Blogworld Expo 2008 - Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV Keynote

To say that this was an energetic Blogworld session is a vast udnerstatement. Gary is one of those people who seems to be single-handedly hasterning the entropy death of the Universe. He is a creature of pure energy and his style and passion made this hour go by very fast. His theme was that social media was all about branding and getting yourself known as an expert in your area. Here are some notes I managed to take amidst the flurry of good advice from Gary.

• You need to spend 2-3 hours a day of communicating on blogs and in the comments. Find the blog leaders in your field and participate in their comments. Answer every email and every comment on your blog forever. This community work is huge – build up name recognition by leaving comments everywhere. If you know what you’re talking about, you’ll win.
• Content is king, but marketing is queen and the queen runs the household.
• Technology is fine, but the connection is the factor, what makes us tick are the human connections. You have to go to every meet up that you possibly can.
• You need to build up brand equity by sharing your knowledge. You need to be pumping out content every day, if not, you will be out-hustled.
• Hustle is an imperative essence of this. Things don’t just happen. If you want to build a business, you have to work like mad.
• You have to put out great content and you have to find money – find a way to monetize your content.
• Gary said he doesn’t sell wine, he was building personal equity. With that, he earned the offers he has received. For example, Guy Kawasaki has brand equity.
• You need to become the king of your domain. We’re in the middle of a gold rush.
• You have to be doing what you love because you’ll need to work 17 hours a day. You need to Google the topics you are trying to work so you can get them to buy advertising on your site. There are more and more people in the corporate world who get it.
• If your goal is to build a company and sell it, then you need to make money. People don’t want to buy companies with users, they want to buy companies that make money.
• Make swag for your products – that’s the quickest way to build brand equity.
• You have to be patient waiting for your marketing efforts to pay off. The big players in the corporate world know it’s coming and they have patience.
• Work on getting the most traffic you possibly can. The best way to do that is to become part of the community where the community knows you and knows you’re an expert.
• You need to have a huge email button on your blog. You want to induce conversation at every turn. You need to have friend buttons for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. Your job is to create a connection - a two way connection. You need to have your IM address available all the time.
• Remember that your goal is to build business, not go hang out with people.
• You have to be authentic. (We heard that in every session.)
• Check out Ping. fm. It allows you to tweet to multiple platforms.
• Using the @ in Twitter is a great way to make connections.
• He spends a lot of time searching for people who say bad things about him and he engages them and converses with them. Don’t waste your time on hating people. Spending any energy at all being angry at other people is a waste of time. Don’t spend your time finding people to be angry with, instead find places to leave comments on your expertise.
• Comment on all of the big blogs in your area.
• Gary tried a full-page ad in the New York Times. It cost about $30-40,000 and resulted in no payoff at all. It’s just a matter of time before the Internet kills off the newspapers and the old media.
• Gary's method is not scalable, but you need to do it as long as you can.
• Team up with others and don’t worry about how much they’re contributing – take every viewer you can get.
• People resist the new media because they can’t control their message.

Gary Vaynerchuk