Gary Vaynerchuk's Blog, page 53

How the Real Estate Industry Can Use Snapchat and Facebook Live Video For Sales

After Crush It! and Thank You Economy were released, I realized that a lot of the readers who were drawn to my advice happened to be in the real estate business. Which, if you think about it, makes perfect sense–to be good in real estate, you have to have great entrepreneurial tendencies. It’s no wonder why I’ve always had a bit of kinship towards that industry.

Back in 2011, I even did a big keynote speech at the Re/Max annual convention to over 40,000 people. Real estate has always been a hot topic and I continue to get a lot of questions on how realtors can leverage social media for their businesses.

My favorite concept in real estate is owning the story around a home and the city or town around it. Where social media comes into play is that you can easily craft daily content about a home and the 10-20 mile radius around the area where you plan to sell property. If you want to win on social, you should also be putting out content to make potential buyers romantic about the local amenities since people often pick where to live based on utility (ie. convenience, commute time, school districts).

So, here are some tactics you can use on two platforms that I can see gaining popularity in the real estate industry. Realtors can use these tips to bring value to their audience and produce real results (aka, actually lead to housing sales and rentals).

Snapchat

I’ve hyperbolized around Snapchat for so long and it is so obvious to me where the market is headed. If you know me at all, you know where I stand on it: it’s a platform that people use with intent. Because the content disappears, you can be sure that users are really paying attention to what’s happening on their screens.

But, the value of the platform that most real estate people are overlooking is the emerging 30 to 45 year old demo on Snapchat. In the next 2-3 years, Snapchat will skew much older and age much like Facebook has. There’s a lot of value in being a first mover on the platform.

Just as interesting is Snapchat’s growth among the elite top earners within the 30 to 45 year-old demo, especially on the coasts. (It is very obvious to me that Snapchat has the attention of my “rich” friends right now.)

The one arbitrage tactic that is still available (and I think is grossly underpriced right now) is custom geofilters. For example, I think it would be incredible for a real estate agent to buy filters on top of all the hottest restaurants in Soho with some clever creative and copy. You want to take advantage of the fact that if they are out in the area, they probably like the neighborhood. For the cool, affluent 36-year old who can afford a 3 million dollar apartment in Soho, a real estate agent who is smart enough to create a filter on Snapchat is exactly the person who is going to win that business.

One of the great things about Snapchat is that the platform makes it very easy to create content. It doesn’t have to be “polished.” Because of the low barrier to entry, you don’t need a high-tech camera or to be blessed with amazing photography or video skills.

For example, you can easily produce content around the neighborhoods where you have listings and showing the actual properties won’t take up much time. You can do quick reviews of the nearby restaurants, schools, the back porch, the patio, the pool, or anything relevant that adds value to the consumer. Think about it: It’s a one person show that you can do without a production company and it doesn’t require the high skill cap and resources that are often needed for other platforms like YouTube. For the average real estate agent, Snapchat content is quite scalable. All you need is your phone and insights on what people are interested in.

Facebook Live Video

Now, you also know my stance on Facebook advertising. It’s an incredible platform that allows you to overlay a ton of rich targeting layers like age, location, recent life events, and interests. However, that’s not all that Facebook can offer. There’s a big opportunity to use Facebook Live, Facebook’s native live streaming product.

Live streaming is hot right now and with Facebook Live’s growing popularity, it’s definitely something realtors should move on. Feel lost on how you can use Facebook Live? Think about the ability to create a virtual open house at scale on Facebook–a platform where many real estate agents already have a foothold for potential buyers.

I can envision a hotshot real estate agent streaming live from an open house while talking to potential clients. Potential buyers will be able to view the house remotely and ask relevant questions that the realtor can respond to and show in real time. Think about all the house-showcasing programs that took television by storm in the late 90s and into the 2000s. It’s MTV cribs made even more compelling with live streaming.

Using Facebook to do live, virtual open houses is going to be a monumental move. I expect multiple people to email me over the next 24 months to say they sold a house to someone who was watching on Facebook instead of going to a traditional viewing.

Using Facebook to do live, virtual open houses is going to be a monumental move.

A lot of realtors are not using social to their full advantage. A lot of you lack the desire to adjust and innovate with the new tools at hand. You can’t be romantic about using the same methods to make a sale based on the industry standard. While you might be mapping to your demo now, we are 24 to 30 months away from Snapchat and live streaming platforms becoming the mainstream for the 30–45-year-old demo. So, I challenge you to start experimenting with these platforms to bring value and make that sale.

