Gary Vaynerchuk's Blog, page 63

Parenting for Success with Kid Entrepreneurs

Can you raise a kid to be an entrepreneur? Is it possible to nurture an entrepreneurial skillset in your child early on?

As someone who grew up knowing I wanted to be an entrepreneur, wanting to run my own businesses, and now with two kids of my own, these kinds of questions intrigue me.

Growing up, I was lucky to have parents who were incredibly supportive of me. While I was failing math class, they recognized something different in me: the ability to become a great entrepreneur. And that was valuable. You have to understand (and I’m sure many of you do), it was different back then. Nowadays kids who pursue their own business are seen as geniuses; not so much when I was growing up. If you sucked in school, that was it. Done. That’s why I give so much credit to my parents: they saw my strengths and let me play to those.

In many ways, if you are a parent, seeing your kid become an entrepreneur and develop entrepreneurial skills could be very exciting. Being an entrepreneur teaches you so many valuable skills, including how to be tough, how to be scrappy and how to survive in business. It is important for us to remember it can be a great thing for a young person to experience.

But what really made me successful, and the way my parents pushed that success, has to do with seeing the difference between reacting and forcing.

Reacting is giving your kid the rope. If your child is selling some kind of trading card in school, or setting up a lemonade stand and they’re only 8 years old, all you need to do is react to the fact that they’re already entrepreneurs and give them a lot of rope. What I mean by that is freedom, support, acknowledgement and building up as much steam behind those actions as you can.

This is essentially what happened for me. I exhibited those tendencies early. My first gig was ripping up flowers from my neighbors front lawns, ringing their doorbell, and selling the flowers back to them. Sure that business in particularly wasn’t quite sustainable. But baseball cards? That was my first big gig. My parents reacted to those things. I got all the support I needed in those early days. My mom drove me to baseball card shows and I was able to flourish because of it.

It’s no different than if your kid constantly wants to paint, or play baseball, or dance; you notice they love doing something, and you want to support them in it.

But you can enroll them in theater class to get them interested in theatre. You can put them in violin lessons just for the sake of trying it out. So the question still remains: can you instill an entrepreneurial spirit from a young age?

For me, the answer is no.

If you don’t see those characteristics, be very careful about forcing entrepreneurship on someone who isn’t interested. Not only because, to state the obvious, you don’t want to force anything on your kid, but also because it is a difficult, long road to be happy in entrepreneurship. It’s lonely. It’s tough.

However, I do think that exposing kids to the concept of entrepreneurship is extremely valuable. And who knows? They might pick it up.

If there is a sibling, or cousin, or friend, or neighbor who exhibits those kind of entrepreneurial characteristics, or runs their own business, you can encourage them to spend more time together and get involved in those kinds of things. Learning by doing is still applicable here. From there, you will have the ability to storytell around entrepreneurship, show them the benefits. It’s all good exposure.

Mainly, though, it’s all about reacting. I, as an entrepreneur through and through, have absolutely no intention of imposing entrepreneurship on my children. But I am very happy that my parents noticed the gene in me and let it grow.

Avoid the Noise, Sell in the Off Season

Selling wine in August.

What do I actually mean when I say that?

I’ll tell you a story.

I was working in my dad’s liquor store back in the mid nineties. One day, out of curiosity, I asked him, “Dad, why are we always running ads during Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter but barely any other time of year?”

His response was because that is when people buy wine. Those holidays are cornerstones for the wine business and, historically, a great time be selling because a lot of people are buying.

But I was thinking of it differently. That was the day something clicked for me. My response to him when he was talking about the ads was this: “Dad, people come into our store every day to buy wine.”

Everybody markets at the same time because they presume that is when people are going to be most willing to buy. They use the logic of “This is when people are going to be doing _____” to figure when the “best time to sell” is.

So what happens?

It gets super noisy.

Here’s an example: The Oscars. Every year, there are brands making content, trying to break through and jump on the next big meme. It’s no different for the Grammys, or the Super Bowl. Brands and businesses keep trying to jump in and say something funny.

Meanwhile, let’s talk about any other day of the year. Maybe today if you’re reading this at the right moment. An average Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday. You could do something, anything, on this day, and overdeliver. It could be the smallest gesture, but it would still feel like a lot because nothing else is happening.

So let’s go back to that wine in August thing I was talking about. Somehow, not sure how, I convinced my dad to take out full page ads for wine in the middle of August. In case you didn’t know, that is the most dead season for wine retailers.

But do you know what happened? We won. Because we were the only ones talking.

