RonAmok!

Not only did I have the great pleasure of seeing Gary Vaynerchuk speak live at the Marketing Profs Digital Mixer last Thursday in Scottsdale, AZ, but as a bonus, I got to chat with him over lunch. Gary is one of those people who can recharge the batteries of everyone around him. He’s the New Media Evangelist’s New Media Evangelist. Very smart and very entertaining. His only flaw is that he’s a NY Jets fan (Says the Pats fan!)

I recorded his entire talk with my Flip camera, but unfortunately the sound wasn’t up to snuff. So instead, I went through his entire presentation and pulled out ten of my favorite Garyisms. Here I present:

Gary Vaynerchuk on…

…content: “If content is King, marketing is Queen and she runs the house.”

Pumping out great content is not enough. The best everything, is not the best business. The best running shoes are not the best sellers. The best song is not number one. The best Pinot Noir is not the biggest seller. Marketing is the difference

…changing the rules of Marketing:

At the end of the day, nobody cares about anything that you do unless you give them eyeballs to convert an action. When the eyeballs go to different places, you better go there. If the fish leave this pond and they go to that pond, be there.

…Word of Mouth:

The Internet is so different today than it was five years ago, it is scary. Word of mouth is on steroids. Here’s why. Because now we have tools that let us keep pushing the conversation forward. The word is traveling. Word of mouth is changing so much.

If somebody came to my store and loved Wine Library and got great service and she was the biggest socialite on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, how many people could that yenta have possibly told? A hundred? But now, if Chris Brogan thinks my wine is yummy, he can re-tweet that sh*t to 18,000 people. And 34 if them may think that is cool. And one of those 34 is me. I have 18,000 and I re-tweet it. And you know who follows me? An editor or producer at Fox — who tracks it back and all of a sudden your consumer is on the show.

Word of mouth, remember that. In your world, marketers, it’s the word of mouth that’s changing. Your fan-base, your friends, they’re the ones that are going to build you. They always were but the difference is that they are no longer armed with sling shots; they’ve got machetes too.

…Social Media technology:

Twitter, and Seesmic, and Facebook…are tools. They’re a screw driver, a telephone, a car. They don’t make a difference. You make the difference. Use the tools.

The tools are there. You just need to use them. Creating a Twitter account or making a Facebook fan page is like buying a house and not furnishing it.

Anyone who doesn’t spend at least an hour a day on search.twitter.com is making a huge mistake. The free data that is on search.twitter is amazing. You can search anything, and see what people are saying about it. You can eavesdrop on every conversation in the world. And it’s free.

…corporate resistance to Social Media:

We’re living in an age where the gatekeepers have been eliminated…companies don’t want to hear that they can’t control the message anymore…If your product your service is broken — you’re broken. ‘Cuz your intern or your cousin or your neighbor is going to expose you on the Internet. Try spending less time and effort trying to control your message and fix your message. You’ll be far better off. Because if you don’t think that every iPhone in 2010 is going to be streaming direct to the Internet live, then you have no idea what’s going on. You’re not paying attention. So if you have cockroaches in the back of your pizzeria, clean that sh*t up.

…Social Media Marketing success:

Everyone thinks this is some magic pill. There’s no magic pill. Here’s what works. Work. You’ve got to work. I don’t want you to spend a lot of money, but I want you to spend a lot of time.

Remember when your grandmother used to say, “Stores aren’t the same anymore.” When the butcher used to say, “Sally, you want some lamb tonight?” You can do that, virtually. And if you are outsourcing these types of activities to interns, then you’re dead. Please don’t do it. Outsource everything else.

It’s all about authenticity and transparency. You can build enormous brand equity…Way too many people are scared to ask for what they want. If you are transparent and authentic, there’s nothing to be afraid of.

…B2B and Social Media:

There’s only one thing that we consume. We consume brands. That’s what we do. When you have brand equity you win. So, depending on your space, my biggest game plan would be to build the biggest brand equity that will be attractive to all the partners in your B2B space. Always build brand.