The Ambition of a Human Based Company

About a year ago, when James Orsini joined VaynerMedia as our Chief Integration Officer (CIO), he was amazed at how low our voluntary turnover rate was. “What are we doing?” he asked me. My response? “We are an HR-driven organization.”

VaynerMedia is a private company, which means that I don’t have Wall Street breathing down my neck (so all my decisions don’t have to map out to 90-day profit behaviors). So, to build the company, I have to use the number one asset that I have: people and the relationships I have with them. In the past 7 years, VaynerMedia has grown from 20 employees to more than 600 across five different offices around the world. During that timespan, preserving company culture has always been the number one priority for me.

I truly believe that the continuity of a great team trumps everything. It’s just like in sports—a team that has been playing together for a long time usually beats a group of superstars that came together for just a season. And that’s what I aspire to build at VaynerMedia, a team that’s built to win for decades based on the continuity they have with one another.

Despite the movies and the media portrayals, having endless snacks and espresso bars aren’t what creates great corporate culture. You don’t get to claim that you have great culture just because you have an unlimited vacation day policy or an open floor plan.

Company culture stems from the top. That’s why I like to say that I am an HR-driven CEO—I am the head of HR as much as I am the CEO of VaynerMedia. It’s the best way I can communicate how strongly I care about my employees and how much I believe that a strong internal culture is the key to a company’s success.

I’m an HR-driven CEO—I am my company’s head of HR as much as I am its CEO.

Caring about your employees doesn’t just mean providing them with health benefits or 401(k) plans. When I say “I care about my employees,” I really mean it. I’m passionate about knowing each and every one of them as individuals.

The problem with a lot of companies is that HR comes second to their bottom line. Not only is it not a priority, but most companies act as if their employees all have the same driving motivations for working there: to make a paycheck and receive benefits.

But here’s the thing: You can’t put everybody in the same box—everyone is driven by different goals and aspirations. I recognize that my team of more than 600 people is driven by 600+ individuals who each have their own specific wants and needs. For example, I understand that some of my younger employees are motivated by money. I understand that others want a great work-life balance. I understand that the needs might be different for someone who just moved to New York versus someone who wants to start settling down. I care about what they care about. Why? Because life’s a value exchange—when you care about your employees, it translates into value they can give back to your company.

So, how do you find out what motivates your employees? The same way you start any relationship: trust. And you gain that trust by interacting with your employees and acknowledging them as individuals. These interactions can be as small as a wink in the hallway or a wave as you walk past the conference room they’re in.

It’s what I like to call the “Rickey Henderson Effect.” Back in 1985, I was 10 years old and went to my first baseball game. At the end of an inning, Rickey Henderson caught a fly ball and, as he ran into the dugout, he looked up at me and winked. It took Rickey a hundredth of a second to acknowledge me, but for the next five years of my life, I was his biggest fan. I bought everything “Rickey Henderson.”

Efforts like Rickey’s wink have enormous ROI. Although my schedule is jam-packed, I still make it a point to sit down with every new hire at VaynerMedia within the first few months of them joining us. Even though it’s only 5 minutes, it gives us a chance to do two things: (1) they get to know me and ask the questions they want to ask and (2) it gives me the context of who they are and what I can do for them to reach their professional or personal goals.

The beauty of this interaction is that this is just the beginning of our relationship. Here’s the thing: a 5-minute, one-on-one conversation about the town they grew up in or their favorite sports team can lead to saying “Hi” in the elevator or the hallway. That can then lead to a productive conversation 6 months down the road when they’re struggling, but are comfortable enough to come and talk to me about it. It’s amazing how a little bit of communication can lead to trust.

It’s important to note that the wink or a “hello” is not a tactic. I’m not doing it because I know it works; I’m doing it because I mean it. It’s me using a gesture to make someone feel a bit more comfortable, so that when the need arises, they’ll come to me with whatever’s bothering them.

Never underestimate what great company culture can do. You may think that awesome projects and accolades come from hard work or the right combination of people on a team. All of those things are part of it—of course. But, when it comes down to it, you need to make sure that each employee is happy with where they are. When you help make your employees happy, it gives them a reason to be excited to be a part of your company.

