- On this episode, I talk about negative reviews,
that are anonymous, the but, and the climb.
(energetic music)
Hey everybody, this is Gary Vay-ner-chuk and this
is episode 79 of The #AskGaryVee Show.
Thanks for being on with me.
Meerkat, what's up?
You know, I don't have a whole lot to say actually.
I really just don't.
I think we should just into the show, and focus.
I'm growing a beard, oh--
How do I have nothing to say?
Darrelle Revis has come home.
Nothing is more exciting to not only get back
one of the great Jet players of all time,
while he still has some really solid years in him,
but to take him from the dreaded, hated, awful,
disgusting, worst ever New England Patriots,
that has been just a tremendous, tremendous
feeling and I'm very happy about it.
Darrelle, welcome home.
- [Voiceover] Theresa asks, "What is your 'but'
and how do you get off of it?
What's the biggest "but" you hear from others
that's holding them back?"
- Theresa, the amount of buts that I hear, is actually
stunningly overwhelming.
I pride myself in not being a but guy,
and so, I think that the buts that I hear are all the time.
I didn't have any money.
I didn't have a chance, I grew up in a poor neighborhood.
I didn't have a mentor.
I didn't get the lucky break.
People are loaded with buts.
It's why the majority of people fit into the standard
of ones life right?
Whatever those ambitions may be, I think that
for me, my but is usually--
But I love the process, I love the climb.
When I don't achieve the maximum upside in
my career, it's going to be predicated on the fact
that I hedged about loving the process,
and so within the context of finances,
I didn't buy the Jets, because, but--
You know, is really, that whole thing is because,
oh, I liked the grind too much, and that didn't allow
me to scale and create the level of wealth I needed to be
able to actually pull it off.
That's my narrative, and so that's my but,
but I love the process.
The amount of buts I hear though,
are just everything, and really--
You know, what but is, is it's an excuse, and now
look, before I finish with my rah rah scenario,
let's very much understand there's real stuff going
on in the world.
I mean, you may be born in a part of the world
where there's a dictator, or communism, or
just you know--
Do I think that is as easy to be a female
entrepreneur in the Middle East, as it is to be
in New York City? No, I do not.
Do I think that it's harder for somebody that's
born in Mississippi, a non white male,
in America, as it is for somebody that is born in
L.A. white male, to succeed?
I do, but on the flip side, let me flip it,
I think the hustle and the grind of coming from the grind
has a big advantage.
I see a ton of--
I think some people--
Some people think you're dead on impact
because you're born a minority or,
or in a bad spot, or to a drug infested home
that you're predisposed to losing.
Ironically in my weird twisted brain, in the game that
I play, the hustle game, the real climb,
like it's almost equally predicated on your spirit
and your gusto as it is on your skill set.
I think a lot of people that are born into kush
are in a setback situation because it's gonna come
so easy, and so, I just think it's how you optically
look at the world, but I will tell you this,
I hate excuses man.
I hate them with all my heart.
I really take enormous pride, and I mean it.
We just had a hard core, right guys, we had a hard core
meeting, I don't know if any of you were here,
VaynerMedia meeting on Friday, where I talked about
stuff and I'm always scared that I don't know if the
team believed me, when I said, "Hey look, before I start,
this is my fault."
But I really mean it.
I take pride in taking blame.
It's crazy.
You know, it's funny, this Jets/Patriot thing.
I see all these Pat fans making fun of me, right,
yesterday, and I feel sad for them that they've won
four Super Bowls.
I like the climb and the grime, and trying to win it, right,
and that's kind of how I think about buts, and blames,
and excuses.
I take pride and I like taking the blame in front of my
whole company and saying this is my fault, even though
I know there's so many other people that
are at fault as well, I'll take that on me.
So, you know, buts are bad, but they're not as
obvious as I think that some people may think.
- [Voiceover] Robert asks, "Is there value in using social
to engage with customers, even if they're not in your market
and will never buy from you?
- Robert, this is a great, great, great, great question,
because riding the hashtag, I wrote a blog post about that,
ding, you know, and all that stuff, but
your questions is the right question, which is
what's the ROI of jumping in--
So the Apple watch comes out, and everybody's
talking about it, what's the ROI of you know
Twinkie putting a Twinkie on their wrist and saying
yea this is our version of it, or riding a trend and putting
out content of what everybody's talking about
whether it's that new technology, a new app, Meerkat,
a new celebrity, you know, whatever it is,
if they are not likely to buy from you.
