Gary Vee Reveals How To Win At Social Media Marketing In 2024

We have Gary Vaynerchuk on the show today. We just wrapped with him and he shared the number one marketing skill and it blew our mind because it was not something that Kieran and I have talked about on the show yet. We also talked about the problem with Fortune 500 marketing. We talked about the dying ad model of agencies and advertising. We talked about how the super bowl is the most underpriced piece of media on the planet. And we talked all about Gary's new book, Day Trading. Attention. Let's get into today's show. All right, on today's show we have a very, very special guest. We are joined by the one and only Gary Vaynerchuk. And Gary, I want to tell you a story of how I first came across you. I was an early wine library TV listener back in the earliest, earliest days, probably episode 20, episode 30, very early wine libraries. I think I saw it on, I think I was doing web analytics on Crazy Egg and there was some type of like cross promotion blog article or interview or something you had done promoting wine library tv. And I learned a bunch from you, but I learned a lot about marketing from you. And you have done so much over the years that one of the places I want to start is like, you've written all these books, you've created all this content. Like, what is, if you look back on it, what is the most impactful piece of content you've ever made? Like, what is that thing where you're like, you know what? I got the most leverage and mileage out of that more than anything else.

It was probably, you know, it's a crazy story. There was a Web 2.0 conference here at the Javits center, which I'm very close to right this second. And it was early. I might have done three or four talks at that point in my career, but I'd already been in the game and enough to like be one of the headliners and. Cause it was pretty quick for me. Like I did a talk at, in Miami at Future of Web Apps foa and that hit and then like one more talk hit and then like, you know this since you found me that early. There wasn't that many of us in web 2.0 back then.

And so no creators. Hardly at all.

None. And like the personalities were mainly bloggers that crossed over to video, right? Or social. Like, yeah, Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki and Kevin Rose and dignation and Tim Ferriss. Like there just wasn't that many.

No, we're talking pre four hour work week. Like this is early, early in the cycle of all this stuff, right?

That's right. And so I gave a Talk at Web 2.0 conference and it was the one where I said, if you love Smurf, smurf it up. And I just kind of exploded and just said it was my thesis for Crush it, which was the book that kind of put me on the map in the business world from the wine world. And, and what was really funny was two really iconic web people were in the green room right before I went on. And I said to them right before I took the stage, like, they're like, gary, two minutes, come and get mic'd up. And I looked at both of them and I really go with my intuition and chemicals and I look at both of them and say, either this is going to be the best talk of my career or it's all over and I'll never be speaking again.

Like, this is it.

I really felt like crazy, like overhyped and I'm a pretty hyped dude. And I went, I blacked out and did my thing. By the time I got to the wine store, because I still was doing the wine business.

Yeah.

And we didn't have cell phone email back then. By the time I got back to the wine store and checked my email, I. I had like four book offers from people that were like, I'm in the crowd from Penguin, Putnam or Simon and Schuster. And then TED picked up that video and put it on the TED Talk website and that was it. And that was really the first, you know, time broadly I was discovered for Business talk. Prior to that, I had done an episode of Wine Library TV where I tasted wine with, with all these weird vegetables and fruits and cereal and candy that made the front page of Digg and Slashdot and Metafilter, all those places where you could be discovered back then. And then that led to me being on the Conan O' Brien show and the Ellen DeGeneres show doing the same skit. So that was my first broad thing, but this was my first, if you ask me, impactful. Like the Gary career that I have today, that piece of content definitely set it off.

I got kind of a two part follow up on that. One of the things that you did amazingly well is you went from this like you were doing content around wine. You had a family business around wine and you expanded into business. Most people have a hard time going from one thing that they do well and kind of expanding it. I want to know, how the hell did you do that? You know, I think There are a lot of people here who, like, feel like they're stuck in where they're at.

