Gary Vaynerchuk's Blog, page 80

Respecting the Psychology of the Platform

People need to understand that storytelling works differently on Facebook than it does on Twitter. Making a Pinterest post involve a different psychology than it does on Instagram. Bucketing it all together as just “Social Media” is a huge mistake, guys! You have to respect the differences in order to be truly native.

A Q&A Where I Really Cut Loose

This one was awesome. I went on a tear about how boardroom politics are bullshit, how business schools are hopelessly unprepared, how being a junior brand manager sucks, and the ONE THING that brand marketers can do to help themselves. This one is really worth watching. Let me know what you think in the comments.

The Secret to Working in Retail

I grew up in retail.

Long before my dad dragged me to bag ice in our family liquor store (where I’d eventually go on to fulfill my full retail potential), I was selling lemonade, and flowers, and baseball cards, and many other things. Always retail. Always selling. A little over 30 years later, and I’m still selling, but I find myself in a position of mentorship and hiring more and more often. In light of that, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to quantify exactly what it is that I’m looking for in potential business partners and employees, and I’ve realized a very specific common strain runs through most of my favorite candidates: Experience in retail.

When you work retail, whether it’s working the floor at a convenience store or a big box store, working the register at a family business, or taking orders at a fast food restaurant (I know that’s more service-oriented, but it’s still the same set of skills I’m talking about), you start gaining the one thing that I think is really important for everybody to understand: The ability to read the customer.

If you’re unable to read the customer, to adjust to a customer’s response in real-time, directly in front of your face, I think you’re missing out on something that makes every great businessperson truly exceptional. We’re living in a faster world, and if you can’t reverse-engineer your customer’s finish line in order to make him/her happy, you’re going to have a very hard time breaking through the scale and the speed that we’re now dealing with thanks to the “stream economy.”

As somebody who likes to yap – and let’s be honest, I love to yap. I love to talk. I love to hear myself talk. I love to be heard – It’s shocking to me how much I like to listen. To be honest, I used to struggle with it. “Why the heck do I like to listen so much?” And then it dawned on me (which probably prompted me to write this article): “Oh… I’m a retail person.” I had no choice. Customer walks in and I had to listen. Long before I could spout about what Chinon would go best with that dish, I had to hear what dish they were going to serve. Long before I could go on about what they should buy for the wedding reception, I had to know how many people were there and, more importantly, what their preferences were.

And so, my friends, I implore you to recognize the world we’re living in; to recognize that the consumer will always be right forever. I implore you, if you’ve never worked retail, to try and find a situation that allows you to do that. I implore college students to highly consider taking a summer job stocking shelves or working a register. The soft skills (which are, in my opinion, hard skills) that you will learn in that job will be transferable to everything you do for the rest of your life.

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This piece was originally posted on my LinkedIn account. I’ve got over 30 features over there. Take a look!

Entrepreneurial DNA. Do You Have It?

I got into a conversation recently about whether entrepreneurship is a case of nature or nurture. I really look at it like a skill thing like singing or basketball. Some people were born with it and had circumstances where they never even had the chance to realize their skill. I’m sure there are hundreds of people around the country who could play for the NBA right now but maybe they were never exposed to it in high school or maybe their interests lay elsewhere when they were younger.

On the flip-side, basketball may have been a “way out” for some people and they worked their way up to a high skill set through sheer determination. but I always think that at the end of the day it’s about betting on your strengths, so finding a way to figure out what you’re good at and then going all in on it is extremely important. Whether that’s being an entrepreneur, or an accountant or a teacher, it’s all based around skill sets.

So do I think there are outlier situations in which you can be forced into something that you become great at? Sure. But do I think that for the most part it’s a DNA thing? Yes, I really do.

I had no choice in the matter. I HAD to make a lemonade stand. It was the only thing I thought about. When everybody went outside to play and make forts, I just had to stand on the side of the street, make signs, and sell stuff all day. Now I’m an extreme version of it, but there are a lot of places in between, and I think most of them are predicated on skill and DNA.

So now, you’re probably asking, “how do I know if that’s me? If I hate my job and want to get out and explore my options, how do I know if entrepreneurship is in my DNA?”

I’d say that it’s like anything else. You don’t know if you’re going to be good at something until you do it. Now up and quitting your job isn’t practical. I know that people have lots of variables in their lives like kids and mortgages that don’t allow them to flip on a dime, but that’s why, in Crush It! I wrote about the idea of 7pm-2am. Now if you really hate your job, that is a powerful thing. Hate is a tremendous motivator. Hate is worth working from 7 at night to 2 in the morning. And what’s great about the time we live in is that 20 years ago, you couldn’t have done that, but with the internet, 7pm-2am is just as useful as any other time of the day.

If you want to know whether you’ve got that entrepreneurial spirit in your blood, here is what you do: You cut out watching your favorite sitcoms at night, you cut out playing more GTA5, you cut out going out for beers, you cut out being on the softball team, you pick a dream, and you attack it.

And if you prefer all that downtime over the upside of building your own business? I honestly think that’s great! That’s totally fine, but you’re not allowed to complain about how much you hate your job, just like I am not allowed to complain about my lack of free time or sleep.

