Gary who? Gary Vaynerchuk is a social media celebrity, serial entrepreneur, and the author of Crush It! Why Now is the Time to Cash in on your Passion, an Amazon and New York Times bestseller.
Gary is renown as an expert in the social media space and is a big proponent of inbound marketing. He’s also a frequent early adopter of new social media platforms like Meerkat and YouTube when it was first starting.
In these two videos, Gary has provided some social media and marketing advice specific to Kickstarter, which is very much in-line with our values and how we think about Kickstarter and crowdfunding promotion at CrowdCrux.
We’ve embedded the videos below and provides notes at the end of the post.
Video Notes
- Email every single person that has a blog of any size that plays in your space.
- Put out content in blog form. Make Facebook posts. Post places like Medium.
- If you’re doing an ice-related campaign, reach out to all the blogs in that space and talk about the industry generally like desserts or ice products and don’t spam your product.
- It’s all about putting out good content and not about being an infomercial.
- Too many people are worried about monetizing the now rather than using things like LinkedIn and Medium to generate awareness. Gary likes being in places where there are viral loops and where good articles will be promoted by the platform if you put out a nice piece of content.
- Pick spots strategically that give you awareness and that gives leverage for you to monetize eventually on your own website.
- Explore doing a joint venture. “I will give you 5% of my company if you make the spark to get it going. I will give you free product for a year.”
- Gary is a big fan of Facebook dark posts.
Gary Vaynerchuk’s Books
“Do you have a hobby you wish you could do all day? An obsession that keeps you up at night?
Now is the perfect time to take those passions and make a living doing what you love.”
I loved reading Crush It! I think that this newfound desire to go full-time on side projects is captured best on this section of our forum, where countless creators have shared what they are passionate about.
“The Thank You Economy offers compelling, data-driven evidence that we have entered into an entirely new business era, one in which the companies that see the biggest returns won’t be the ones that can throw the most money at an advertising campaign, but will be those that can prove they care about their customers more than anyone else.”
Although I haven’t read this book cover to cover, I think that it yields great advice for a crowdfunding campaigner who wants the inside track on how to best handle backer relations. How can they capitalize on the relationship they have with their backers and translate that into a thriving business?
Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World
Although I haven’t read this book (I’ve watched many, many video interviews with Gary on the book and his viewpoint) I’ve reiterated this message countless times both in my online course on how to succeed on Kickstarter, and in blog posts.
You can’t promote 100% of the time on social media or in business in general. You must provide value and engage in a discussion with your customers, which eventually will allow you to promote to them every once and a while. This is very similar to Seth Godin’s concept of “Permission Marketing”
The one awesome aspect that this book hones in on are the different cultures or demographics that exist on different social media platforms.
“It’s not just about developing high-quality content, but developing high-quality content perfectly adapted to specific social media platforms and mobile devices—content tailor-made for Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Tumblr.