Well, it was weird because I was getting like, I'm very proud of my wine knowledge, and it's pretty significant. But the reality was that kid that you saw right when you were a real kid back in episode 20 of Wine Library TV, that was February. That was March or April of 2006. That was now eight full years into me running the family business. And ten full years since I launched winelibrary.com which transformed our family business. And 1990. Sixteen years since I worked pretty much every day, every weekend, every summer vacation, and then Monday through Friday, when I was in school, I was reading the Wine Spectator and talking to my dad at night about the business. Sixteen years into my wine retail career and 2006, call it 1986, 20 years into my true hardcore entrepreneurial career. Because in 86, you know, I already started selling baseball cards.

You were flipping.

You know, I was really in it. Like, not in the way that I think people understand. Like, I was a bad student for a reason. I was basically running a business since I was in sixth grade. Like, it's all I thought about. It's all I cared about. I'd go to school to sell cards. I'd come home and study cards. And then that switched to wine. And so what was ironic was I actually wasn't adding another thing. I just started communicating about the core thing. I knew more than anything, I know much more about operations and entrepreneurship and marketing than I do about wine. It's just that I came out the gate making a show about wine. And really, it's how the Internet knew me for the first five years that I was out there.

All right, one last question on this before we move on. So, really, that big talk that you said was the thing that really propelled you. That was like, 25 plus years in the making of a culmination of a lot of experience. But, like, how do you prepare and put something like that together? I think a lot of people see you and they're like, oh, he's just off the cuff. He just has all these ideas on the spot. I don't think that's necessarily true, but.

You know, Kip, I got a weird one for you, brother. Yeah, it's a complicated answer. I don't prep for anything strong. Not even for, like, wine Library business meeting. Excuse me. VaynerMedia business meetings. I am so deeply in my craft hell, yes. That it's just incredibly easy for me to talk like If I had to go give a talk on healthcare, I'd have to prep for a hundred hours. If I had to go talk. But if I have to go give a keynote about the New York Knicks right now, I'm good. Give a keynote about wine, I'm good. If I have jets, forget it. I could give a 400 hour keynote about. And so when I go and talk or do an interview like this with you and Kieran right now, like I'm talking about what I really deeply know. One of the things, actually, I'm glad you brought this up. One of the things that I think propelled me in public speaking pretty quickly after that moment was I started going to conferences all the time. And it was the same people in the circuit, the same hundred people had all the keynotes, right? And the same 25, really at the time. May rest in peace. Tony Hsieh Founder, Zappos Biz Stone.

Oh yeah, Biz Stone was on the circuit.

Hard circuit hard. You know, Tim Ferriss, who's amazing, but even like Dave Morin from Facebook. And it was just the same characters, right? Robert Scoble, guy Kawasaki and 1. And I mentioned those people because these people weren't doing it. But most of the people, including some of the people I just mentioned, they have the same presentation every time. I would see them at the affiliate summit. Affiliate marketing is quite different than Twitter marketing. I'd see them at the search summit. Like Google search is very different than winning on Twitter, you know, And I would see them at these different things. I'd see them at Le Web. What was going on in Paris and Europe was very different than what was going on in the US and it took me back, took me aback, saying, huh, they know this stuff. But as a presenter, they're just kind of like, this is it. Slide 3. Same joke, same kitten from the Internet on slide 6. And I think what made me stand out was I was incredibly contextual. Like if I was going to France, I was going to talk about what was going on Web 2.0 in France. When I do the HubSpot podcast, like I'm doing right now, I'm thinking a lot about the agencies, the individuals that are running within this ecosystem. That may be different than if I go speak at a blockchain summit in Finland. Might be different than if I go talk about intellectual property at IP conferences. So I think context matters. But to give everybody an answer, yes, I am shooting off the hip comma to answer you only because I'm prepped to the max, because it's my entire life.

That's the important part, is that, like, it's not being unprepared. You've prepared your entire life to talk about what you're talking about.

I'm a practitioner every day.

Exactly.

Yes. We talk about this all the time. If you're in the craft, it's so much easier to talk about it.