Look, I think the value is very low, and I think that
that may throw somebody for a loop, but the
truth is, the one upside is the home run,
the anomaly, which is, you get somebody because
they care about that trending topic, and they amplify you,
which then brings people awareness to your high
end shoe store, or purses, or your $50,000
pieces of art. So, as people have become the infrastructure
of media distribution, riding the conversation of what
people care about, with the hope that they create
the retweet, the reblog, the share, that then creates the
amplification of awareness to somebody who is connected
to them, does have some Hail Mary,
some rogue, long tail
upside, but speaking to, and communicating with,
people who are not going to buy your product
no matter what, does not have enormous ROI.
Never did in the old world, has a little bit more now,
because they have the opportunity to share it and
bring awareness to people who may buy, but it
is absolutely limited and it's a tactic that needs strong
strategy around it.
- [Voiceover] Brendan asks, "I'm biking across Canada
for Pencils of Promise and documenting my daily videos
on YouTube, what other jabs could I use so that
I'm not just right hooking for donations?
- Hey Bren, as a proud board member of Pencils of Promise,
I want to thank you personally for your adventures.
You know, the jab, content wise, obviously even this little
question had a great content, beautiful views,
India was really taken aback.
And so, let's just show India being taken aback---
- Wow.
- And so, that was amazing, and so--
The jab that I'm looking for from you, you know,
you didn't take this biking adventure for kicks and giggles,
obviously the charity component is in you,
but it's not the only thing, people always do things that
are selfish to them at some level,
so you want to create video content and document it.
Maybe you're a documentary thing, you know,
you're using this great thing you're doing as a global
jab to maybe bring you awareness to an opportunity in the future.
I want you to take a step back because I think you're gonna
do all the jabbing right, right put out good content
on Instagram, and SnapChat, and Facebook and different
native, you know, The Book, "Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook"
respect the platforms, and put out good content.
The one thing that I think is missing from a lot of
people's repitouires when they're in this world, is the
listening, the bionic ears of what Twitter search is.
If I were you, the other jab, you can do at scale, is to
go into Twitter search, and search people who are talking
about Pencils of Promise and then jumping into
their conversation, and not jumping in and saying
cool that you raised money, like "Oh, I raised $48 for
"Pencils of Promise in my school book fair, fourth grader."
Tweets, right, or the mom of the fourth grader.
You don't jump in and say cool, "I'm doing this,
"watch this."
That's too much of right hook.
You jab within the listening,
oh I like that.
You jab within the listening, and so what you do
is you jump in there and say, "That is phenomenal."
And just by you interacting with that person,
they're gonna maybe look in your profile and then
they'll see your latest 3 or 4 Tweets were around this
content, and then you've really double jabbed
into the funnel of that donation, right,
you jabbed within the listening. You jabbed
with the content, that became the gateway to the
donation, or whatever you're trying to achieve the
awareness, so a shit load more Twitter searching, I think
would be a tremendous opportunity.
As a matter of fact, this is an enormous opportunity to do
a humble brag, so DRock you're gonna have to do
some editing for this episode, because I want you to
really take over the screen, and maybe use some
music, maybe non Hip-Hop music,
and so what you can do is take over the screen
for 10 or 11 seconds, because I want people to really,
really absorb this very proud moment of mine, which
is some data has just came out of who has spoken
in the social sphere to the most individual
people, and you can see, I'm enormously proud,
poppa of my execution, of being number one,
and Steve, I don't know if you saw, let's show Steve
and his reaction to this.
Not only was I number one--
- We're double number two.
- I mean it was India, you saw the data right,
like dismantled--
As a matter of fact, number two, three, and four
combined probably got close to my number.
I'm very proud of this, and I think it speaks to the
advice that I'm giving you here..
So it was fun to answer your question, but it was
maybe even more fun to humble brag that I'm number one,
in actually talking to me, and that's why there's ROI.
- [Voiceover] Nicole asks, "How do you deal with reviews
that could impact your business?"
- Nicole this is a great question.