So as the holidays approach, if you’re trying to figure out how to say something really cool and funny and original to say, consider putting your efforts into a random Friday.

Easy supply and demand of attention. Create value when no one else is.

Want to hear more? Watch me talk about off season marketing in this video:

 

Stop Marketing Like It’s 2012

Over the last half decade, I’ve realized that one of my biggest skills is my ability to outmarket the market. Another way to put this is just to market in the year we live in.

Heck, at this point I’m saying you should market in the day you live in since marketing is changing so fast. It’s the principle seed and religious north star guiding everything we do at VaynerMedia. I look forward to the day when I get to make fun of Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat as tired, old, out-of-date tactics to reach the end consumer. I will never, ever be passionate about marketing anywhere other than where I think the current consumer’s attention is, and, more importantly, the places that are underpriced by the market because they’re young and unrecognized.

So with that in mind, 2012 was just a few minutes ago, and I thought it would be fun to take a look back at tactics that worked back then, but have no place in the dawn of 2016.

 

Quirky Holidays on Twitter

Back then, everybody was newsjacking like it was their jobs. After the Oreo Superbowl event, every marketer in the world was looking for his opportunity to win The 4th Of July, or worse yet, #FlagDay. To be fair, if you look back, a lot of early brands were able to create context with their consumers using some of these tactics, but just like anything else, it became an issue of supply and demand. When every single pet food and tire company ends up trying to find a way to incorporate easter into their Twitter posts, consumers get tired. The consumers have moved away from that tactic, even if a shocking number of brands still haven’t. Ironically, I feel like there could be a lot of utility for brand doing this in 3-5 years because things like this are a see-saw, but at this point, I would not advise you to start working on your awesome #PresidentsDay post.

Relying on Organic Facebook Traffic

The most emotional topic I’ve seen markers deal with over the last few years is their disbelief at the decline in Facebook’s organic traffic now that they have to pay for reach. Go figure. Paying for reach. Ya know, like literally every other marketing behavior on earth. Of course it’s declining! Facebook’s number one mission is to keep their users happy, and the best way to do that is to protect them from all of the posts from brands they’re following. What you have now is a system that works a lot more like Google search: Not everybody gets to find you organically. What people need to realize is that yes their organic reach is down, but what’s been birthed from that is probably one of the most powerful marketing tools that we’ve ever seen. If you understand the capabilities of Facebook’s paid targeting, it doesn’t matter if you’re a small business or a Fortune 500, you’ll go from tears of sadness to tears of joy.

Asking for Likes and Retweets

Look, this was a horrible tactic back then, too, but for some reason it stuck around. I railed against it in The Thank You Economy, and in any speech I could. The thought that a business who is asking you to buy something is also asking you to spread their word of mouth by forcing you into sharing their content is just lowest common denominator marketing. It never really worked, but somehow it became a common practice, and it just needs to fade away.

Social Content that Only Exists for Engagement and Shareability

Something I’m really passionate about (and I’d like to think my book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook helped with this) is that social shouldn’t be used purely for awareness. Now look that’s part of what it’s there for, and that’s great, and it’s fun to create “viral content”, but it’s massively naive for companies to ignore social’s DR and sales capabilities. I’m excited to see more and more brands throwing right hooks (which is to say going in for the ask) and treating social media as sales platforms, and not just broad awareness platforms.

Mailing in Your Creative

Three years ago the conventional wisdom, the conventional wisdom was to spend as little as possible on the design and video assets you put up on social media. At the end of the day, most brands didn’t believe in it as a viable marketing channel. Now, we’re at the dawn of an era where brands are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a video that is only going to live on Facebook, and that’s exciting. This speaks to one basic thing: the attention of the end consumer. Brands are waking up to the fact that consumers are spending all their time on mobile and tablets, and of that time a disproportionate amount of it is on social, so it’s only natural that they’re investing more and more in high quality content. This isn’t to say that scrappy, daily content doesn’t have a place – I still believe in it tremendously – however, the respect that brands and advertisers are giving social networks is exciting to me, and the financial commitments that they’re making in their images and videos speaks directly to it.

Not Understanding what “Social Media” Actually Means

In 2012, people were still throwing around the term “social media” like it was this up-and-coming technology; like it was this cool new place. If you don’t understand today that social media is just a slang term for the internet. Like I said in the last section, the math is straightforward: people’s internet consumption now happens on mobile, and the thing people do the most on mobile is use social media platforms. That is the internet now. If you don’t understand this, you’re behind. So the faster brands understand that there is zero difference between “digital marketing” and “social media marketing”, the faster they’ll understand that they need to be moving their money out of banners and popups in a 2016 world.

