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

Why Social Media Has Ruined Your Advantage

Yesterday, I wrote about real-time information and the death of news cycles. This of course creates considerable challenges for business, which typically is not yet architected for real-time communication (at least not in public). Speed matters. Requiring someone to pull off to the side in your drive-thru lane like a vehicular leper because you didn’t [...]

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It’s About Response, Not Engagement

Guest post by Jeff Molander, Author of the new book, Off the Hook Marketing: How to Make Social Media Sell for You and adjunct professor, Loyola University Business School. He blogs at http://www.makesocialsell.com/blog/. We’re all listening, engaging, sharing, posting, updating. But with what business outcome in mind? When we say engagement, might we really mean [...]

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Social Media Lessons From the Offline Real World

An interesting report released from Pew Internet Research about the use of location-based services among adults found that only 28% of American adult cell phone owners use services such as maps or recommendations based on their location. In addition, 4% of all American adults use check-in apps such as Foursquare and Gowalla. Conversely, in the social [...]

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Social Media Success is About the Wizard, Not the Wand

Thoughtful research genius Tom Webster wrote an interesting post a couple weeks ago about where the location-based business could head, moving beyond the momentary check-in toward more nuanced and relevant customer interactions, using location data as the raw materials. His example was his local watering hole, where he figures by the time he’s checked in [...]

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Why Critics of Klout Are Missing the Big Picture

Other than signing book deals, the favorite sport of the social media punditry these days seems to be bashing Klout. The pugilists are plentiful, and appear to be trying to win a merit badge for dismissiveness. The most recent example was from B2B social media thinker Paul Gillin who wrote a post unveiling the flaws [...]

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New Research Finds the Curation vs Creation Sweet Spot

Whether you’re on a first date, meeting new people at a dinner party, or making it rain on Twitter, it’s just not a good idea to go on and on about yourself. It’s just awkward. Conventional social media marketing wisdom suggests that brands should avoid being overly self-promotional. Thus, brands seek to “be a part [...]

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Nobody Said Social Media Should Be Simple

Simple isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Social media is unique in that it is the only medium yet conceived where companies are playing in the exact same sandbox as we’re playing personally. Your employees and customers aren’t making TV ads on the weekend. Nor are they making their own magazine ads for fun [...]

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Accelerate the Convergence of Social, Search, and Content

This is my video interview with Arnie Kuenn about his excellent new book Accelerate. It’s a playbook for integrating your social media, search, and content marketing. I wrote the forward for the book. Video production, editing, titling by my friends at Candidio. If you need your raw video footage tidied up good, fast, reasonably priced, [...]

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5 Reasons Social Media Measurement is Making You Lie to Yourself

Social media measurement causes unsavory (and ineffective) marketing behavior because unlike the rest of our marketing key performance indicators, social media metrics are out there for anyone to see. Was it a surprise last week when Presidential wannabe Newt Gingrich was (allegedly) busted for having 1.3 million followers on Twitter, most of which were bots [...]

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