Earlier last week, I had a big meeting with my senior leadership team and I told them: “Your title is HR ‘comma,’ whatever your actual title is.” When you’re in a leadership position, whether you’re the CEO or a senior account executive, you need to understand that you’re not just the “head of this or head of that.” You’re a Gary or an Emily or a Rickey. The problem is that too many leaders out there think that their work talent justifies being disrespectful to their employees. Just because you have hard skills doesn’t buy you the right to be an asshole. If you do that, you’re not winning the complete game. Hard skill is only part of the equation. What you have to be is human. You need to be accessible and open to anyone around you. Remember: Culture stems from the top.

Even with my senior leadership team helping to scale my emotional quotient (EQ), I’m always trying to move the needle on making myself more accessible to my employees. If you’re the CEO or a leader in a company, I challenge you to come up with two or three HR-driven goals every year. It’s a thought shift in making KPIs around people’s longevity, health, and happiness instead of just your profit margins.

I truly believe that the future of HR is that it becomes more one-on-one. If you give a crap about each of your employees, you can cultivate the right culture that leads to team continuity and, as a result, a strong company. That’s what I aim to do here at VaynerMedia. I want to build the best human empire in the history of time.

I want to build the best human empire in the history of time.

PS: As of the writing of this, it’s my firm belief that only 100-150 employees of VaynerMedia’s 600+ have legitimately bought into what you just read above. Only about 100 of them feel comfortable enough to come to me directly with their problems with other individuals or shortcomings within the organization. Another 400 are intrigued and want to buy in, but are cynical because what we’re trying to achieve is difficult and, very honestly, has rarely happened in the business world over the last 70 years. The rest just aren’t there yet.

The reason I want to add this context is because a year ago, only 20-35 of VaynerMedia employees believed our HR-driven strategy. I’m proud to say that we have made tremendous progress. But, even though this has been at the forefront of my ambitions and is something I try and over-communicate with my employees, the numbers are still not where I want them to be. They’re not even close.

If anyone could create an environment where people were comfortable enough to approach the CEO with their internal issues, you’d think that it would be me. I’m a charismatic and outgoing character who goes out of his way to get to know his employees. However, I’m not that naive—I know that as the CEO I have a lot on my plate and I still haven’t been able to crack this nut.

At the beginning of April, I created the Chief Heart Officer (CHO) position at VaynerMedia—the second-most important position at my company (aside from CEO). It’s my next step in scaling my goal of having everyone believe in this strategy. I know Claude Silver, our CHO, fully believes in it and I’m excited to have her on board.

But, I know that it’s going to take a lot of hard work and it’s why I wrote this article. Here’s the thing: If I, someone who’s a great communicator and 100% in control of the situation as the CEO, have a large number of employees who still need convincing, I can’t even imagine what is happening elsewhere in the business world.

In this episode of my show DailyVee, I give a glimpse into the religion of building a business that puts its people first, because it understands that it’s all it has.

Kobe Bryant’s Legacy, Messenger Chatbots & Snail Mail | #AskGaryVee Episode 199

On this episode we talk “guide life” with a very special guest!

Questions Answered on This Episode

7:03 – Do you think big brands should sell directly to consumer?
13:40 – The average amount of email someone gets is 147 per day. The average pieces of mail, 4 per day. Is it time to get back in the mailbox?
19:03 – Do you see bots becoming big in the next 24 months? Microsoft and Facebook are heavily investing. Will bots become a tier 1 inbound channel?
22:27 – Kobe Bryant score 60 in his last Lakers game! What can we learn about business from Kobe? Thoughts on his legacy?

Guest List

Brad Grossman (bradgro)
India’s Mom

Resources from This Episode

To purchase Brad Grossman’s Zeitguide please visit zeitguide.com

For a discount, use coupon code: #ASKGARYVEE

$17.99 for digital version

$35.98 for print version

Question of the Day

26:53 – With all these innovations and disruptions, if you had to think of the perfect job you’d want to have in the near future or in the longterm, what do you think it should be? What do you want to be now and what do you think you’ll want to be in the future?

The Only Snapchat Hack You Need for Marketing

It’s no question that in the last 6 months, I’ve been hot on Snapchat. And, in those six months, I’ve been getting a ton of questions asking me what the best Snapchat hacks, tricks, and tips are to dominate the platform.

When people ask me, “Should I put a filter? Does it need to be black and white? Should it show the weather? Should I fast forward? Should I face swap?” All those things are tactics—the techniques that will help you make the best content possible. And yeah, I can give you some hacks for those tactics, but those aren’t the right questions to be asking.