Desktop-First Mentality

This is by far the biggest difference we’re seeing between 2012 marketing and 2016 marketing. At this point you need to be evaluating all of your creative, UI, and UX on a mobile device instead of just reviewing it on a laptop. This is a big shift, and one that people are still lagging behind, even though the data clearly supports it. If you’re still lagging on this, wake up. If your company is lagging on it, share this article with them right now.

 

This was a fun article to write, and I plan on updating with something like this every year. The biggest challenge facing marketers right now is that while TV and radio stayed consistent for half a century, the internet is changing dramatically on a year to year basis. If you’re not nimble, you’re going to get left behind. Maybe you’re not going to go out of business, but you’ll end up leaving a lot of upside on the table if you’re not implementing the tactics of the day. I hope you enjoyed this, and I hope you can share it with anybody who is locked-in, listening to Gangnam Style, and reading 50 Shades of Grey.

Want to be a Better Salesperson? Take a Month Off

Sales is at the heart of any business. No matter how amazing your product is, if you can’t sell it, you’re done. That’s it. At the end of the day, you have to make money somehow, right?

So it’s no surprise that learning to be a better salesperson, how to close the sale, is a frequent topic that is addressed in the business world. It’s something that I think about a lot. You can employ tactics, read articles, try new things…there are a lot of ways to approach making the sale.

But in the end, for me, the first step in being a better salesperson starts with taking a step back from selling.

You heard that right. If you’re starting to re-evaluate how you sell to people, if you want to make a big change or just get better at it, take a month off doing what you call “selling to someone.” Instead during that time, reverse engineer the sales practice. Start from the endgame, which is someone buying a product, and map every step that comes before it. See how you can differently handle each step to make sure the outcome is what you want.

There are many ways you can reverse engineer and map that journey, but for me, the number one way to do that comes from going directly to the source. Whether you are a salesperson in a store or an executive selling services, go to your clients. Your customers. Approach them with a very open mind and attitude and ask them: “What are your pain points? What are your day to day struggles in business?” Cut the crap. Yes, you want to sell to them. But you can even point that out, be the first to say it, and still ask for a real conversation.

Because the bottom line is that you want to sell to them by providing value. If you’re a good salesperson, that is always how you approach making the sale. You have value for the customer in mind.

Take the relationship with them to another level by letting it move beyond just being about a single sale. If your entire relationship is predicated on making a sale every single time, the foundation of the relationship won’t be as strong. Then you’re moving into a spammy territory.

Spend a month, two months, not selling. Open your ears and listen. Try to find a way to provide value outside of the context of making a sale. How can you help them?

Thought matters. It will mean a lot to your customer or client. They will respect you more for it and in the end building relationships with humans is always beneficial.

DAILYVEE 002: Get ’em to the Gala

Here’s the second episode of DailyVee—today you see what it’s like to be Gary Vaynerchuk for a full day—it’s a long one! I have four meetings before 11am, film #AskGaryVee, and end the episode at a gala.

I hope you enjoy!

#LINK

https://donate.charitywater.org

Don’t Be A Dick. Everybody Is Relevant at Networking Events.

How often have you attended a networking event or conference, let’s say something like SXSW, for example, and thought to yourself “How do I meet up with the right people?”

Or maybe you’ve heard someone say something like “I want to make the right connections.”

In fact, at SXSW just a few years ago, someone asked me during my talk: “How do I find the people who are relevant.”

It really pissed me off.

It’s not that I think this guy was trying to be a dick, he was just trying to understand what he deemed would be the best way to network at an event. It’s a pretty common type of question. But the problem is just that: this networking and business development mentality is far too normal and common.

It’s time that we all get out of that obnoxious mindset. You shouldn’t categorize, justify, and prioritize people if you’re in a situation with such a high capacity for serendipity.

First of all, relevancy is massively subjective. There are people who have a lot of followers and influence in a certain industry, but if that isn’t your industry, it doesn’t matter to you.

If you’re just trying to get to one person, let me remind you: everybody is trying to get to that person. It’s a supply and demand issue. You’re being consistent and knocking on the door over and over, but they have certain defensive moves in place because they’re constantly being approached this way.