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If you want more articles like this from me, you should take a look at my LinkedIn and Medium accounts. Tons of good stuff there!

Ride the Hashtag, Don’t Create it.

This piece was originally posted to my Medium account. You should check it out.

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I was waiting for somebody at a wine bar the other day for a meeting when I heard two guys sitting and having a business discussion. For the 12 minutes until my appointment got there, I eavesdropped on them and overheard that they spent all their time trying to figure out which hashtags to create to try and get a trend on twitter.

They sat there and they strategized. Should they have their business name in it? Would that be too spammy? Should they go more general? Can they own this that and the other term?

Social media has much more upside when you’re actually listening and responding and reacting.I sat there drinking my crisp, flinty Riesling, laughed to myself, and thought once again, “people still don’t get social media.” Social media is the first true listening platform, not speaking platform. Yes, you can speak on it. Many will, and many do so successfully, but on the flip side, riding the wave of hashtags instead of creating them is a defining part of my thesis on social media. You’ll get much more success if you pay attention to what is trending on Twitter , try reverse engineer the nature of the hashtag, and then try to bring value to the conversation – joke, a piece of information – rather than what most people think about which is “How can I create a hashtag and start my own trend?”

News Alert: You’re not single-handedly getting a hashtag to trend on Twitter unless you’re the Biebs, or some up-and-coming hip-hop artist who is completely dominating already. On the flip side, your ability to pay attention to what’s going on and jump into it, over-indexing the performance of a normal tweet, is pretty consistent even for people who are somewhat average social media users.

So please, let’s use hashtags as the baseline in this whole thing. Social media has much more upside when you’re actually listening and responding and reacting. Kinda like being a cornerback (I hate you, Darrelle Revis), instead of being a quarterback (I hate you, Tom Brady).

It’s Not About the Numbers.

The marketing world has been abuzz for the last few days over this whole “Guy Buys a Sponsored Tweet to Complain About British Airways” story, and as I’ve been reading about it, I came across a quote that really got me thinking:

With someone with six followers who’s on Twitter and who makes a nasty tweet, it’s completely irrelevant,

Now, because tone is lost in text, I’m not going to call this guy out by name, because I’m sure there was more context around this and I certainly don’t want to flame him, but the quote really drives to the heart of what I’m trying to say here and that is:

Even with all the talk about how we’ve embraced new media, people are still looking at the fundamental human elements of it in old-school terms and absolute numbers.

The scale of impressions, or the scale of followers is simply not the end game anymore. Sure it’s a part of the equation, but to give that idea so much stock is just ludicrous and totally misses the point of what makes a platform like Twitter so incredibly unique.

Ok, so you have six followers: Sally, Jimmy, Bobby, Yacko, Wacko, and Dot. You tweet out that you hate British Airways. One of those six “completely irrelevant” followers retweets you — not exactly sure how six human beings can be irrelevant, but that’s a different story for a different day. So anyway, Sally retweets this, and she has 39 followers, which is probably still “irrelevant” by our friend’s point of view. Now let’s say one of those 39 people happens to be her friend from college… who happens to be a showrunner on The Today Show. What if that happens? What if that showrunner brings the story to the producers and all of a sudden you’re leading off the next episode of The Today Show?

The thought that low numbers of human beings can somehow be irrelevant is ludicrous. The absolute number just doesn’t matter. You could have 100 followers, or 1,000,000 followers, all it takes is for one tweet to be noticed by one person, and the word-of-mouth plumbing that social networks are can take care of the rest.

And I’m not talking about going viral. You don’t need to go viral. You just need to get in front of the right person. Hell, you could have two followers… Oprah and Obama. Now all of a sudden that follower-count feels a lot less important, right? This absolute number thing is stupid. It’s very stupid. Every consumer’s word does matter because word of mouth is now at scale and has the infrastructure to go anywhere.

We need to start thinking about this in a very serious way. Because right now, we completely misunderstand it.

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This piece was originally posted to Medium on 9/6/2013

Advice to NY Creative Interns

This is less of a keynote, and more like 20 minutes of advice. I don’t usually get to talk to an audience like this, so it was a really awesome opportunity for me.

If you’re about to graduate I want you to seriously think about spending the next three to four years of your life trying to execute on your dream. This is literally the absolute best time to do it.

Fireside Chat with Gary Vaynerchuk and WeWork Stories

This is, without a doubt, the most unique Q&A I’ve done so far. Major, major value here, guys.

Huge thanks to WeWork Stories for putting this together! Be sure to check out their new blog here: http://thefullstart.com/inspiration/q...

WeWork Stories Q&A Pt. 1

This one was huge, guys. Seriously one of the most unique Q&A sessions I’ve ever done. Pt 1 is more of an interview format, and then Pt 2 (coming tomorrow) we got into audience Q&A.

Much love to WeWork Stories for putting this together. Be sure to check out there new blog here: http://thefullstart.com/inspiration/gary-vaynerchuk-on-social-media-building-a-business-life/

Jab, Jab, Jab, Right-Hook Case Study #2: Cone Palace

Oh man, this is one of the greatest reviews in the book. These guys were so spot on, they really make it hard to compete. Super fantastic microcontent!