What you should be asking is about the religion of your strategy: What do you want most to happen? Who do you need to speak to in order to make that happen? How is your audience likely to react?

The biggest truth and the best “hack” is when you can speak to the religion of what your tactics are trying to accomplish—the big picture of what you want to make happen.

When you are able to understand what you want the outcome to be, you can then figure out who you need to be speaking to. Only then can you reverse engineer what you need to produce in order for them to get excited. Once you do that, you have the audacity to question what tactics you need to get there.

For example, let’s say you are a local high school and you want to sell tickets to the spring play. You should then produce content for the parents and the students in that school district that both drives awareness and also promotes calls-to-action. Engaging Snapchat Stories, stunning Instagram photos, and Facebook advertising will get you there, but you have to be able to reverse engineer what you want to happen: getting people interested to attend your high school play.

Marketing is all about religion, not tactics.

It’s not about using a custom geofilter or what’s the best length for a Snapchat video. It’s an enormous mental shift about believing in what you do and understanding how to do it. Because, once you believe in what you’re trying to accomplish and you understand what the north star is, it gives you the ability to decide which tactics are right for you and your brand. You can be as tactical as you want, but you need to understand your marketing purpose first. It’s what separates salespeople from brand marketers. Salespeople utilize tactics, brand marketers believe in the religion.

The Top Apps I’m Paying Attention To Right Now

I often get asked what the next big app or social media platform will look like. The truth is, I don’t predict. I’m a counterpuncher—I react. While I don’t know the 2 girls at UCLA creating the “next big thing,” what I can tell you is that I’m always keeping tabs on the current tech landscape at all times.I do this by watching people’s behavior at scale on social media and trusting my intuition.

For example, when Vine popped, I looked at everything people were doing with the platform and started playing with it. I even told my company to stop whatever they were working on to download the app and learn how to use it. I wanted everyone to know as much as they could about it because my gut told me it was going to be hot.

What I’m actually doing is investing in things that I know will win in the marketplace, but haven’t hit their tipping point yet. Here are the 5 platforms I am paying close attention to right now from a marketer’s perspective:

Anchor

Anchor has a lot of potential to become “voice Twitter.” It’s a great play for podcasters.

Anchor is an app that allows you to record and share soundbites—what they call waves—of yourself talking. I have been obsessed with the idea of “audio Twitter” for a long time. It’s an app I have always wanted because I am fascinated with the context your voice can create. Speech is one of the main ways we communicate and it is why podcasting has re-emerged as a popular medium. The product is incredible and has the potential to become a very important platform.

Where Anchor is strong is that it feels very native and very easy to produce and reply. It can be used as a podcast play for a lot of people. I think it’s a great tool to create 2 minute promos as a gateway drug to actual podcasts.

However, Anchor’s vulnerability is that it takes too much time to create and listen to content. Since time is the number one asset, that issue is what concerns me most. But, the truth is that I have not seen an app that does a better job in making spoken content as seamless and frictionless as possible. That’s why I’m keeping a very close eye on it, but it’s too early to make a call either way.

Musical.ly

If you are following what’s happening with 7 to 13 year olds in America, Musical.ly is growing enormously in popularity.

If you follow me at all, I am always talking about checking out the App Store’s top free apps. As of posting this, Musical.ly is number 18, which is ahead of Soundcloud, Twitter, Kik, Yelp, Reddit, Pinterest, and the Amazon app.

Musical.ly is an app that allows you to make short videos of yourself lip syncing to popular music.

If you are following what’s happening with 7 to 13 year olds in America, this app is growing enormously in popularity. I recently had two Musical.ly influencers on The #AskGaryVee Show to demonstrate the massive reach Musical.ly has over younger demographics. It is the only platform that has a chance to become the next Snapchat—a very powerful statement.

Peach

Peach uses “magic words” to generate content. Think Twitter plus Slack.

If you haven’t heard of Peach, it’s a messaging app that allows users to post status updates, images, gifs, and drawings. It uses “magic words”—keywords that allow you to post geolocations, what song you’re listening to, or even a random photo from your phone’s camera roll. Think Twitter plus Slack.

My interest in Peach is based on the pedigree of Dom Hofmann, one of the creators of Vine. I am a very big fan of Dom’s point of view on product, so I am betting on the jockey more than Peach the app. I still don’t have a good read on how it fits into the market, but I’m excited to see it evolve. I’ll be keeping my eye on it.