…results:

Way too many of you in this room have had great ideas, and can make things happen, but you haven’t been patient enough. You didn’t see a return on your investment. It wasn’t worth it. Nothing comes easy. The great stuff is hard. And so I pumped out a show for 18 months, and then finally, one of them who was a New York Magazine writer that became a fan, and she wrote an article, and then Joel Stein read that article at Time magazine and he wrote an article, and then Conan’s producer saw that and put me on the air…and away it went.

…personal brand:

I want my DNA to be my personal brand. I want Gary Vaynerchuk to be my personal brand. I do not want to be known as the wine guy. I want to stay-on-brand that’s coming and flowing through my body, my DNA.

…Personal Brand vs. Company Brand?

You build both. Steve Jobs has personal brand and the company’s got brand. Understand who you are. If you are an introvert, be the greatest introvert that there ever was.

Tags: Gary Vaynerchuk Chris Brogan MPDM New Media Evangelist Ron Ploof Wine Library TV

I’m sitting in the Phoenix Airport getting ready to get on my flight home from the Marketing Profs Digital Mixer here in Arizona. Yesterday, I heard some great presentations and wanted to share a few of the thoughts that really resonated with me.

“Don’t use Social Media to fix your broken business model.”
Christopher S. Penn — Student Loan Network

Chris elaborated that Social Media is a “magnifier” that exposes problems as opposed to hiding them. In the past, your PR folks may have been able to “spin” a story, or might have been able to bury it by not responding. Today, with your customers armed to tell the world about your flaws through text, audio, or video, you as a company have two choices: engage in the conversation and fix the problem or ignore it and hope for the best.

“Is your brand what you say it is, or what your customers say it is?”
Scott Monty — Ford Motor Company

I like this question because it cuts to the heart of my battles with the traditionals who think that they control their brand. It’s really important for businesses to monitor the online conversations about their brands with the understanding that conversations cannot be controlled.

Tomorrow, your New Media Evangelist will add the nuggets that he gathered from today’s presentations.

Tags: New Media Evangelist mpdm Marketing Profs Digital Mixer sessions ChristopherSPenn Scott Monty

Elections bring out the worst in people. And even worse…it’s people who I genuinely like and trust. And as we get closer to the election, I’m finding that some of my most trusted sources, especially the bloggers who I’ve entrusted my RSS-based attention to, are showing me a dark side — one that is affecting how I view them — and not in a good way!

New Media is about content and trust. If I subscribe to your blog, I did so because I like your insight and the quality of your content. However, if you drop the quality of your content by turning into some whiny hater (h8tr?),  how do you expect me to react?

Politics takes extremely smart people and makes them sound stupid. Normally lucid writers become so caught up in emotion that their content is served slathered in venom. Look, I’ve probably subscribed to your blog because of your brilliant thoughts on New Media. Therefore, if you post something to your blog, at least make it New Media related. At least try.

For example, if you want to write about how the Obama campaign is using text messaging in an innovative and effective way — cool! If you wanna show how pro Obama YouTube videos outnumber pro McCain videos, yet the McCain videos have more total views, great. Let’s have a conversation, a debate, something — ANYTHING — other than sophomoric name calling and personal attacks that have been streaming in through my trusted feeds.

And so my friends, my trusted sources, my favorite New Media mavens, I’ve had to put a few of you into the RonAmok! penalty box. I’m not reading any of your stuff, listening to any of your podcasts, or watching any of your online video until after the election. Hopefully, on the first Wednesday of November, when all the hype is dissipated, you’ll have found your way back to your roots, to start writing like the smart and thoughtful experts that I subscribed to in the first place.

In times of high emotion, it’s easy to lose your way. If you’ve been swept up with the financial woes of the DOW, the hype of the election, or the crisis du jour, take a deep breath, think about why you started creating content in the first place, and please come back home.

I’ve left the light on for you.