Gary Vaynerchuk on Out-caring the Competition at ConnectNow in Sydney

The following are my notes from Gary Vaynerchuk's talk at the ConnectNow conference in Sydney. I found him totally inspiring.

We live in a "thank-you economy". You have to love people first. The reason we love our parents is because they love us first. You're going to have to love your community first if you want them to love you back.

When Gary came out with his first book, all sorts of people thought it would never succeed. He made more money gambling that his book would make the bestseller list than he did on the advance, and the reason people bet him was because they thought people online wouldn't buy. So much of his content is out there for free that people thought there's no way to monetize it. What the naysayers didn't realize is that we're in a thank-you economy. The reason his books sold is because he gave away so much for free, because he @replied a million people, because he responded to 700 emails a day. That's how it is: you have to care first in a big way, and then you can monetize in a big way, because that's how you build relationships. And, yeah, he hears all the debates about "these aren't real relationships," but they're real to him.

He's a touchy-feely person, so is it like that? No. But it's a lot more than zero. The fact that you can scale your caring is unbelievable. He's got NHL and Campbell Soup as clients and he tells them, "You need to interact with everyone who wants to interact with you." They thought that was crazy, but he was like, "I'm only one guy, and I have 750,000 fans, and you're a big company and you only have 5,000." That was then. Now they have 400,000, because they interacted, and that's the cost of entry.

The social media customer service departments in every business in 60 months are going to scare the crap out of you, because it will not be an option. You will get beat by the person who cares more. Price gets neutralized by caring.

It's why when everybody looks back at this generation, Jeff Bezos will be respected more than Steve Jobs. Bezos sealed it for Gary when he bought Zappos for 1.3 billion. Zappos sold shoes, but not at the best prices. Amazon, Walmart, Costco... they all win because of prices -- not Zappos. It doesn't make sense to Wall Street, but it made a ton of sense to Gary. Zappos was beating Amazon with more expensive products, because they OUT-CARED Amazon.

Word of mouth is the single biggest closer in your business. It's in the 70th percentile. 7 out of 10 times when a friend tells you to go to a movie, or read a book, or whatever, and you can afford it, you're going. Traditional advertising closes at 12%. We are built on a word of mouth society. Take Bruno -- it had the highest Wednesday night opening ever. Opened huge. Thursday, it was the biggest collapse in cinema history, because every person walked out of that theater and tweeted and Facebooked that it was shit. There are 30-50 products in Hollywood right now that will never be released because of that effect. It used to be you had a 3-6 week window on crappy movies before word of mouth penetrated. It used to be the biggest yenta on the Upper West Side could tell 20 of her friends, now the most awkward dude in his mom's basement in Minnesota can tell 5,000 people.

To him, what every person in this crowd should care about is that this is the first time ever that you can build a business after hours -- you can come home and play 5 less Wii games and not watch 6 hours of Lost and not drink those few beers, and in a few years you can build that spare time into a business about your passion. It's so different, and we don't respect it. The consumer web is only 15 years old. Do you know how ridiculously zero that is in the scheme of things? He feels bad for all the entrepreneurs from the 50s, 60s, 70s who didn't even have this shot. The fact that we're even listening to this right now means we have a dramatic competitive advantage, and if you don't execute against the biggest culture shift we've ever gone through, you're a jerkoff. If you're not paying attention to virtual currency, you're crazy; Facebook credits are going to rule the world in 24 months; we're lazy and mobile is better; and if you don't recognize these things you're screwed. You can build brand equity for nothing, financially. Yes, time is valuable and he gets that, but this is a big deal. He doesn't think we get just how big this is. This whole game ends with the robots killing us! It's a big shift!

He's been able to commoditize his brand in a very big way, and this has come through caring and being good. You need to recognize what you're good at, and be as honest as possible. What is your differentiator? Why should people listen to you? People are selling a lot of shit, and they're stunned that it's not working. Think about your product, and then be solid. Don't be lazy. It's a shitload of hard work. "Gary, how much time should I spend on Twitter?" Well, if you do one pushup, you'll have no muscles. Business takes time and you've gotta hustle, but if you build it around the things you're passionate about it doesn't become work.

Being naive to the realities of the yins and yangs is a very dangerous place to be -- some people are introverts and some are extroverts. He's got a full-time assistant, mainly for scheduling, but he never outsources his engagement, ever. Nobody has ever tweeted for him or emailed for him. He spends an outrageous amount of time on it. He's going to spend less; he needs to stop talking and start listening, and he's experiential -- he doesn't like talking about theory, and he needs some "did it" time. He feels like he's hitting a lot of triples right now and he likes to be in the home-run business. But during his "down-time" he'll still be tweeting and Facebooking 5-7 hours a day.

Brands win when they tell their story properly. Whoever handles your brand messaging has to know the story cold. When the NHL brings in rookies they have to go through 2 weeks of media training. Anyone who is fronting you to the world has to go through that kind of training -- do they understand what we're trying to accomplish?

Way too many brands are trying to sell. 95% of people out there are 19-year-old guys -- they're trying to close in 5 minutes (lol).

He thinks Rupert Murdoch is smarter than people think. He would play the search engines against each other. He thinks Rupert's play is to go to Microsoft and offer them exclusivity. "Free" is a scary game. "Free" is not a business model. The only related business model is freemium. Patience and monetize later is okay, but you can't survive on free. His intuition tells him Microsoft is Murdoch's biggest ally. If he had to run NewsCorp today, he would completely consume what's going on with the iPad, and understand that people are going to pay on the device. A paywall isn't the biggest problem; the problem is that there's so much good free content out there. Content is tougher to monetize than ever.

When Coca-Cola and Pepsi fight for shelf space, Coke has 7 spots and Pepsi has 6, and that one can in the middle is worth hundreds of millions, so imagine the amount of money in being able to talk directly to the consumer and influence them to go into the store and pick up the Coke can and collect the caps.

His consumption of content is scary low. He doesn't follow people actively; he reacts to what's coming to him. He's very much an intuition guy. When he wrote Crush It, one of his only scary moments in business was when he hit Send on the email and then thought, "What if I just wrote someone else's book?"

How do you deal with people who just don't "get it"? If it's really the issue, and you really "get it", there's only one way to go about it: analyze the situation and figure out how stable they are in their job, and if they're capable of being sold. If you go into a playground with your basketball where everyone's playing hockey and say, "Let's play," nobody's interested. If he had 60 days left in a company that didn't get it, he'd push his message as often and as loudly as possible, to either get fired or be crowned the new champion. You can't be silent on what's right for you and on your conviction. If you are silent your brand is defined by the stupidity of those around you. Silence is deadly -- with business and farting.

On scaling community: tactics are easy -- there are a million tools to allow 37 people to sit in the trenches and talk to people and not overlap. What's not so easy to scale is the DNA -- that's where you need to get people that "bleed green" (like Gary does for the Jets) and make sure they're infecting everyone else.