After School

After School reminds me a lot of how Facebook grew out of a college-only social network.

After School provides an anonymous and private message board to high school students.

I should disclose that I am an investor in After School. However, I invested in a very different product that has evolved into this current product. Not only am I watching because of my investment, but my interest also stems from its potential similarity to old Facebook. After School is a high school only social network that requires a school ID to sign up. This reminds me a lot of how Facebook grew out of a college only social network. It’s not so much that I am infatuated with After School yet, because there is still a lot of work to do, but I am interested in whether a social network only for high school kids can grow the same way Facebook did. I am so bullish on this concept that I predict, over the next decade, an app that grows out of a high school only app will become one of the main social networks of our time.

MiiTomo

MiiTomo is Nintendo’s first social mobile app where you create a “virtual you.”

MiiTomo is Nintendo’s first social mobile app. You start by creating a Mii—a virtual “you”—that you use as an interface to answer questions with friends. You can also make quote cards with your Miis and post them on other platforms.

I have little to say since I don’t have a great grasp on this app yet since it’s so new. I’m watching, but it’s still very early. However, I do find it interesting that MiiTomo was released right after I complained about Nintendo not playing in the mobile space. Obviously, they had been working on it long before I said this, but the timing seems serendipitous and I’m excited to dig further.

The Rest of my Watch List

I have also got a quarter of an eye on some things that are more mature that with a tweak or two could be much bigger. These platforms are one feature away from changing their outcome. I will be watching to see if they will take the next step in the evolution of their growth.

Kik—It’s a beast of a platform for communications for the 13 to 25 year old set, but never seems to get much attention.
Soundcloud—It’s currently what I think is the leader in audio and music. I’m always kind of fascinated by it, but they haven’t taken that next leap yet. I’m rooting for Soundcloud because I really like the team behind it.
Wattpad—This app has been doing extremely well with long-form content, particularly popular with teenage girls.
WeChat—It’s a dominant player in Asia and I’m curious to see if it’ll become a dominant player in the US.

PS: As a side note, truthfully, apps on my watch list have very rarely changed from “watch” to “buy.” Why? Because historically, there have only been a couple of things worth buying into: Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat. Remember, the market decides and only a handful of them survive the test of time.

PPS: Two more apps to play with: Down to Lunch and Wishbone. These are listed under “Social Networking” and free in the app store.

Numbers Don’t Matter, Influence Does

The importance that people and brands place on follower counts or the impressions their content receives is grossly overvalued. I can’t say numbers don’t matter, but the value everyone places on these numbers needs to be reconsidered. There is just too much emphasis on the width of engagement—how many potential connections they make—rather than the depth of those interactions which, in my eyes, is far more important.

The number of impressions you have don’t always tell the full story

The entire marketing world is blinded by the notion that more impressions always correlates to a successful piece of content (the sad part is, most of them don’t care about the business outcomes). For example, you might hear somebody say “500,000 people saw my YouTube pre-roll ad!” But, the truth is that they likely didn’t. What probably happened was that as soon as the ad started, the “viewer” clicked away to another tab or did something else until it was over. Or looked at their phone…. So even though they didn’t pay attention, the analytics still show that they saw it.

Not only can an impression count be misleading, but it may not even reflect a positive consumer engagement. There are companies I will never buy from again because their pop-up ads annoyed me so much—you know, the ones that have hundreds of extra “clickthroughs” because someone accidentally clicked on it 8 times because the “close window” icon was too small. While those extra clicks look like engagement, they were only expressions of frustration with the brand. That context gets lost when we are playing in a world that treats impressions as a be-all, end-all.

Why your social media follower count is irrelevant

The same misconception can be applied to follower counts: they only matter if the audience actually cares and actively consumes your content. Followers can be absolutely everything or absolutely nothing.

Let’s say you have 20,000 followers on Instagram and 12,000 of them buy ten copies of your book because you posted about it. That type of conversion means you have an engaged audience consuming your content. That’s valuable.

On the other hand, let’s say you have 200,000 purchased fans. When you post something and it gets zero engagement, those followers have zero value because (1) they either don’t care about your content or (2) they’re not real. Either way, your follower count does not represent their real value to you.

Followers can be absolutely everything or absolutely nothing.

