I admire Moo (www.moo.com) because they have used Flickr and Facebook to reinvent old, tired products—business cards, notecards, and stickers. Customers can use their own photos or upload images from any of Moo’s partner sites. You can even print a different image on every card within a single pack, allowing you to let people choose their favorite one and creating a ready-made conversation piece around your brand. It goes to show that any product can be huge when approached from a new angle.
youtube and/or viddler
These are both video platforms that I use and like. YouTube is like the ocean—it’s huge, you go out in it, and you can come home with a boatload of fish. But you’re also competing against millions of fishermen. Viddler is much smaller, which allows you to see and be seen with greater ease. It also allows you to brand your player, so that anyone who watches the video sees only your logo at the bottom, which I think has value. If you use YouTube, the YouTube logo appears at the bottom of all of their videos. Viddler also allows you to tag your video, which means you can earmark important moments for your viewers by placing a little dot within the video stream linked to a key word, allowing for easier searches should someone want to see a particular part of the video without sitting through the whole thing. For example, if I do a thirty-minute wine show and am discussing three wines, and you’re only interested in the third wine, you can go straight to that segment of the video because I’ll have marked within the video stream where my review of each wine begins.
YouTube has a larger user base, which can definitely be an advantage. You can embed from either site, which is as easy to do as copying and pasting the embed code. I do give Viddler an enthusiastic thumbs-up for the way it takes care of its users. Have you ever wondered how certain videos get featured on these sites’ homepages? YouTube is so huge and so swamped with video submissions that featured videos are usually a result of random luck, biz dev, and inside deals. Because Viddler is smaller, however, their staff is quickly able to assess new talent on their network and support that talent by featuring it on their homepage. Viddler doesn’t wait for you to make it big; they’ll give you a shot for a day or two if they think you’re good enough. They’re great at identifying talent early on.
ustream.tv
There is no way to overstate the importance of Ustream, one of the biggest brand-building products that I’ve used. It’s a platform that allows you to launch live video, but the cool part is that it also has a chat function that allows you to interact with your audience in real time, much like a radio call-in show.
How does the content you post on Ustream differ from what you post on your video blog, if that’s your preferred medium? Think of your blog as a formal presentation, a prepared speech about a predetermined topic in which you control the message and all the content. Once you’ve said your piece, you’re done. If anyone wishes to challenge you or ask for clarification or comment, they certainly can, but some time will pass before they get their answer. By the time you get back to them, you may have to remind them what they asked you in the first place. And if you decide to address their questions in a follow-up video, you have to hope that they come back to hear what you have to say.
Your Ustream video allows you to talk about your brand the way you might at a cocktail party during which you get a chance to work the room and find out what’s on everybody’s mind. By responding to chats while you livestream you can establish the most powerful—and empowering—interactive brand experience any consumer has ever known. Even live television can’t provide this kind of immediacy. It’s so sticky—people love to know they can come talk to you one-on-one. Best of all, it costs you nothing. Ustream is another classic example of an Internet platform that costs the brand and product nothing to use yet provides amazing return on investment.
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Natasha Wescoat is an artist known for her candied landscapes and whimsical characters. She is rising in popularity as a result of using social media tools to connect with her audience and engage with her collectors and potential buyers. As a result, her business has grown 50 percent in six months and her business network 80 percent. In addition to Twitter, she uses Ustream.tv to livestream her painting in the studio. It began as an experiment but within a week she had viewers buying directly from her LIVE online. Since then, she has used it as a tool for studio sales and auctions. By allowing her viewers to watch her create something, it inspires them to buy directly, then and there.
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word-of-mouth power moves
There are a few additional tools that can add a real boost to your word-of-mouth potential.
Just as it would be a shame to decide that Chardonnay is your favorite wine when you’ve hardly tried any other varietal, you should try every platform to see which ones work best for you. Now, when I was just getting started, Chris Mott, my camera guy, had to spend hours every night individually uploading the blog onto every single platform we were using. Luckily, there are now two sites that are going to make life a lot easier for you.
Ping.fm is a service that allows you to post a limited amount of text, such as a status update, one time, and then automatically distributes the update to any of over thirty social networking sites, including Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, Wordpress, Jaiku, Friendfeed, MySpace, and Del.icio.us. Currently the service doesn’t allow for video, but according to the site that capability is coming soon.
If you are a video blogger, you must have a TubeMogul account. It’s a website that allows you to upload your video once, then distributes it to countless video-sharing sites for free. It’s also a tracking service, offering analytics about who is watching your videos, when, from what sites, and how often.
Analytics
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I use analytics very rarely and I urge you not to rely too much on them either, especially if you’ve got good business instincts. A lot of times the stats and percentages related to my business just don’t support what my instinct says is true, and I’ll trust my instincts over numbers every time. What if your analytics tell you that you’ve only had seven views on Break.com in two months? Are you going to stop posting to that platform? The data are telling you that you should probably drop it, but what you don’t know is that one of those seven viewers is a producer for The Today Show. There’s no reason to think that can’t happen.
