#youtility

Te has preguntado si tu marca es útil? No me refiero a que si lo que produces sirve o no sirve.

Si tu vendes algo hoy, has obtenido un cliente, pero si tu ayudaste a alguien, tendrás a un cliente de por vida. Esto es parte de lo que promociona un controvertido escritor y conferenciante, llamado Jay Baer con su libro “Youtility”.

De acuerdo a los últimos índices de confianza, y este será un tema recurrente en mis aportaciones, los consumidores ya no creen en los gobiernos (eso no es nuevo) pero tampoco creen en las empresas. Ahora, y sin pensarlo, le estamos creyendo mas a algún anónimo (o conocido cercano) que dejó la opinión en internet de algún producto o servicio. Si, ponte a pensar que la última reseña que leíste de alguna película, vino o restaurante y le hiciste caso, muy probablemente fue escrita por un desconocido.

¿Cómo pueden revertir las marcas estas “malas impresiones”? Pues uno de los puntos es cultivando nuevamente la confianza. Y cómo desarrollamos la confianza en nuestros productos y servicios? Pues tratando de serle útil a los consumidores.

Dile adiós a las comunicaciones de llame ahora, compre pronto, aproveche la oferta. Y, la próxima vez que escribas algo en las redes sociales o lances una campaña de publicidad piensa si ese mensaje es realmente útil.

New Post has been published on http://www.learn-digital-marketing.com/need-help-finding-work-see-a-bank-yes-a-bank/

Need Help Finding Work? See A Bank. Yes, A Bank.

The cornerstone of strong content marketing or even more specifically social media marketing is providing value to your audience. Talking about you almost never accomplishes that. Finding ways to talk about them is where you need to focus. However, you’ll need to be ready to face the fact that often times the value you provide may have little connection to the product or service you sell.

With this in mind, consider the case of 5/3 Bank. The Cincinnati-based financial institution recently launched a free online Job Seeker’s Toolkit for all of its customers. It’s helping its community find jobs. Certainly, if its customers have jobs and get paid, they need somewhere to put their money, so the program does make sense. But how it came about and what it entails is almost counterintuitive to how banks market.

The Genesis

Reemploy was quietly launched in January of 2012 to help 5/3 Bank’s mortgage customers experiencing unemployment gain access to resources and expertise to help them find work again. The goal was to help the mortgage customers stay in their homes, and yes, to keep making their mortgage payments. The bank engaged NextJob, a national reemployment service and matched customers with a personal job coach.

Nearly 40 percent of the participants were fully reemployed after six months. Upon considering the results, 5/3 decided to incorporate a lot of the program’s components into a free offering to its customers. The more that earn or stay employed, the more money they can deposit, save, etc.

The Core Benefit+

While serving its customers with these online tools for free makes intuitive sense, 5/3 understands that to provide value to your community, you need to provide that value to the entire community. So, at least for now, the resources are available to everyone, not just 5/3 customers.

At http://www.53.com/reemploy, anyone can access resources for employment. The Job Seeker’s Toolkit is an online job search training program that includes help writing resumes and cover letters, identifying your skills to migrate to different industries, discover jobs that were open but not advertised, get interviewing tips and tricks and more.

And employed folks can help, too. By simply retweeting the program’s message and URL, 5/3 devotes more funding to give worthy recipients one-on-one coaching and job search assistance. For every 53 retweets, it funds an additional job seeker in need.

The Youtility

My friend Jay Baer’s concept of Youtility — of giving to get, of marketing by providing value — completely hits home here. 5/3 Bank wants its customers and even prospective customers to have jobs so they have money so they will bank with them. Instead of just hocking low interest rates and no-fee checking accounts, they’re providing a service that helps keep their core audience in a place where they can do business with the bank. They are providing a Youtility all about the customer’s needs, not the bank’s.

But that’s not enough for most businesses. Feel good is great, but it doesn’t pay the bills, right? This is were the concept of confluence comes into play. The social aspects of the program drive word-of-mouth on- and off-line. The 5/3 public relations team has secured over 600 media placements to the program, most including naturally acquired, organic links back to the institution’s program and/or website. Guess what that does? Boost 5/3’s organic SEO.

What you have with the program is great branding and awareness, great word-of-mouth pass along value, great social content and sharing, great public and media relations, all resulting in increased SEO.

It’s generous. It’s great content marketing. It’s smart business.