Right.

I assume this is audio, predominantly, but, like, literally, while like 99 02. Literally as. Oh, literally as we were getting ready, it's kind of blurry, but that green box. You don't have to zoom in. It's fine, actually. Zoom in. I don't. It's kind of might be interesting for people. Like, this is me writing the copy to my Instagram post right before we started.

You're like, I'm doing the work in the moment.

I am literally the copywriter for my content. Still at this point, you know what people think? They think it's all like, oh, he's got a team. I'm like, no, for 11 years I did it by myself. And then, yes, I got to a place where I have a huge team for my content, but I'm still writing the copy.

It's still your voice.

No, no, it's my voice because it's me.

That's what I'm saying. But you're saying it. I'm saying it works because it is still. You. You're not farming this out. You were like, I got this razor sharp perspective and I got to make sure it gets out there.

But I'm also, like, analyzing the numbers and, like, thinking through the first second and, like, it's why I wrote the new book. Like, I feel like I'm at the sharpest I've ever been. And I. I know because I've grown up in this game the last 15 years as people hit financial success as they go into different chapters of their life, which is super appropriate, by the way. Everyone gets to live their life the way they want. Most people have, you know, delegated or, or walked away from the trenches, from the dirt, from the. From the practitionership. I've doubled down on it.

I would love to kind of dig into this point. So Kieran's so happy. You could. Gary, you could do literally anything you want to do with your life. Right. Your latest book is on Day Trading Attention. You basically taught a whole generation how to do that. One of the things that we find with marketers, and I know you manage marketers or spend a bunch of time with marketers, is today marketers want to graduate to strategy really quickly, right? Like, oh, like I've done a year's work now I'm a strategist and like someone else would do the actual craft, but I'll direct them to do the craft. And what do you talk, what do you say to people like that? Because you're deep in the craft all this time, you know, today like each and every day you're in the craft, like what do you, what do you say to people like that?

I'm obsessed with strategy, right? So first it makes sense. Like I couldn't comprehend not overthinking about this stuff, you know, like, you know, it's my favorite part. But I, I would say to people, the second you take your hand off the wheel, you become a worse driver, right? And so I do believe that. Let's go very high up. The sole reason Fortune 500 CMOs really struggle with today's marketing is they are so removed. So remove, so removed they don't even have some of these apps on their phone, let alone consume the creative that works on it. Let alone make the creative that works on it. Think about that. They are so uncomfortably removed. And so for me, the reason I like being in the craft, it gives me a currency, a pulse of its actual success with the end consumer. But this is also challenging. Here's why. First of all, if you're in the Fortune 5000, so let's include private equity based owned businesses and, and series D VC back startups. You know, if you're at that level, a lot of your marketing isn't even in the trenches. Fortune 500 continues to overspend on television, to overspend on traditional thing. I mean it is flabbergasting how much Fortune 500 companies spend on print magazines and newspapers. There are many companies in fashion and other areas that spend more on print than they do on social creative.

Mind blowing that is.

So first of all, if you're Fortune 5000, you're running on reports, not on truth, right? Internal mmms amaze. Justifying media spend that are fake. Creative is being done by creative agencies that want to make television ads on a good day and on a bad day want to make banner ads for the web. So it's a mockery there as you go. Underneath that you have a lot of founders that start companies doing all the social creative, doing all the copywriting, doing the website, doing the email and it's great. And then they get bougie, especially the under 40 year old set. I get it. They want to get to the Lambos and the private planes and the pretty girls and boys and all the things that they want. And, you know, they start to delegate and they have fast dreams that also leads to quick vulnerabilities. And so, you know, I think. I think you're right, my man. I'm pumped to see the way you jumped in and asked with passion, because I do think it's the biggest. It's the biggest variable out there. And I think in a world where money got expensive. Right, like raising capital is expensive now. And in the world of post iOS 14, 5. Right. And let's go.