The numbers can be a trap that changes your behavior. People see they’ve only gotten fifty viewers in a few weeks and decide they suck and they stop trying as hard. Or their video catches on and gets watched a thousand times and they think they’ve made it, and they stop trying as hard. Metrics can be useful, of course, but the effect of your online interactions and the excitement building toward your brand isn’t accurately reflected by the number of viewers you have. It’s not about how many viewers you have, it’s about how passionate they are. If you must use them, analytics should remain a minor-league detail. Focus the majority of your attention on your overall brand positioning.
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Facebook Connect is a service that allows new users of your site to skip the long process of registering personal information—how many hundreds of times have you filled in boxes asking for your name, address, password, and so on, by now?—by pulling it from their Facebook page. It will also pull Facebook profile data to save them the slog of having to fill out yet again all of the personal and professional information onto the new site. So Facebook Connect is a huge time-saver for your viewers. In addition, when a Facebook member clicks “Connect with Facebook,” an announcement will be sent to her friends’ Facebook newsfeed and on her wall that she is now a user of your site. By now you should know why that’s a good thing—people with similar tastes to your new user see that newsfeed and think, “Hm, what’s that?” and then come see you for themselves. If you’re telling your story well and putting out awesome content, there’s no reason they won’t return and bring more friends with them.
We’re going to see a lot more of Facebook Connect in the future. It all
ows such quick interaction and site building that it has the potential to become as omnipresent and necessary as your cell phone and e-mail account.
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For a comprehensive list of many more tools and applications, go to www.somewhatfrank.com/2008/12/social-media-my.html
And check out these blogs:
TechCrunch
ReadWriteWeb
GigaOm
SocialTimes
Endgaget
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differentiate yourself
Everything we’ve talked about in this book so far—passion, knowing yourself, personal branding, word of mouth—has always been important to every successful business in history. These social networking sites have only changed the game by giving entrepreneurs a reason to ditch the sinking traditional media and advertising platforms in favor of a communication method that opens them up to markets that would have been inaccessible until just a few short years ago.
The thing is, just having a presence on these platforms doesn’t get you any further ahead of the competition because most entrepreneurs are getting wise to the need of having a Twitter and Facebook account, not to mention all the other platforms we’ve discussed. So how are you going to differentiate yourself from all the other clowns? (“Clowns” is, of course, used in the best possible way.) You’re going to do your content better, and you’re going to do it your way using the tools we just discussed.
Vitamins can give your body a real boost, but they won’t do you much good if you don’t also incorporate exercise, proper nutrition, and even vaccines into your healthy habits. The same goes for all of these platforms. Each one individually gives your personal brand strength and reach, but if you use them together properly, they can turn you into a force to be reckoned with.
The other thing you’re going to do is accept that just having good content and Internet access is not enough to take your business to the top. There are a lot of people who have good content, and everyone has the same access to the same tools as you do. What they don’t have (though they think they might), and what we’ll talk about in the next chapter, makes all the difference. After all, lots of people can play the piano, but not everyone can be Billy Joel.
seven
keep it real…very real
authenticity
We’ve talked about paying attention to your DNA, but while the concept of authenticity is closely related it’s not the same. Your DNA dictates your passion—whatever it is you were born to do; being authentic, and being perceived as such by your audience, relies on your ability to ensure that every decision you make when it comes to your business is rooted in being true to yourself.
For example, I would love to change the opening of my show. It starts off the same almost every time. “HELLO EVERYBODY AND WELCOME TO WINE LIBRARY TV. I AM YOUR HOST GARY VAY-NER-CHUK AND THIS, MY FRIENDS, IS THE THUNDER SHOW AKA THE INTERNET’S MOST PASSIONATE WINE PROGRAM.” It’s not exactly what some wine lovers are looking for in a wine expert, and I lose about 12 percent of my viewers right off the bat because I yell and scream like a maniac. For a businessman like me, that number is intolerable. I desperately want to change the opening of my show to something a little calmer, more refined, something that won’t scare people away. But I can’t, because that yelling, screaming, superexcited guy is who I am. If I tried to tone things down and make myself appealing to that missing 12 percent, I can guarantee that everything I’ve built until now would start slipping away, because now every time I’d get in front of that Flip Cam I’d be putting on an act. I’m not putting on a performance when I do the show or my blog posts—I’m just being me.
invest in the important stuff
One of the silliest questions I get is, “What kind of mic do you use?” To that I reply, why are you even worrying about that? Your content has nothing to do with the mic, the camera, the lighting, or the set. The day I filmed my first Thunder Show I sent the stock boy out to buy a $400 video camera from Best Buy (now I use a fancy Sony that cost a few thousand bucks, but most of my recent shows I tape on a $150 Flip Cam and they look fine). Watch the show, what do you see? It’s me, sometimes an awesome guest ranging from my dad to Wayne Gretzky to Jim Cramer, some bottles of wine, and a Jets spit bucket. I only invest effort and thought into what I care about and what I need to create great content.
