to interact with you guys quite a bit. I'm pretty
obsessed with Q&A, so if you guys wanna
roll, I'm ready to go.
There's a lot of
different things I'd like to talk about but the
thing I probably want to most talk about is what
is up here which is, when I come and
speak at conferences, I'm always trying
to bring the most value that I can to the
audience and the thing that's difficult when
you speak at a conference of this size is what's the
make up of the audience. Are these founders,
are these executives, are they in digital marketing, are they B2B,
are they B2C, are they trying to
build a personal brand? There's a lot
of different things that everybody in this
room, in this conference is trying to accomplish so
what I think is a very good place to start is attention. I don't care what
you do in this room, I don't care about what
you're trying to accomplish, the key to all of it
is trading attention. Attention is the asset.
Before you tell me how great
your B2B SaaS social media product is or how your great your fuck you're
gonna t-shirt is or how great your sneakers are or great you are as a
tastemaker in bottled water or fashion or yoga,
before anybody in here gets to say what they're about, they need the end
person's attention. Attention is what
we're all trading. What Boz's whole talk
really was about was attention. Once you have the attention,
all the action starts.
And the way I really
think about this is a framework of you know, who you are, how you're
going to talk about it and where you're going to
talk about it, WHW, right? What are you
going to talk about? So many of you in
this room have not started. Whether you're talking about
yourself or your product, you've not started the process
of actually communicating what you're all about. What is it? What is your manifesto? What is your product
bringing to the table? Why should I give a
shit about what you're up to? Now the reality is, so
many of you are at such an early stage that
manifesto should actually just be your mission, right? You haven't done anything yet, this whole fake
it 'til you make it brings no value to anybody. You need to tell me
what you're gonna do which is very scary 'cause you
actually have to execute on.
The next part
that so many of you have to think about is how. I'm very concerned
that most people feel that whatever
the current thing is, is what you have to do. So as many of you know video
is massively over indexing in the game right now. Facebook video,
YouTube crushing it.
But there's so
many people in here that shouldn't
be producing video because that is not the
best way they communicate. Only a decade ago,
if I was speaking here all I would be
talking about is blogging. Which was one of
the few platforms that I never got involved
with in the last 20 years because even though I've
written four New York Times best selling books,
I can't write for shit. I can't put three
sentences together that make any sense, if I
didn't have a ghostwriter, I would have zero books.
Yet, there are
people in this room that are caught up by
picture and video communication and they are tremendous
writers and they don't realize that blogging or
posting on Medium or even my favorite
little hack right now, if you're a good writer
and you want to build up a profile for your
business or for yourself, I actually highly
recommend you start blogging inside of Facebook
and Instagram. I literally mean
writing 7, 15, 25 sentences, three, four, five
paragraphs of written content within your feeds that people
will absolutely consume. See the reason I know
that is another theme before I get into
the last W of where, the reason I say that is because the other
thing I wanted to speak about this morning is something
that really matters to me which is the following,
we're living through and this room
is filled with them and the whole world
is filled with them, we're living through
the greatest era of headline readers. The amount of
people in this audience who have their own ideas
about Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, blogging, podcasting,
SEO, SEM, programmatic, whatever it may be,
the amount of people here that have strong opinions
on the ROI of these things, yet they've never executed
a single ad on Snapchat or executed more than
three or four campaigns on these platforms
is startling to me.
I am stunned by the
lack of practitioner-ship in our space. You have so
many people pontificating about what's going on, yet
they've never done anything. There are people rolling
around with Amazon Alexa voice skills points of view and they don't have
an Echo in their home. They've never written a
skill, they have no idea.
They've read a
Business Insider article, they've read a TechCrunch post, they've read something once, their best friend
is good at technology and said something
that they now parrot. But we are living
through ungodly amounts of people who read
a couple of headlines and have a point
of view and just roll. The amount of people that
congratulated me yesterday because I was an
early investor in Snapchat that don't realize that
I have to wait six months before I get to sell my
stock and who gives a shit about what it does on day
one, I still have five months and 30 days before
anything actually happens is interesting to me. It was an interesting, I was,
I got 3,000 congratulations and I replied not yet,
not yet, not yet.
