#leweb - Go wide, not deep says Gary Vaynerchuk

Allegedly Gary Vaynerchuk hadn’t slept for two days before his talk at LeWeb. I well believe it given how rambling it was. This isn’t a conventional chronological liveblog, as I’ve tried to gather together his thoughts into subject groups…

Go deep not wide

Everyone cares about dumb fucking data. It doesn’t matter how many followers you have – it’s how many that care.

If the founders of luxury.com are watching: fuck you. He bought an ad from them on an e-mail newsletter that went to 2m people. He got one order. Breadth doesn’t matter – depth does. Worry about open rates, about clicks.

Today @garyvee talks about his strategy to get attention, it is completely the opposite from @guykawasaki‘s strategy: depth vs width #leweb— Erno Hannink (@ernohannink) December 11, 2013

The Secret of Snapchat

What snapchat is not about is impressions, it’s about attention. Whatever you do, the number one thing you have to do is tell your story to someone on the path of making a decision. To do that, you need to get their attention.

Gary can’t make something trend on Twitter any more. But he can on Snapchat – by sending thousands of message on Snapchat, by hand. He does wonder if they have any good product people left, based on how shit the last update was. Still, many of the recipients then posted the photo he sent to Twitter with the hashtag he asked them to use.

He thinks Snapchat will go one to many eventually – especially if they want to monetise. They tried with Stories – but it’s shit with a shit UI. No-one has figures out how to monetise one to one yet. There might be a $20 a year app that’s one to one that might work because it’s such a great experience.

Snapchat is a utility to get someone’s attention in a very noisy world.

The Agency Dictator

He’s built an agency from 20 people to 300 in the past two years. He has no HR manager – he instills the culture through dictatorship, and choosing the hiring. They’ve fired some talented people because they weren’t wiling to be the culture fit he needs.

The entrepreneurship bubble

Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur now. The number of Ivy League students I see thinking they’re entrepreneurs, then see them crumple the first taste of adversity they get. For every Instagram, there’s 5 million Instashits. We’re not in a financial bubble. This is not a cycle – this is the beginning of technology eating everything in our lives. But there is a bubble of entrepreneurship.

Living in a social era

He lives his life as if he’s on the record all the time. That’s a decision he made the moment he had a measure of internet fame. It changes how you behave – and more people are going to think that way. We all under-estimate how much the world is actually going to change. We’ll all be flabbergasted by what it becomes in the next 15 years.

It’s @garyvee in full f***ing flow at #leweb: pic.twitter.com/2VXaDKeG3q

— Adam Tinworth (@adders) December 11, 2013

The Big Social Mistakes

People use social wrong – they blast out links to elsewhere. Do your storytelling on social media. Look at the 10 hashtags that are trending and being creative around that- it’s 7000% better than truing to create your own. A woman on Pinterest has an intent or an openness to buy. On Facebook she’s looking to be informed. Don’t give her the same photo in bot places. Stop linking your Twitter and Facebook. It doesn’t fucking work.

The stream on Twitter has become so busy that people miss things. You shouldn’t worry about tweeting things more than once. If you put out quality content, people will be less worried by it than seeing 10 pieces of crap content from someone else. People need escapism and entertainment. The things on the front page of your phone are the single biggest gateway to the psychology of out society.

Other stuff

• He’s a big believer in free: give, give, give and then you earn the right to ask for something.
• 90% of people who speak give the same presentation for three years. He’d rather do all Q&As
• If we went in a time machine and showed people bottled water – and that people paid for it, they wouldn’t believe it. It took packaging and storytelling. If you can do that with water, you can do it for anything.