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

Mitch Joel of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Blog started an interesting project to gather the best practices of Social Media Marketing. Here is the one that I tell all my clients.

Social Networks are places for people to gather, share ideas, experiences, learn and have a little fun. Companies, on the other hand, have a hard time with these motives because they only know one way to market — using war analogies. They traditionally:

• “target” their demographics,
• “launch initiatives” at them
• “orchestrate campaigns” against them,
• and “blast” them with messaging.

Unfortunately, companies that rush pell-mell into these Social Networks with traditional marketing guns a blazin’, end up at the wrong end of a firing squad.

Therefore, I remind my clients that it’s better to ease their way into an online Social Network the same way one would with an offline social event. Be a wallflower for a little while, simply observing. Look around. Listen to the conversations. Try to understand the overall vibe of the place.

Then, after you begin to understand the vernacular and can feel the rhythm of the conversations, ask yourself the following question: “How can I help make this community better?”

Be useful. Seek first to help, even if (especially if!) it has nothing to do with your product or service. Soon, as members see that you are willing to invest in the community and its members, they will likely reciprocate, in more powerful ways than you can imagine.

Tags: social media marketing best practices project ronamok mitch joel new media evangelist ron ploof

Nothing like the rantings of a Traditional to spur your New Media Evangelist to type through the pain of two stainless steel traction pins impaled through his left pinky.

Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel wrote a piece in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal entitled The Internet is Ruining America’s Movies and Music. The piece is packed with too many gems from the Traditional’s Handbook to list, but here are a few of my favorites:

Today’s music industry is either moribund or dead, depending on whom you ask. Downloading has destroyed it, and no one in the business is smart enough to figure out how to fix it.

Downloading hasn’t destroyed the music industry, the music industry has self-inflicted its own head-wounds by adopting a very dangerous business attitude: that the industry itself is more important than its own customers. The same people who willingly bought a song (or an album) in every new medium (vinyl, eight-track tape, cassette tape, Compact Disc, and now the DRMed MP3 file, etc…) have decided that they won’t play that game anymore. iTunes has proven that people will pay for music, but they want it in a form that’s portable across all of their digital media platforms — instead of the music industry’s preference that you buy a copy for your phone and one for your home stereo and one for your car and one for your computer and one for the dozens of other media inventions that nobody can conceive of today. However, instead of listening to their customers and offering them new products and services (like a normal business would do), the Music industry reverts to its monopolistic ways, choosing to treat its customers like thieves — which in hindsight sounds exactly like someone who isn’t “…smart enough to know how to fix it.”

…47% of our gross domestic product involves intellectual property (IP) transactions, and about 6% of our national worth — $626.6 billion annually — is from our copyright businesses. These are the segments of our economy that are suffering, or stand to do so, as a result of the Internet. The Internet, glorious as it is, should be thought of as the plague of postmodernity.

The Internet is no more a plague today than smoke signals, carrier pigeon, printing press, vinyl records, telegraph, radio, or television were to their respective times. None of these technologies were welcomed with open arms by their respective societies either. And copyright? We’ll get to that after this next statement.

Entertainment is such a crucial part of the American way of life — because of the jobs it generates, the fun it engenders, the goodwill it creates world-wide — that the potential for its undoing is a national emergency that ought to at least merit a congressional panel or governmental alarm. The U.S. was meant to be a nation of commercial creativity. It is our birthright. It’s what we do.

Our birthright isn’t creativity; it’s freedom. Creativity emerges from freedom. But just for the sake of argument, let’s work with Ms Wurtzel’s conclusion. If creativity is our birthright and we need some congressional panel to sound a national alarm, why is the Federal government pulling out all the stops to kill creativity through inflated copyright laws?

Article 1, Section 8, paragraph 8 of the US Constitution makes it the government’s responsibility:

“To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;”

The first copyright laws set these “limited times” to fourteen (14) years with the ability to renew for another fourteen (14), for a grand total of twenty-eight (28) years. Over the past 200 years, though, the content creators have lobbied and won multiple limit-extensions, stretching it to the author’s life plus seventy (70) years.

Let’s think about this for a second. The founding fathers wanted us to protect copyrights for inventors for twenty-eight (28) years. Today, we are protecting their rights for 2.5 times that amount after the author or inventor is dead. Or, looking at it another way, let’s say that a twenty-five year old woman creates a video documentary in 2008 and lives ’til the ripe ol’ age of ninety-five. That work won’t enter the public domain for someone to build upon, in essence to “innovate” as Ms Wurtzel says in her peice, until 2148 — which is absurd in today’s digital Read/Write world. Today’d copyright laws have totally upset the balance that our forefathers attempted to achieve between the economic needs of authors and the innovation needs of our society. They must be updated in order for our economy to continue to thrive.

And now that any old anybody with opposable thumbs can operate a digital camera, international markets have found they favor the locally produced fare over yet another sequel to “Rush Hour.” Bombay prefers Bollywood to Hollywood.

Putting aside the fact that Bombay was renamed to Mumbai in 1995, why wouldn’t citizens of “the city formerly known as Bombay” prefer stories told in their native languages, using their own cultural references? Are we to believe that America is the only country of beings with opposable thumbs that are capable of telling great stories? Is it our birthright to hold a monopoly on the world’s audio-visual entertainment? Evidently, some people think we should:

Hegemony is over.

Yes, by its very definition, hegemony is indeed over. We’ll actually have to compete from now on.

The World is Flat. The Economics of Influence are forever changed. And until the recording and movie industries understand these things, they’ll continue attacking their customers and then lobbying Congress to provide air cover. As a result, Congress will continue to gather lobbyist funds while feeling good about protecting the rights of copyright holders — while systematically stifling the innovation society requires to take economic advantage of these new technologies.

Some pioneers are working very hard to solve these problems without reverting to featherbedding. For example, checkout the innovative things that Kevin MacLeod and Jonathan Coulton are doing for music. Or, follow the future of digital entertainment through the exciting work of machinima creators such as Phil “Overman” Rice. If you wanna read some great insight into new media business models for content, read Tim Street. And lastly, if you’d like to learn about work being done to update copyright laws, follow the work of Larry Lessig.

We haven’t solved the problems created by our new media technologies, but I’m convinced that the pioneers mentioned above will guide us well. Until then, the Traditionals will continue to miss the point entirely.

Tags: Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel riaa mpaa copyright US Constitution Kevin MacLeod Jonathan Coulton machinima Overman Tim Street Larry Lessig