So what do you think? How can your business tap into something that serves your audience in a relevant way but that also brings them back to your business? Figure that out and you’ve got yourself a case study.

       Related Stories

Proof It’s Not Facebook. It’s You.

The Powerful Manager and the Email Summary

New Post has been published on http://www.learn-digital-marketing.com/how-i-became-the-person-most-mentioned-by-digital-marketers-on-twitter/

How I Became the Person Most Mentioned by Digital Marketers on Twitter

A quick parenting tip:

If you want your pre-teen and teen kids to listen to you (at least temporarily) beat out Pharrell and Jimmy Fallon on an Internet list.

That happened to me – and you’re damn right I dad-milked that sucker – when it was announced last week that (among digital marketers) I am the most retweeted and most mentioned person on Twitter (PDF). In the latter rankings, I bested Mr. Fallon, Mr. Happy, and some guy named Barack Obama.

The same study concluded that this blog – the blog you are reading right now – is in the top 25 most shared information sources among digital marketers, alongside enormous websites like Mashable, TechCrunch, The Next Web, ClickZ, AdAge, etc. Wow!

I had a few immediate reactions to these announcements:

1. What was the methodology, and can this possibly be true? (Leadtail analyzed the Twitter accounts of 515 digital marketers, manager level or or above in North America, so it’s based on what people actually do, not on what they say they do.)

2. Lots of great people that I consider to be colleagues and friends were on the list(s) too, and sites I adore like Social Media Examiner, MarketingProfs, Buffer, Social Media Today, and Hubspot made the top 25 sources group as well.

3. These lists would be a lot different if they were focused on G+, Linkedin, Youtube, Pinterest, or Instagram.

4. How is Pharrell the #10 most mentioned person on Twitter among digital marketers? That guy is EVERYWHERE!

I’ve been on some lists in my day, but I never talk about them much here. I’m not a big believer in using a blog dedicated to marketing education to take a victory lap on your attention nickel.

But after I pondered it for a few minutes, gave a speech to the Marketing Association for Credit Unions in Montreal (thanks for having me), endured a flight delay and finally boarded the tiny aircraft where I am writing this post in TextEdit (no Wi-Fi), I decided to embrace this development because it gives me a chance to remember some things. Some of this may be slightly out of sequence, but I’m old and on a plane.

I Remember

I remember selling my digital agency in 2005 and planning to teach at a university when my earn out concluded in 2008.

I remember the simultaneous real estate and stock market collapses in 2008 putting that plan on indefinite hold, resulting in me starting a new consulting firm.

I remember that this consulting firm (which was a “firm” in name only, since it was just me in my house) originally being devoted to conversion rate optimization, hence the name “Convince & Convert” – which was partially chosen because the domain name was available.

I remember hiring my good friend Chris Bohnsack to create a series of logo options, and over beers at a craft brewery outside of Tucson, settling on the very distinctive one you see here.

I remember deciding that the website for this new firm would include a blog, which perplexed me since I’d only written about 3 blog posts in my life.

I remember waking up early and reading dozens of great blogs and online newsletters and trying to figure out the news of the day in social and digital, and then writing a “here’s what I think” post as fast as I could, and then going back to all of those sources and writing strong comments with links to my posts attached.

I remember the biggest traffic day on this blog over the first three months being 242 visitors.

I remember Jason Falls, who I’d never spoken to and didn’t know at all, tweeting one of my blog posts. It was the very first sign that maybe I was doing something worthwhile. I’d been blogging for several months at this point, writing four posts per week.

I remember Bailey Gardiner (now called I.D.E.A) , an agency in San Diego, becoming my very first client (and we still work with a ton of agencies every day).

I remember being on vacation in Los Angeles with my wife when Chris Brogan tweeted a post of mine for the first time. I actually cried, and printed out the tweet. The post was about Janelle Monae and used her as a metaphor for customer experience (if you’d like to cringe at how much I sucked then, click away).

I remember shortly thereafter when Ann Handley (whom I’d never met) agreed to let me speak at MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer in Scottsdale due to the urgings of my friend Stephanie Miller, who curated the email track. In those days, I still mostly wrote about email, as that was one of our major points of focus in my previous agency.

I remember writing a “Guide to Enjoying the MarketingPros Digital Marketing Mixer” based on my insider’s knowledge of the area (the conference was not far from where I was living at the time) and being overjoyed when Ann shared it with all conference attendees ahead of time, giving me a dose of name recognition.