One of the reasons I had always been a big push
against cut guy, I don't know what that means,
why I was a loud advocate in the other direction
of things of Yelp, and other things of that nature,
was they were anonymous reviews, and I knew of
PR agencies that were getting paid to leave negative
reviews of their competitors stuff,
which is why I was always a big fan of Facebook and Facebook
Connect, real identity.
There's two things to understand, one I do think anonymous
reviews, and anonymous review sites are losing their equity.
I do think that Steve and India, and all of you watching,
and everybody at Meerkat, what's up.
You know, I love doing that,
Take anonymous reviews with a grain of salt, right?
Like that's changed, like from 2004, compared to now,
you just take them with a grain of salt because we have
become cynical to knowing people do it on purpose.
The big thing that I think you should do when somebody,
your right, we live in this crappy world, where you guys
are serving at a restaurant, and I always use restaurant
because they--
Or an airline, airlines are doing things so right, on a
like they're flying planes, machines in the air,
on crossing the world, at scale, landing at the proper
times, leaving at the proper times, keeping us safe,
they're given us wi-fi in there, it's cozy.
These are big machines, they're like flying through the air,
and if it's like a 8 minute delay, you're like "Fuck you
"Delta," I mean it's crazy, it's crazy talk, anyway,
so you're right, we don't get the credit for the good,
we get dismantled for the bad, right? Like the athletes
that are doing wrong things all over the place,
all the one that are doing charitable things and
great things, nobody wants to cover that.
It's just unfortunately the way it is.
Now, did my boy Aton get a rare, that
he's making a comeback.
That makes me happy, I can't wait to see what he did,
make sure you email me that moment because I don't watch
the show.
(laughing)
I think that you should jump into any Yelp review, or any
foursquare review, or any review, any negative review
that you have to jump in and answer every one of them
immediately.
"Hey, saltypants49, call me, here's the number.
"I'm super upset. I don't understand.
"I remember you."
Don't fight it.
Fighting it is feeding the wrong energy.
You're in business, this is their opinion.
They could be wrong, but you need to at least have one
more level of empathy and listening before you get
into the fight of it, and so the way you can
handle it is by jumping, monitoring it, and jumping into
all of them, because the optics of you jumping in,
to the rest of the world, is actually more powerful in the
amplification of who and what your intent is,
and the depth of actually giving a crap about that
one person, really, really matters.
- Hey Gary, here's my question, when will social marketing
spending be bigger than television commercials?
- Fred, great question.
First of all, if you guys don't know who Fred Wilson is,
then you know nothing about the startup in the VC
community in New York or the world.
One of the great VCs of all time, Fred.
I don't like you for that, I like you because you're a
Jets fan.
We got Revis, can you believe it?
So, Fred, great question, I appreciate you asking it.
My gut answer, and I'm going to use social as current
digital platforms, let me explain why.
My answer to that question is somewhere in the ballpark
of 35, 20, 22 years, long,
and by then, I don't think
we're going to be calling them social networks, we're going
to evolve to whatever they are, but digital
is eating up a lot of TV, but the web's been around for
20 years, the consumer web, since 95, and banners
and email, and Google adwords, they're still not making
an enormous dent against television.
Now we've got over the top.
My prediction is 22 years because
all these things take longer.
I also think advertising in general is gonna change and the
money is gonna go into content and it's all going
to be native and interwoven much more, but
you know, I'm not sure if I'm right about the year--
22 years out, 2037, but what I will tell you is this Fred,
that the TV commercial industry is in the early stages
of looking very similar to the late years of the newspaper
advertising world.
It was Craigslist that really was a very important,
kind of watershed moment to the death of newspaper
advertising, and I believe that it is
Netflix that is the same to the TV commercial world,
because as everything starts going over the top,
and people don't want to consume commercials,
and really you could even say DVRs, right TiVo,
probably was the first precursor to it, but we're well
on our way, you know, question of the day,
how many people in this room actually
watch television commercials?
and I don't mean this room, I mean the
people that are watching, I mean Meerkat,
give it to me right now.
Everybody's watching when they want, how they want,
outside of live TV shows, which are basically live result
shows, awards shows, and sports, guys without sports
the TV industry would be in such a different, different,
different place.
I asked my question of the day.
I enjoyed my mood, it was a very kind of like,
interesting mood.
It was an interesting mood, episode 79,
80 coming up.
- [DRock] Tomorrow.
- Only 20 more shows before we hit 100.
You keep asking questions, I will keep answering them.
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