We're living in
a world politically, we're living in a world socially and we are definitely
living in a business world, practically that is
absoutely not in the trenches. The best way I articulate
it is the following, we have a whole lot of people
that want to be architects and we have very few plumbers
and masons in our industry. And so what does that mean?
Why am I fascinated by that? It speaks to
the last of the WHW. Once you know what
you're going to say, your manifesto,
your promise, your words, your mission of the product, once you know how
you're going to say it and that matters,
video, audio, written word, they all work.
Podcasting reemerged
in the last three years after voice wasn't winning,
video clearly dominating, written word still very strong, way too many people
here disrespecting it, but the next part is where. How do you get
people to actually know what the hell you're up to, what you're about, what your
product and service is up to, especially when
you have no audience. I love when people say,
Gary it's easy for you now. You have a million followers
plus on all these platforms.
Great Rick, I had zero ten
years ago asshole, I worked. Right?
(Audience laughter) And so what I want
to remind everybody is, in 2007 when
I had zero audience, I spent 12 hours a
day on the where part, and that part at the
time was using a site called Summize.Com, which
was later Twitter Search, and I searched
every single person that mentioned the word
wine and I replied to them. And that was my hand-to-hand
combat of arbitrage. Today, every single person
here has a product and service, a mission, something
that brought them here today.
Everybody wants the world or
a certain part of the world to know what they're up to
and there's incredible ways to get that awareness
around what you're doing. For example, it is stunning
to me how many people want to build their Instagram
audience and they don't do the two core things that
build an Instagram audience. Number one, they don't
use 10, 15 or 20 hashtags to be discovered,
because that's the plumbing of that ecosystem. Number two, they don't
spend two to three hours a day direct messaging
until Instagram stops them all the individuals
that have the awareness that they aspire for
and ask them for awareness for what they're
doing by offering that person something in return.
You're not gonna DM somebody
who has 837,000 followers on Instagram and they're
just gonna post your picture. You need to pay attention
to what they care about, DM them with something
that matters to them, and return, hope, that
they'll give you awareness. And you need to do it
for two or three hours a day because one out of every 97,
one out of every 336 is actually gonna do it for you. But here's one way
I promise you that you will not build
your Instagram profile.
By not doing anything, by sitting and having
a beer with your friend and complaining that it's so
hard to build your profile. Actually, you know what? Can I spend a
second on complaining? Come here, can I spend
a second on complaining? You want to do this with me? Let's talk about complaining. There are only two people,
two groups of people that will actually
listen to your complaining. Are we doing a selfie? Two groups.
(Audience laughing) Thanks.
One, the four to five
people that love you the most, your mother, your spouse, the people that have to. (Audience laughing) The other group of
people that will listen to your complaining are
your other loser friends. (Audience laughing) Yeah, that's, actually,
I'm done, thank you. (Audience laughing
and applauding) I'm glad some
people clapped on this because I am
blown away by the people that are trying
to aspire, you know, I'm fascinated
by how many of you, and when I say you
I don't mean this room, I mean fuckin' the world,
how many of you have your mouth, your
ambitions, the things you say you're gonna do so
far ahead of your actions.
So many people telling
me that they're gonna build 10, 50, 100,
$200 million companies and they're scared
to work 12 hours a day. We are not catching up in
our actions to our ambitions. And what it leads to is
a whole lot of complaining. Of course, it's
supposed to be hard.