I remember enjoying the email part of the event, but being enthralled by the people and the topics in the social media portion.

I remember meeting Chris Brogan for the first time. Mythical. And CC Chapman. And of course, Ann. I remember meeting Amber Naslund for the first time, and can picture so clearly in my head her and Chris sitting alone on a couch by the elevators late at night, and thinking “those are people with whom I want to spend time”.

I remember meeting Gary Vaynerchuk, who was just hitting his stride with his video wine blog (which taught me a ton about wine), and playing poker in the casino next to the conference with Gary and my pal Jeff Rohrs from ExactTarget (a long-time friend and now the co-host of Social Pros).

I remember my idea to start interviewing people live on Twitter, which had never been done before, Joseph Jaffe being the first guest in the long-running Twitter20 series of live twitter chats and blog posts, which helped put me on the map among social media thought leaders.

I remember – vividly – hiring Jess Ostroff to be my virtual assistant based on a tweet for help. Jess had been my intern for a summer when we both lived in Phoenix. She’s been with me ever since, is the managing editor of a blog that is a top 25 information source for our target audience. Congratulations Jess!

I remember going to SXSW for the first time the next spring and hanging out with Mack Collier, and meeting Jason Falls in person, and seeing Patrick O’Keefe talk about his book, and meeting Shawn Morton and David Armano and Richard Binhammer and so many other people who are truly brilliant and kind and caring and supportive.

I remember debuting my bottle opener business cards at that event – a trademark to this day.

I remember being a Mixologist at a MarketingProfs B2B event with Stephanie Miller and Beth Harte and Michael Brito, and that opportunity starting to position me as something other than an attendee and occasional speaker.

I remember my old friend and colleague Chris Sietsema joining C&C to help provide exceptional consulting to clients (and he’s a senior strategist with us today)

I remember Scott Stratten recommending to Shannon Vargo at Wiley that I would be a good person to publish a book.

I remember being 100% positive that I wanted to write a book with only one other person in the world, Amber Naslund.

I remember spending a marathon outline session with Amber at my old agency offices in Arizona, surrounded by giant Post-its with ideas for “Taming the Waterfall” which was eventually renamed “The NOW Revolution”

I remember being introduced to Tom Webster through Amber, who interviewed him for the book. This sparked a friendship that gives me great joy on a regular basis.

I remember Jason Amunwa (formerly of Bailey Gardiner) building a great website for The NOW Revolution for us.

I remember hitting the road and doing 25 or so speaking gigs about TNR in exchange for bulk book buys, the first time I’d ever done speaking in any real concentration.

I remember thinking: I really like being a consultant, but you certainly get more applause as a speaker.

I remember doing a 10-minute version of the TNR presentation to a packed house at the ExactTarget Connections conference, and the reaction being extraordinary.

I remember Mike Stelzner asking me to guest post for Social Media Examiner, and supporting me time after time with slots on his virtual summits, and keynote gigs in both of his extraordinary Social Media Marketing World events.

I remember bringing to the C&C team my former client Daniel Lemin, an ex-Googler who is a senior strategist here and is a brilliant and amazing guy.

I remember moving from Arizona to Indiana (here’s why), and driving across country with two kids, a dog, a cat, a snake, a lizard, and 12 cases of wine. I remember my friends and family thinking we were crazy.

I remember Joe Pulizzi from Content Marketing Institute asking me to put together an 8-minute “burst” session for the first Content Marketing World event, and coming up with a them of “useful marketing”

I remember standing in the shower when the word “youtility” popped into my head.

I remember Jason Keath inviting me to speak at many of his highly-curated Social Fresh events, and now I am a co-host and a big believer in his vision of intimate, thoughtful marketing conferences.

I remember changing my name from Jason to Jay because there were already so many Jasons in social media, and my Twitter handle was @JayBaer. It took 18 months to fully make the shift, and now when people from my Arizona days call me Jason, it sounds weird.

I remember working with Jess on a new editorial calendar for the blog, where I would write only one or so posts per week, with a rotating cast of guest writers, in an effort to turn this from a blog to more of a digital marketing magazine.

I remember a year later realizing – somewhat sheepishly – that the less I write, the more traffic we get.

I remember my little brother suddenly dying, and canceling my new book (which was going to be called Surprise Marketing)

I remember Eric Boggs from Argyle Social asking if I’d ever thought about doing a podcast, and us starting Social Pros together, basically on a lark.