My business blog, Garyvaynerchuk.com, is even less dressed up. A lot of times I’m filming from my office, which is usually a mess. I could clean it up to look more professional and polished, but it seems wrong to do that just because the Flip Cam is running. There’s nothing scripted and nothing staged about my blogs, and I always, always do only one take. No redos, no tweaks, nothing. People walk in and out of the office, I wave to folks passing in the hall—whatever happens during filming is what my audience will see. I’ve filmed posts from balconies, hotel rooms, the street, even my editor’s office—anywhere an idea strikes me. Sometimes the sound quality sucks. Sometimes the light is bad. As long as I get my point across and feel like I delivered the message in an authentic way, I don’t care.
Once upon a time the most popular celebrities were boxed up in such slick, sleek packages it was almost impossible to get a feel for their real personalities. Every move was choreographed, even their love lives, and even when they weren’t on the red carpet they were red-carpet ready. Those days are long gone. The celebrities of today, the ones who are making it huge by connecting with their fans, whether on the screen or online, are all about keeping it real and being themselves. No matter how big or small you want to go, your authenticity will be at the root of your appeal and is what will keep people coming to your site and spreading the word about your personal brand, service, or whatever you are offering.
If you want to dominate the social media game, all of your effort has to come from the heart; and it can’t come from the heart in the passionate, irrational, wholehearted way it needs to if you’re trying to be anyone but yourself. Authenticity is what will make it possible for you to put in the kind of hustle necessary to crush it.
hustle
I’ve said over and over that if you live your passion and work the social networking tools to the max, opportunities to monetize will present themselves. I’ve also said that in order to crush it you have to be sure your content is the best in its category. You can still make plenty of good money if you’re fourth best in a category, or ninth best, but if you really want to dominate the competition and make big bucks, you’ve got to be the best. Do that, be that, and no one will be able to touch you.
With one exception. Someone with less passion and talent and poorer content can totally beat you if they’re willing to work longer and harder than you are. Hustle is it. Without it, you should just pack up your toys and go home.
Now, I’m betting that most people who pick up this book consider themselves hard workers. Many are probably just sick of the killer hours and inflexible schedules and demanding bosses often found in the corporate world and think entrepreneurship will somehow be less taxing. I hate to disappoint, but if you’re looking for an easier time here, you’re barking up the wrong tree. There might be a little more flexibility to your day should you be at liberty to devote yourself full-time to building your personal brand, but otherwise, assuming you’re doing this right, you’ll be bleeding out of your eyeballs at your computer. You might have thought your old boss was bad, but if you want your business to go anywhere, your new boss had better be a slave driver.
Too many people don’t want to swallow the pill of working every day, every chance they get. If you’re making money through social media, you don’t get to work for three hours and then play Nintendo for the rest of the evening. That’s lip service to hard work. No one makes a million dollars with minimal effort unless they win the lottery.
The cool thing about hustle, though, is that it’s one more thing that equalizes the playing field. Fifteen years ago you could have had a rock-solid idea of your DNA and your passion, but there was a billion
to one chance of you actually crushing it in business—the platforms and channels were just too narrow and guarded by some pretty tight gatekeepers. Now we can take advantage of the explosion of tremendous, free digital platforms on the Internet, which are also making the gatekeepers more and more irrelevant. And now it’s no longer a special interest story if you make it big without family connections or money or an education, because everyone can do it. The only differentiator in the game is your passion and your hustle. Don’t ever look at someone else who has more capital or cred than you and think you shouldn’t bother to compete. You may only have a million-dollar business, and your biggest competitor may have a fifty-million-dollar business, but if you can outwork him or her, you will win over time.
Anything insane has a price. If you’re serious about building your personal brand, there will be no time for Wii. There will be no time for Scrabble or book club or poker or hockey. There will be time for meals, and catching up with your significant other, and playing with the kids, and otherwise you will be in front of your computer until 3:00 A.M. every night. If you’re unemployed or retired and have all day to work, maybe you knock off at midnight instead. Expect this to be all consuming.
The thing is, if you’re living your passion, you’re going to want to be consumed by your work. There’s no room for relaxation in the flop-on-the-couch-with-popcorn-and-watch-TV kind of way, but you won’t need it. You’re not going to be stressed or tired. You’re going to be relaxed and invigorated. The passion and love for what you do will enable you to work the hours necessary to succeed. You’ll lose track of the time, go to bed reluctantly, and wake up in the morning excited to do it all over again. You’ll be living and breathing your content, learning everything you can about your subject, about your tools, about your competition, and talking nonstop with other people interested in the same thing you are.