People are like,
"Gary, it's so hard." No shit, asshole, you want
to make millions of dollars and live your perfect life,
why should that be easy? Makes no sense. Do you know that
most people in this room, with their ambitions for
their startups or careers, are actually
projecting to a 1% life? Do you know how that
math actually works out? We're completely
disconnected from reality and, and as a lot of people
in here that maybe have a couple of gray hairs or losing
their hair like I am know, we've lived through a very
good global economic period over the last
seven or eight years. I want to remind
everybody here who's be in tech for 20 years about
the late '90s early 2000s and 2007 and '08. My friends, if I can
leave this trip to Germany with one thing,
I'm gonna leave you with this, please, and I mean please,
forget about the inspiration and the awesome fuckin'
DJ and the good speakers, forget all that, I'm asking
you to do one thing for me.
Please get practical,
please get practical. Let me tell you why. If you have a startup in this
room and you're losing money each month 'cause
you've raised capital, you're in deep fucking shit. Let me explain why.
It doesn't take a hero
or a successful entrepreneur to lose money each month. And when inevitably,
whether it's tomorrow morning or 24 months from now,
but I sure know when we go seven or eight
years of economic growth, we're just a few minutes
away, again, I don't know if it's tomorrow, I don't know
if it's four years from now, but it just
can't go another seven, that when that money dries up,
when that money is gone, you actually have to make money. Over the two
cycles of tech innovation and this space that
I've been in, what happens is everybody here goes from
saying entrepreneur and founder into their Instagram
to working at Bank of America or GE. It is, right now,
let's do a call to arms.
Let's use this
remarkable event to not only get inspired and rah-rah and
cheer ourselves up in our bullshit ecosystem,
let's use today for everybody to
look in the mirror and ask themselves if
they're being practical about what they're doing because
it can't go great forever. And the best way to
survive it is to be practical. How many people have a
startup or an entrepreneur running their own business?
Raise your hands. I implore you to
get very serious about what I'm talking about.
For the rest of you
and the rest of us, it is time to trade attention. We are living through the
greatest era of business ever. It is remarkable
that this has become the remote control
of our lives. There's nothing, nothing
more important than this.
When I hear the word social
media, I know so many people think of that as a sprinkle,
as an afterthought, as an emerging kind of thing.
To me, it is every minute of what people spend on this
device outside of utilities and games. It is the foundation, it is the
foundation of our society. This is the remote
control of our lives, and over 50% of our
time is spent on one of these seven or eight social networks. To me the term social
media is the slang term for the current
state of the internet.
And I implore you,
and I promise you, that if your strategy
around communicating on those seven, eight,
nine websites that matter is not the first
thing on your mind, you will have zero
relevancy over the next decade. And, most importantly,
and this matters, what scares me quite a
bit is that most of you, when you see these logos, you
think of a piece of content that you make and you
think of those five channels and more as places
where you distribute it. These are not just
distribution channels. These are channels where you
have to natively story tell in the context of the platform.
The videos that work
on YouTube versus Facebook are different. You
don't take the same video and just post it
for distribution. The picture on Instagram
and Facebook is different. You are disrespecting
the psychology of the user, even if it's, that dude right
there with the white hat and the Hustle Mode t-shirt,
when he's on Instagram and he's on Facebook,
he's a different dude.
His mindset's different,
he follows different people. He's on those
channels for different reasons. It is imperative that not
only do you start thinking about your content
strategy on these platforms for your business. How many people here
are in the B2B business, B2B? Higher.
Perfect. B2B friends, you are
disrespecting how much B2B business is happening here. Facebook allows you to target
the employees of customers. You could make a
three minute video that says does the CFO of
your company know and then send it to
all the employees of and then all of a sudden,
that CFO is getting 50, 60 emails from employees
from his or her company making them aware of
your SaaS product for the CFO.
This is what I'm talking
about, about headline readers versus practitioners. Headline readers don't think
that B2B is happening here. Practitioners are exploiting
it and making real money. Headline readers
think that you have to make short videos on social media.
Practitioners are making
20, 30, 40-minute videos telling their story, compelling
people into their world, remarketing to the people
that actually want in on it and close it and close
those sales by remarketing. If somebody watched
37 minutes of your video about you or your business,
when you remarket that view with a call to action,
you don't think you're gonna convert them? My friends, we are looking,
we are living through this incredible era of
massive opportunity. Yet, everybody's
talking and reading and nobody's fucking doing. Start fucking executing.