I remember reaction to my first-ever Youtility full-length presentation (at BlogIndiana, now called MixWest) being so strong that I decided it could be a book, and getting back on track with a new book project.

I remember my dear friend Lisa Loeffler coming to the C&C team to handle publicity and events and special projects. She is indispensible.

I remember Julien Smith helping me figure out how to take Youtility to the next level, and connecting me with my agent Jim Levine, who got me a swell book deal from Portfolio.

I remember my old friend Kim Corak joining the C&C team to head up special projects, which at the time consisted mostly of helping with Youtility research and eventually, book promotion. Kim is remarkable, and now heads our biz dev efforts.

I remember my pal Zena Weist (long-time Social Pros co-host) recommending ex-Edelman Digital smartie Megan Gilbert as a possible addition to the C&C team. Thank goodness. Megan is incredible and we (and our clients) are so lucky to have her skills and attitude around us.

I remember so many professional speakers like David Newman, Sally Hogshead, Rory Vaden and Mark Sanborn mentoring me and showing me the ins and outs of the business side of speaking. They continue helping me day after day, and put up with my constant questions.

I remember asking my friends on Facebook for help with the Youtility cover design, and being blown away by the smart feedback, especially from Billy Mitchell (whom I met through the extraordinary Mark Schaefer) who came up with the “why smart marketing is about help not hype” subtitle.

I remember putting together such a “we’re all in” marketing plan for the book launch that Portfolio’s marketing team said “we’ve had a lot of authors try a lot of things, but we’ve never had an author try everything.”

I remember spending hours and hours and hours emailing individually to just about everyone I’d ever known, asking them to pre-order the book (a technique I learned from Gary Vaynerchuk). I was so incredibly touched and honored by the response. Just unbelievable.

I remember getting the email that Youtility was a New York Times best-seller, and staring at the rankings on their website for many minutes.

I remember being on vacation at the time, and trying to find a printed Sunday New York Times in tiny Show Low, Arizona being more difficult than I’d imagined.

I remember subscribing to the Sunday New York Times shortly thereafter.

I remember my old friend (from our email days) DJ Waldow recommending to me the digital marketing genius Zontee Hou. Zontee has been an extraordinary addition to the C&C team, working with corporate and agency clients.

I remember all three of our annual Convince & Convert company retreats and thinking every time how lucky I am to have a team that I would do anything for, and a group that has had zero percent turnover, ever.

I remember emceeing the IBM Smarter Commerce event recently, and interviewing Ron Howard on stage in front of 5,000 people and thinking “don’t screw this up.”

I remember each of these circumstances, but more importantly these people, and what they’ve done for me (plus the many, many others that I didn’t include here, as this post could have been 15,000 words, easy).

It’s You, not Me

Chris Brogan did an amazing video years ago talking about it taking 10 years to become an overnight sensation. He’s right of course, but I remember it a little bit differently. I remember the hundreds of people who guided me, supported me, cajoled me, believed in me, helped me and gave me their time, attention, expertise, loyalty, friendship and love. I am equal parts fortunate and grateful. Each of them – and all of you who choose to read this blog or my tweets, or listen to my podcast or whatever – are trusting me to add value. That’s not my right. I haven’t “earned it.” I haven’t “paid my dues.” It’s a gift. And I try to never take it for granted.

PART I: Turning Marketing Upside Down

Chapter 1: Top-of-Mind Awareness

Key Points:

As a marketing strategy, top-of-mind awareness is less effective than ever:

The media landscape is highly fractured.

Companies are fundamentally distrusted by customers.

Trust has a huge impact on marketing success.

Key Data:

Business are only trusted by 58% of global consumers.

When a company is distrusted, 57% of people will believe negative information about it after hearing it just one or two times.

Chapter 2: Frame-of-Mind Awareness

Key Points:

Being found doesn’t create demand, it can only fulfill it.

Search engines’ role in the website discovery funnel is weakening.

Key Data:

Search engines were used by 83% of consumers to find websites pre-purchase in 2004. In 2012, it has 61%.

More than 30% of American social media users say social media has driven them to make a purchase.

Chapter 3: Friend-of-Mind Awareness

Key Points:

Today, companies must compete for attention against consumers’ friends and family members.

