New Media: Serious Business Gary Vaynerchuk | Big Think

New Media: Serious Business

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Gary Vaynerchuk is “not here to joke around” when it comes to employing social media such as Facebook and Twitter to build his brand. The Internet has created a whole new economic playing field that is here to stay. He explains the meaning of the new media revolution, and tells Big Think a few of the many new media niches that are begging for someone to make millions filling.

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Gary Vaynerchuk:

Gary Vaynerchuk has captured attention with his pioneering, multi-faceted approach to personal branding and business. After primarily utilizing traditional advertising techniques to build his family’s local wine business into a national industry leader, Gary rapidly leveraged social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to promote Wine Library TV, his video blog about wine. As his viewership swelled to over 80,000 a day, doors opened to a book deal, several national TV appearances, and a flurry of speaking engagements around the world. Gary’s dual identity as both business guru and wine guy has made him the “Social Media Sommelier.”

Gary’s remarks on personal branding, social media, and business at FOWA, Strategic Profits, and South By Southwest occasioned praise from established web denizens including Kathy Sierra and earned the admiration of countless bloggers and aspiring entrepreneurs. Check out the Keynotes tab above for more video and check out Gary’s national TV appearances on the left!!

Gary’s landmark seven-figure book deal with Harper Studio was featured in The Wall Street Journal and he was recently profiled by The New York Times and Market Watch. Watch his interview with Business Week for Gary’s advice to entrepreneurs and small businesses.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What is your secret of social media success?

Gary Vaynerchuk: I just want people who are watching this; obviously I understand the profile of people that would watch this, to understand that I, and plenty of the people that I respect, are not in the business of collecting a million twitter friends. This isn’t ‘Ha, Ha.’ I’m not here to joke around. We’re here to build big businesses. This is a platform shift.

You’ve got to understand, we’ve been playing under the same rules of society for a long time when it comes to telling stories, newspaper, magazine, radio, billboards, television. And television way up here with other print media that was quite important. I mean, this is big. Anybody can be in the game. I mean, that’s wild to me. That fact that you could become the authority about foreign affairs online, and not spend a lot of money is staggering. Now, you have to have the chops, you probably spent a lot of money on your college bills, or you know, learning it, or paid your dues, but the most important chocolateer in America can make $7 million a year. Right? Through sponsorship and speaking engagements and deals selling chocolate. That person can come out of the internet in 24 months for the grand total of $5,000 and a crap-load of hours. And I just don’t think people can believe in it because it wasn’t true 36 months ago. And I understand why people don’t believe in it, but I know it’s true and I’m excited for this shift because I think a lot of people that would have never been able to be really happy talking and conversating around the thing they love most are going to be making $79,000 a year and maybe not a buck-ten, but 79, but boy oh boy, waking at 11:00 eating Captain Crunch you know, hanging out with their kids and then the people who have the true talent, listen, I feel like I’m going to make billions from the platform. So, it’s just really a big shift, it’s a ging-change your business, everybody will be affected by it, and the quicker you wrap your head around – instead of making fun of it because you just don’t want it to happen, learn a little bit, touch it a little bit, don’t give up after three days, ‘oh this is stupid,’ and understand where it’s going because boy oh boy, there’s a lot of chatter about how stupid Amazon was in 1995 and 96 when I was doing WineLibrary.com, all of the same conversations from my industry, the wine industry, about how stupid WineLibrary.com was and how it wouldn’t work, and shipping laws. And it worked. And so did Amazon, and so did the Huffington Post, and so are many, many, many other things.

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