Even the thought that a low number of followers can be considered “irrelevant” makes no sense to me. You can have 10, 10,000, or 1,000,000 followers and all it takes is for one post to be noticed by one person to cause a social media chain reaction. The absolute number does not matter. One retweet, one repost, one link in an email is enough to get the ball rolling.

What matters most is the attention, not the numbers

Instead of talking about how many people see your content, we need to be focusing on how much value that piece of content actually brings your audience. For a consumer to get excited about something, to be compelled to click an ad or watch a video, it comes down to caring about your audience’s attention. And in order for you to win, they really need to consume it. That’s the game.

In terms of organic reach, the #1 platform in the world right now is Instagram (even with the new algorithm). If you have 297 followers on Instagram, 150 of them are actually going to consume your posts. On the reverse side, someone with 3,000 followers on Twitter would not command nearly as much attention due to Twitter’s noise problem. For any platform, you need to understand the context of how your followers are consuming. Once you do that, you can reverse engineer how you can go deep to connect with that consumer and how that “impression” translates into actual interest.

For my newest book release, I sent free advance copies to over 1,000 Instagram influencers and asked them to post a substantial longform review with a photo. Not on Amazon, not on Twitter, not on their blog, but Instagram. Why? Because I day trade attention and I understood that this tactic was going to command the most amount of awareness.

Snapchat also has great organic reach right now. It’s the reason why I’ve been so excited for custom Snapchat filters and Story takeovers. When someone is using a filter or watching a Story, they have intent and you can be sure they’re paying attention. Remember, it’s about depth, not width. It’s not how many you reach, it’s how many you connect with.

Bottom line: I don’t care how many people see something, “I care about how many people see something.” Quality over quantity. Depth over width. Reach does not equal value and follower count doesn’t mean people are listening. We need to stop focusing on optimizing the number of views and instead concentrate on making each one of those viewers care about your brand. Because, at the end of the day, that’s the only way you’ll drive results to your end goal.

Don’t Look Now, But Twitter Has Momentum With The Youth

Unlike Snapchat, Twitter was never really about catering to younger demographics. In the early days, Snapchat was all about creating secret, one-on-one conversations that couldn’t be traced by parents. Twitter, on the other hand, was an open forum that attracted the tech and media communities.

It’s no wonder why it never won over the 12 to 18-year-olds like Snapchat has. The only success Twitter found with younger demos was around following celebrities and Hollywood culture, but not actually using it as a tool to communicate with each other at scale.

During a recent episode of The #AskGaryVee Show, I had two 15-year-old Musical.ly celebrities co-host and talk about how Musical.ly was exploding with the teen demographic. So, when I asked Ariel (@BabyAriel) and Ariana (@_theylovearii) what the most popular app in their high school was, I was expecting them to say Snapchat or Musical.ly.

As someone who is constantly watching what people are doing on social media, I think I have a pretty good read on where everyone’s attention is. But, I was completely caught off guard by their answer: Twitter is the most popular app at their high school.

#AskGaryVee Episode 198

I was floored.

After the show, I started to dig deeper to see if this shift was real. And, from what I’ve seen so far, there’s an emerging growth of teenage Twitter users.

This is an early thesis: Twitter has momentum with teenagers because it provides a platform for natural communication. On other popular social platforms, like Snapchat and Facebook, conversations are usually one-on-one and very linear. For example on Snapchat, you can put out a Story, but if someone comments on it, only you can see it and then it disappears. It’s not a platform for open conversation.

The same could be said about Facebook. When users share something, like a funny video, it’s difficult to follow everyone’s conversation in the comments. There’s also data that people are sharing fewer personal status updates and they are communicating privately using Facebook Messenger. It’s also difficult to engage with people who are not your “friends,” whereas on Twitter you can engage with anyone who has a handle.

So imagine a scenario when everyone in a high school is gossiping about the biggest breakup of the year. There will be a ton of activity on all social platforms, but Twitter will have the biggest collective conversation.

What Twitter has always been good at is allowing people to jump into any relevant conversation they want. Users can share thoughts and funny videos, but also have others engage with it in a public environment. This cocktail party aspect is where Twitter shines. Now it looks like the “cocktail party of the internet” might also be becoming the high school cafeteria as well.

It looks like the “cocktail party of the internet” might also be becoming the high school cafeteria as well.

Check out the clip from #AskGaryVee here:

The Musical.ly App with Musical.ly Celebs | #AskGaryVee Episode 198

On this episode, we talk about the Musical.ly app and I’m joined by @BabyAriel and @theylovearii! We talk about what makes Musical.ly great and what other apps teens have their eyes on.

Questions Answered on This Episode

13:31 – How many times does it take you to make a musical.ly?
16:03 – What makes musical.ly great? What’s the future of it?
20:00 – Will Snapchat ever allow us to sort our friends into groups? If not, why?

Guest List

@BabyAriel on Musical.ly and Instagram
@theylovearii on Musical.ly and Instagram

Resources from This Episode

Musical.ly
Follow up: Check out my thoughts on Musical.ly as a “fad.”

Will Snapchat and Musical.ly be Around in 6 Months? Who Cares.

One of the things I find fascinating is that anytime I talk about Snapchat and, more increasingly, Musical.ly, people always say, “It’s a fad. It won’t be here in 6 months.” For example, the other day I did an episode of The #AskGaryVee Show about Musical.ly and I saw a lot of comments along the lines of: “This is just like Vine—it won’t be around much longer.”

I find this extremely fascinating and here is why.

The argument is always in the context of whether people should invest their time, energy, and money into these platforms only to have these networks become irrelevant down the road. I find this ironic because we don’t treat other advertising platforms the same way. There has never been a time when advertisers or television networks decided “well, I don’t want to run commercials on this hit TV show this year because it’s going to be cancelled it’s going to be eliminated in three seasons.”

As a matter of fact, in the television media buying world, companies actually put up enormous amounts of ad dollars upfront to advertise during shows without even knowing if the series will be around for more than one episode. Then, if the show is cancelled, they have their money shifted to another show (which was not the intent of their original buy).

This current double standard around social networks and deploying investment into creative, strategy, and media is laughable at best and stupid at worst. Whether Snapchat and Musical.ly are here in 6 months or 6 years is completely irrelevant. What is relevant? If right now, you want to reach 13 to 25 year olds in America, there is almost no other way to do it besides these two platforms (and potentially one or two others).

I think it’s time for the market to really step up and recognize that this is a stunningly silly conversation, likely predicated on the rise and fall of early social networks like Myspace. Think about what’s really happening: the phone is now the television. These social platforms are networks. So when ABC is #1, you run advertising on it. When it’s #4, you run less. It’s that simple.

And it’s not just social platforms that get hit by the double standard. I used to get bigger results from my email marketing, my banner advertising, and my Google Adwords. It’s not that my spending has to go to zero now, instead I just don’t give as much time and energy to them because that’s not where the attention is. That is exactly how you handle the Twitters, Facebooks, and Instagrams of the world. If something is #1, milk the attention. Deploy your strategies. Extract and use the awareness to get the conversions that you care about. If it’s not # 1, then give it less of your efforts.

If something is #1, milk the attention.

That’s what’s important. Not if these things are going to go away, but how much attention does the platform have and what does that mean for your business right now. People are still running advertisements on radio and billboards. Nothing truly goes away.

The One Thing People Will Massively Overpay For

I don’t think Uber, Airbnb, and Instacart are anomalies in the way a lot of people tend to view them. I think they’re just a preview of what’s to come.

The biggest reason I got excited about Uber years ago, was because I realized that it wasn’t about transportation. This is about a company that sells me back time.

When it comes to business, time is your number one asset. In order of magnitude, we as a society literally care about the health our loved ones, money, and then time. It’s number three on that list. And if you really think about it, it’s stunning to watch people’s behaviors around the things they most value.

I had literally boycotted LA for four years when I was starting VaynerMedia because I didn’t want to have to hassle with the time it took to rent a car and get around. It was just too much of an investment. I valued my time so much that I didn’t even consider visiting. I love time. Uber gave me that time back.

Time is everyone’s number one asset.

We love time so much we don’t even think about it. Think about the last time your phone or your computer was a hundredth of a second slower than what you’re used to on WiFi and how much you cursed and got pissed off. That’s how much we like and crave time. It’s a huge theme that will play itself out and should be really understood by those of you who are looking for a place to play with new businesses.

Being able to buy and sell back time is what some of the most successful startups over the last 3 years have done. They capitalize on our craving to get back the time we have to spend on the things we don’t want to do. If you’re thinking in start-up mode, and looking for an inspirational seed as a starting point, I highly recommend thinking about time. People will massively overpay for it. And if you can figure that out trade off, you’re putting your business in a good position.