Don't read about
how to win on Snapchat. Download the fucking app
and do something, dick face. (Audience applause) Right? I don't know you six at
all, but I promise you this. You're not sitting
there because you postured or pondered or thought about it.
You fucking
executed somehow, right? - [Man] Yeah. - I mean, you didn't think
you'd be really fucking rad to throw a conference. You fucking did it. You didn't dream
about fucking spinning.
You fucking
practiced and got better. Your grandparents,
my grandparents, they had it shit compared to us. We have the internet. I don't know if
you've heard about it.
It's really fucking good. And what it does is it
allows us to be practical about having a much
better life if we choose to put in the work. You could actually work
your 9 to 5, pay your bills, come home, have a
beer and then start working on what you want because
the infrastructure exists. Your grandparents
had to have their job.
They couldn't open
their other business 'cause it was at night and like,
this is a remarkable era to be around and yet we
are completely wasting it. Let me actually throw
you for a complete curveball. You know what
you all need to do? You all need to go and volunteer at a
senior citizen home. If you want to do one
thing, if anything besides being practical and start
making money instead of losing money is what you remember
from this talk this morning, please make it that you need
to go to a senior citizen home and volunteer for one day.
Here's what I want you to do. Spend one day at a
senior citizen home and I promise you you
will leave with the following. You will leave that the
scariest thing in the world, the scariest thing in the world
to human beings is regret. What you will see in
those 80 and 90-year-olds, some will be happy
and they'll be content, but you will see
something at scale that scares the living shit out of me.
It's called regret. The amount of people
that wish they did things is scary and let me
promise you something. When you're 93,
it's hard to pull it off. We are so fortunate.
We live in an era right
now where mainstream media in every part of the
world is pumping down nothing but negativity
yet every piece of data shows you that this is the greatest era to
ever be alive in. I understand we have problems. We all have massive
problems but they're not as bad as they used to be. As bad as Brexit
or Trump or terrorism, as bad as anything you
think is depending on your points of view, it's better
than the Black fucking Plague.
We have to put things into
context and if you're fortunate enough to be here today,
to know to be here today, to afford to be here today,
you are sitting in an incredible spot of the
7.7 Billion people on Earth and I just don't understand
why you wouldn't take full advantage of it
and it starts with something very basic, which is
actually start understanding how this is all
working deeper, not wider. You don't need to know in
theory how AI and Alexa voice and VR and social media work. You need to
start understanding how one of those things work deeply. I've gotten here today
because I didn't come to conferences and talk or make
videos or build a personal brand for the first
15 years of my career.
Let me remind many of you. Long before I was GaryVee,
I was Gary Vaynerchuk building a liquor
store by being good at email marketing, at Google
AdWords, at banner retargeting, at YouTube marketing. I was a fucking practitioner
and then once I built something from zero
to, three to 60 million with no money,
once I built something, then I had a little
audacity to come and talk to you about how I did it. The amount of 23-year-old
business coaches and marketing gurus
who haven't done dick shit in their fucking
life that's out there on Instagram
right now is startling.
It is time to
do and less talking and more fucking doing. (Audience applause) Right?
- [Man] Yeah, I try to do. - You agree, right? - Random shit,
Instagram influencers. Instagram influencers
right now today for doers, is probably only
behind Facebook ads, the single best
arbitrage in marketing.
The fact that you
can reach out to people that have 300, 3,000, 30,000, 300,000 and 3 million followers and trade with them for exposure for your product and
service is remarkable. Especially 'cause
80% of them don't know how to price themselves and
they're grossly underpriced. 10% Of them are
so overpriced because they think their
followers of a lot of followers means that they're valuable. So you have to be
careful of the top end.
