Gary Vaynerchuk is possibly one of the most exciting people to listen to, whether he’s talking about wine or web 2.0. He was just featured on The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, where he talked about going big, building a powerful brand, and treating your business like a community.
”People are always talking about what you’re doing now… To me, it’s not what you’re doing now, it’s about where you’re going.”
Gary hits several great points, the first one being get ahead of the pulse. He explains, “Reading trends is death city USA. You need to be aware of trends, and find them. And the way you do that is you get in the pulse - get into the trenches.”
Later he hits some other great points about spreading your bets around.
“I’m a very big fan of not playing around in the playground that you’re supposed to. I’m a wine guy and I don’t go to wine events. I speak at technology conferences. I think it’s imperative to be involved in the social networks on the internet - to be involved in the real world. All these internet guys love to live just in the internet sometimes. You need to go out there and shake some hands, kiss some babies, live, interact - that’s how you can spread it dramatically more.”
Possibly the most interesting point he made in the whole video was about how social equity trumps private equity.
“I honestly can tell you, that in 2008, not in 2000, maybe not even in 2005, but in 2008 and beyond, I would much rather have 1,000,000 friends than, I used to say $1,000,000.00, well I’ve now changed it to 1,000,000 friends than $10,000,000.00. You know this - word of mouth, how powerful is that? Well, we are now living in a world where every person’s word of mouth reaches so many more people. To me that is the home run of where we are today.”
When you think about it, he is absolutely right. In a recent post I talked about how Guy Kawasaki leverages his social media following to promote Alltop and Truemors. This is a perfect example of the value of social equity. Not a dime is spent on this type of promotion because he’s leveraging the value of relationships.
I’d like you to leave a comment below and answer the following question:
Would you rather have a large social media following, or a 6 figure monthly income?
May 21st, 2008 at 10:56 am
Gary is very inspirational! I am hoping to do the exact same thing in my niche with my Ask Golf Trainer video blog. Will take a month or so to ramp up, but hope to add some excitement to the sometimes boring world of golf.
May 21st, 2008 at 11:45 am
@Golf Trainer
Thats a great idea. I love golf, but I agree it can be extremely boring sometimes. The wine arena and golf arena both have similar qualities in that they each have a strict code of behavior tied to them. If you break that tie in golf like Gary did with wine, you may get noticed and go somewhere.