Tag Archives: dreams

Context, not Content, is King – Gary Vaynerchuck @ INC 500

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Here’s a great video from Gary Vaynerchuck that explains social media for those old school MBA types that learned that ‘cash is king’. Check out around 10:05 into the video for the real reason why social media has become relevant, Gary goes on to say that his particular skill is to recognize those things that people say they are not going to do; but end up doing anyway.

Couple of great questions:

How many of you have a DVR and record most of the shows you watch? Now how many watch the commercials that are recorded along with the show?

How many people pay attention to the signs along the road?

Couple of observations:

Gary argues that the game is changing, and old school marketing methods are losing market share, but old school business is not. Gary changes the paradigm from ‘content is king’ to ‘context is king’, as the amount of content that is being produced in 48 hours, is equal to the entire amount of content created between the beginning of time until 2003, context will be the only way that your information gets noticed.

So what is Context?

Gary sees business going back to the days of the small corner store where personalization is the key. You know, where Amazon knows your name, and has a customized list waiting for you. Around the 23rd minute Gary starts to explain how his company uses Twitter to create that small store feel. His company winelibrary.com actually mines twitter data to see what their customers are passionate about and has used this information to send personalized thank you gifts to customers. The story about the customer in Chicago that really likes Jay Cutler and follows the Bears, who was contacted by their ‘thank you department’ and sent a signed jersey with a thank you note, after using the mined twitter data. The response, of course, was a new loyal customer, who used to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars with a local wine store, and will now shift his business to winelibrary.com. Another interesting take away, his company actually calls every new customer and thanks them for their orders.

These are examples of creating context, which is an emotional relationship with a product, instead of content, the traditional information that was non-individualized and disseminated to the masses. Winelibrary.com claims that their customers that are on twitter are outperforming customers that are not on twitter by 60%, as they have been able to create context with this customer segment.

Finally, some take aways, “How many of you have used twitter’s live search?”, the prediction is that this will outperform google searches in the future, and real time ads will outperform google ads. Have a try: http://twitter.com/#!/search-home.

Just Ship – why so many fail and don’t realize how positive that might actually be in the long run.

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Failing is not, fun, it’s not something that you set out to do, no one has hopes of failing big one day, you don’t hear people say I’m going to go out there and fail miserably. So what often happens is we lull ourselves into a state of negative productivity, we put off doing anything meaningful and actually accomplishing tasks in favor of backpedaling, blaming, blocking, and generally wasting time until it is someone else’s turn to do something – see that way we don’t have to ship anything, we don’t have to put our mark on anything and we can guarantee ourselves that we won’t fail – all the while ensuring that we can not succeed. Ask yourself how can you have passion for anything if you haven’t failed? Real success (especially in software development) comes in shipping and shipping often. Remember perfect is the enemy of good enough, and how many of you really use all the button on any software package that you use?

In January Seth Godin compiled a book filled with what would appear to many as common sense, however, after a cursory look at the state of things it may not be that common, so in the spirit of sharing this resource here are some of the most enlightening chapters for developers. Just today Godin released a set of books that you can use in your organization to help get your products shipped, check out the website here: http://www.squidoo.com/the-shipit-workbook

SHIP (Seth Godin)  Brainwashed – Seven ways to reinvent yourself

Scarcity creates value. People pay extra for things that are hard to get, while things that have a surplus go cheap. That’s basic economics.

So, what’s scarce?

The ability to ship.

If you can get something out the door while your competitors cringe in fear, you win. If you’re the team member that makes things happen, you become indispensable. If you and your organiza- tion are the ones (the only ones) that can get things done, close the sale, ship the product and make a difference, you’re the linchpins—the ones we can’t live without.

Shipping is difficult because of the lizard brain. The resistance doesn’t want you to ship, because if you ship, you might fail. If you ship, we might laugh at you. If you ship, you may be held account- able for the decisions you made.

The key to the reinvention of who you are, then, is to become someone who ships. The goal is to have the rare skill of actually getting things done, making them happen and creating outcomes that people seek out.

Michael Dell ships. So do Larry Ellison and Anne Mulcahy. Quieting the lizard, acknowledging it and then ignoring it—it’s the only way.

How much is your time worth?

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This is a very valuable lesson that should be learned early on.

  • Why am I doing this?
  • Why will I succeed?
  • What happens if I choose not to do it?
  • Doing things right vs. doing the right things – doing the right things adequately is much more important than doing the wrong things beautifully
  • 100 things to do in my life
  • Do not lose sight of the power of inspiration, if you can dream it you can do it, if you refuse to allow yourself to dream it I know you won’t do it.