But when you start getting into that 30,000 to
400,000 followed people, the remarkable value of
just giving 'em the product or giving them 100 bucks to
give a shout out on a product. So many peoples'
businesses and careers would be in a much
greater place today if they spent three
to five hours a day, DM'ing Instagram influencers and business
developing with them, and building
exposure for their brands. Yet most of you will hear
this, you'll be like yeah, you might do it for a day. I said three to
five fucking hours.
You may do it for a day,
you may do it for a week, you may not do it at all. And then in four years from now, you'll look back and regret it. How many people have
been doing digital marketing or business in the
internet world for 15 years or more? Just raise you hands,
just curious. High, please raise it
high, just curious.
A lot of you who've
raised your hands know that if I was giving this
speech when I was building Wine Library in 2001 and I was
talking about Google Adwords, and they were five
and 10 cents a click, a lot of you with your
mindset would still be trying to figure out what
the ROI of that was. Why direct mail was better,
or newspapers were better. That most people
weren't on search yet and why would
people go to Google, Yahoo! Was the leader. That's what you would debate.
Yet we all sit
here 10, 15 years later, regretting that we
didn't spend all our money on Google adverts
'cause the arbitrage was unbelievably
phenomenally underpriced. I'm saying this now
not for the 5,000 of you, I'm saying what I'm
about to say for myself 'cause I'm selfish because
DRock's somewhere here and I'm gonna use the
clip for myself in five years to prove to everybody
that I was right. As we sit here today, if you
are not spending the majority of your money on your marketing, on Facebook ads,
on Instagram influencers, you are making
a massive mistake. In 36 to 48 months all
of you will be spending three, four, five, six, 10, 15 times more money to achieve the same goal
that can be achieved today.
So I implore you, if you do not know how to do
Facebook advertising at scale, if you do not
know what's going on in the influencer marketing
specifically on Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat as well, that there's an incredible
website that you can go to that will help you
figure out every little detail of what I can't get to in here
over the next five minutes. So I know some of you
like to write down sites, I see some of you pulling out, I'll spell if for you. G-O-O-G-L-E. (Audience laughter) You like that one? It's good right? - I know that one.
- Yeah I mean it's remarkable
me how many people ask me well Gary how
do I do that zip code or that's employees
of Facebook ad? You google how do
I run Facebook ads against employees of companies? Enter, 600 fuckin' thousand
results on how to do it. Practitioner-ship. I've been in this game
for 20 years right now and I promise you from the
day I met Boz 10 years ago, it is very simple. 99% Of people talk,
pontificate, read and think and 1% do.
The more you can
push yourself to do, the more you can take risks. The fact that not
every person in the world wakes up every morning, opens
their Apple or Google phone, looks at the top 100 apps on
either one of those platforms, and then downloads any
app that they're not aware of, whether that's Marco Polo,
or Anchor, Musical.Ly, or House Party today,
or SnapChat and Instagram three or four years ago,
blows my mind. You will always
know what's coming by just looking at the data. People always say to me,
you're always so right.
People are like how
do you know the future? I'm like listen
I'm not Nostradamus. This is very simple. I do the work. I wake up in the morning,
I open my Apple phone, I go to the App Store app, I go to top 150
free apps in the world, I go to the bottom first, and anything I've never seen
before that's hit the top 150, I click it, I read,
if it's a social network, I download it, I taste it.
Yes, I do understand
consumer behavior maybe a little
bit better than most, but I would've
never gotten there if I didn't
download it, read it, used it and put in the work. And what I know is for every
Plurk, for every SocialCam, for every Vine, for every
Marco Polo or other things that doesn't make it, all you have to do
is go 1 out of 50 for it all to be worth it. I'm willing to put in the work, I'm willing to
be a practitioner, I'm willing to be practical. I think about the WHW, the what the
hell am I gonna say, how am I gonna say it, and where am I gonna say it, and I do it over and over
and over and over and over and over and
over and over and over and over and over and over.
And I will do it
for the rest of my life. I will become a billionaire. I will buy the New York Jets, and I will win
Super Bowls, thank you. (Audience applause and cheers) (upbeat music).
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