If your company and its marketing are truly, inherently useful, your customers and prospective customers will keep you close, as they keep their friends and family members close.

Making your company useful without expectation of an immediate return is in direct opposition to the longstanding principles of successful marketing, and that’s a good thing.

PART II: The Three Facets of Youtility

Chapter 4: Self-Serve Information

Key Points:

We’ve always tried to build loyalty with people, and now we must build loyalty with information.

If your company isn’t trying to win the zero moment of truth, you’re losing customers you didn’t even know you had a chance to get.

Always-on Internet access has made us all passive-aggressive.

Dearth of the salesmen: we now talk to a real person as a last resort, not as a first step.

Key Data:

In 2010, shoppers needed 5.3 sources of information before making a purchase decision. In 2011, shoppers needed 10.4 pieces of information before making a purchase decision.

From 2009 to 2011, American females’ use of voice minutes on mobile phones decreased by 12 percent. During the same period their text messages sent and received increased by 35 percent.

In B2B, customers will contact a sales rep only after independently completing 60 percent of the purchasing-decision process.

Chapter 5: Radical Transparency

Key Points:

Creating customers by answering their questions is imminently viable and carries remarkable, persuasive power.

Unless it inhibits ease-of-use, there is no downside to providing extraordinarily detailed information to your prospective customers.

It doesn’t matter whether anyone in your industry is providing self-serve information—big companies are, and they’re training all consumers to expect it.

Key Data:

Companies with websites with 101 to 200 pages generate two-and-half times more leads than companies with 50 or fewer pages.

Companies that blog fifteen or more times per month get five times more traffic than those that don’t blog.

Chapter 6: Real-Time Relevancy

Key Points:

Youtility is real-time relationship building. You’re either sufficiently useful at any given moment, and thus can connect with the customer, or you’re not.

For decades, the key question has been “how valuable is the brand?” The key question moving forward is “how valuable are you apps?”

Within a generation every customer in every developed nation will have never known a world without the ability to access information at any time through a mobile device.

Key Data:

By 2014 there will be more mobile Internet users than desktop Internet users.

Forty-five percent of American social media users research products or brands on a smartphone multiple times a week.

There are 2.9 billion mobile subscriptions in Asia and the Pacific, compared to 969 million in the Americas.

Part 3: Six Blueprints to Create Youtility

Chapter 7: Identify Customer Needs

Key Points:

You have to understand what your prospective customers need to make better decisions, and how you can improve their lives by providing it.

Search engines, social chatter, and web analytics data will help you understand customer needs.

The best way to understand customer needs is to ask real customers.

Chapter 8: Map Customer Needs to Useful Marketing

Key Points:

Determining which is the optimal conveyance for Youtility requires a level of research beyond understanding customer needs.

You have to understand not just what you customers need, but how and where they prefer to access information.

Atomize your marketing to reach a larger audience.

Chapter 9: Market Your Marketing

Key Points:

People are not going to magically find your Youtility, you have to add promotional support.

Content is fire, and social media is gasoline.

Use social media to promote your useful information first, and your company second.

Your employees are your most important—and most over-looked—audience.

Chapter 10: Insource Youtility

Key Points:

Everything important in business starts as a job, and eventually becomes a skill.

Being useful must be part of your company DNA.

Involving a wide variety of employees not only makes it easier to create and maintain helpful information, it also increases effectiveness because they bring credibility that centralized, official communication doesn’t have.

There are four types of Youtility insourcing:

Circumstantial insourcing

Voluntary insourcing

Assisted insourcing

Mandatory insourcing

Key Data:

Company experts are trusted by 66 percent of people; regular employees are trusted by 50 percent; and CEOs are trusted by 38 percent.

Chapter 11: make Youtility a process, Not a Project

Key Points:

Youtility requires a never-ending, constantly reinvented and refined process.

There are three reasons this must be an ongoing program:

Customer needs change;

Technology shifts;

New and better ideas are conceived.

You can’t schedule greatness, and it doesn’t respond well to deadlines and ultimatums.

Chapter 12: Keeping Score

Key Points:

If Youtility is going to be more than a marginalized novelty for you and your company, it must be measured effectively.

There are four categories of measurement that matter:

Consumption metrics

Advocacy and Sharing metrics

Lead-generation metrics

Sales metrics

Return on Investment is absolutely calculable for many types of Youtility. Where it isn’t, consider correlation analysis.

Taken from: "Youtility"