This is why I tell everyone who asks for advice on how to network at an event the same thing: open yourself up to meeting somebody who might be “relevant” to you in the definition you aren’t accustomed to. There are hundreds of people running around SXSW, Le Web, Web Summit and all those types of industry conferences who are the gateway to your next big business move. Because all it takes is one personal connection. One great meeting. It’s not about the influence someone has; it’s about who they are and what they bring to the table. It doesn’t matter what the first chess move is, because that person could facilitate a second, even more powerful move down the line. You could meet your next business partner. An amazing UX designer. Someone with knowledge in a field you desperately need help in. All it takes is one interaction, one meeting, one time when you ignored the big shots at the events and opened yourself up the possibilities of networking with other people.

The bottom line is this: when you stop strategizing people’s clout and start acting like an actual human being, you will win.  

Here’s my original answer from SXSW 2012 that I talked about above:

 

#AskGaryVee Episode 170: Snapchat Discover, Disrespect, & Losing Your Hustle

#QOTD: If I told you to go away and be with yourself for 24 hours, where would you go?

#TIMESTAMPS

3:20 – Do you think too many brands are on Snapchat Discover (18 at the moment)? Does each added brand decrease value for others?

5:56 – My podcast’s website gets a lot of page views, but they’re not translating into listens what can I do to help conversion?

9:36 – How do you personally take charge in a meeting when you feel others are being disrespectful?

18:16 – What’s the psychology behind Periscope? Why are users spending time there?

21:10 – I feel like I’ve lost my hustle. Help. What do I do?

#LINKS

#LINKS

DAILYVEE EPISODE 001 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7K4s…

NEWEST MEDIUM https://medium.com/@garyvee/if-you-re…

 

DAILYVEE: No Coat, No Shoes, No Keynote

It’s finally here: I’m doing a daily vlog.

Okay, so maybe it won’t be daily exactly. But I’m going to try my hardest. We’re calling it #DailyVee.

So, here’s the first one. I started the day with some basketball and the day took a turn from there. I wasn’t allowed into a building to do a keynote because of my outfit. Not even kidding.

Enjoy!

#AskGaryVee Episode 169: Shut Down by the Feds

#QOTD: None, cause we got shut down!



#TIMESTAMPS

2:44 – Any advice for people working 7p to 2am doing what they love, but not yet sure how they will monetize it, such as a blog?

4:16 – I’m starting a fatherhood blog. How would you market it?

6:20 – What makes a company more investable, millions of active users consuming free content or millions in actual profit?

6:42 – How do you prepare for a big meeting, or anything where you’re required to have a strong performance?

#LINKS

NEWEST MEDIUM https://medium.com/@garyvee/if-you-re…

If You’re Trying to “Save Print”, You’re Missing the Point

Recently, I was on Instagram when I noticed a conversation in the comments of a post that caught my eye. People were discussing print and the future of it; newspaper, magazines and the like. Mostly everyone was arguing that we should save print, that we should be working harder to preserve it as a medium.

To that I said: why?

It’s not the vehicle of print that is so crucial. It’s the message contained in the vehicle. It’s the words on the page. It’s the articles. The writing. The images.

It’s the message, not the medium.

Do we preserve cave paintings because we are hoping to continue using them as a forms of communication? Do we go back to smoke signals? Do we start using them again because they also need to be “saved”?

The maturity of the internet has created a very interesting phenomenon: romance for platforms has increased exponentially. And I think having romance around platforms is completely fine. It’s normal to want to stick to the vehicle of communication that we feel most comfortable with. Especially when that vehicle is an industry with lots of history.

But you can’t let romance get in the way of progress. To push against the current trends, the current happenings that point to something much larger, will only come back to kick you in the butt later. If you resist change now, you are setting yourself up for failure.

I’ve been shocked by the reaction that many of my contemporaries have to the switch in platforms. Dissing on Instagram. Wanting to keep websites as the main hub. Or even worse: making TV your number one priority. Currently, people with a lot invested in television are sad that Netflix is around.

Newsflash: you guys made Netflix happen. Broadcast television is the reason Netflix exists.

The platform where we deliver our communication is not what needs to be respected.

What needs to be respected is the communication itself.

Whatever form the platform needs to take for us to share ideas, thoughts, best wishes, love — that platform is commoditized. Pencil and paper. The internet. App culture. They’re commodities of the greater thing that is happening, which is communication. Communication will always evolve and find its way to get to us.

There were people that cried about the telephone. What would it do to handwriting?

We have too much romance around the mechanism that delivers information while undervaluing the information itself. And it’s out of the romance of how we grew up consuming it.

Stop falling in love with the consumption vehicle. Start falling in love with what that person is trying to say.

Thoughts? Leave a response below! And if you liked the article, click that heart button you see down here. Would mean a lot to me.