The New York Times had a long piece over the weekend about Gary Vaynerchuk, perhaps best known for the wine videos he used to produce, but now the founder and CEO of VaynerMedia, "which opened in 2009 and now has 290 employees, serving clients as mainstream as Del Monte, General Electric and PepsiCo. They come in the hope that Mr. Vaynerchuk can do for them what he has already done for himself: build an online audience through pluck, ubiquity and charm," using social media to sell things.
"If reducing virtually all human interaction to purely transactional terms isn’t your style, you probably should avoid Gary Vaynerchuk," the Times writes. "Since his childhood days hawking baseball cards at convention halls in New Jersey, and later pitching wine online at his father’s liquor store, he has dedicated most of his waking life to a single puzzle: What will sell more stuff?
"In recent years, that puzzle has given ulcers to a lot of executives. They have watched the rise of Facebook and Twitter, along with the advent of commercial-skipping technologies like DVRs and hardware like the iPad, and realized that spending money on television, print and radio will no longer suffice. But how do you market to people in these virtual realms? Given that these platforms are supposedly about friends connecting — it’s called social media for a reason — will anyone listen and look? Is it too much to ask for a return on this investment?"
Vaynerchuk believes not … and you can read more about it here. (After you read it, you can decide whether you are buying or not.)
"If reducing virtually all human interaction to purely transactional terms isn’t your style, you probably should avoid Gary Vaynerchuk," the Times writes. "Since his childhood days hawking baseball cards at convention halls in New Jersey, and later pitching wine online at his father’s liquor store, he has dedicated most of his waking life to a single puzzle: What will sell more stuff?
"In recent years, that puzzle has given ulcers to a lot of executives. They have watched the rise of Facebook and Twitter, along with the advent of commercial-skipping technologies like DVRs and hardware like the iPad, and realized that spending money on television, print and radio will no longer suffice. But how do you market to people in these virtual realms? Given that these platforms are supposedly about friends connecting — it’s called social media for a reason — will anyone listen and look? Is it too much to ask for a return on this investment?"
Vaynerchuk believes not … and you can read more about it here. (After you read it, you can decide whether you are buying or not.)
- KC's View:
