [...]

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Who’s Watching Now?

Social media doesn’t close at 5pm. Or take weekends off. Or go on vacation. I’ve been watching today’s very successful Labor Day-only Chick-Fil-A promotion. If you wear any sort of sports team shirt or hat to a Chick-Fil-A today, you get a free sandwich, driving awareness of the company’s Chicken Wave fan group and contest. [...]

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Why You Never Had Control

Do you have control issues? Even now, with social media being hotter than the brow of a teppanyaki chef, companies of all sizes and descriptions are still using “loss of control” as a reason to not get involved. Sure, there’s a possibility that your brand will have to use your social media crisis plan eventually. [...]

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A Social Media Gun to the Head

I’ll admit it. I fish on Twitter. Sometimes, I’ll talk about a brand just to see if they’re listening. Too often, they’re not. Or, maybe they’re listening, but not responding. Some companies seem to have a policy of responding to positive comments, but not responding to negative comments. I think this falls into the “we [...]

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4 Brand-Saving Recommendations for Social Media Crisis Management

Is today your Domino’s? Social media can both create and solve crises, and the incredibly fluid nature of social conversations requires brands to be on a constant state of readiness. In April, two Domino’s employees created a foolish and disgusting video, and posted it to YouTube, setting off a firestorm of coverage on Twitter. It [...]

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