For those who didn’t see, a few days ago I wrote a post about Gary Vaynerchuk’s efforts try new things and extend his brand through different outlets online and offline. I titled it ‘Has Gary Vaynerchuk Sold Out?’ – My argument, by the way is that he hasn’t, but I did raise some questions about community and hanging onto your brand. In fact, he’s done a really effective job of taking his brand, and using it to create new opportunity, and monetizing.
Also, for those of you wondering about his helping to get the word out about a friend’s iPhone app or his Obsessedtv.com business venture, he dropped a quick line in the comments of that post).
In fact, Gary not only checked out the post, he actually did a video about it on his own blog, using that as a way to talk about the importance of knowing who you are and how success, more eyeballs, and money eccentuates your personality for good or for evil. Here’s an embed of his response to my post:
I bring this up because I want to give you a quick timeline of how it went down and then just talk a bit about the importance of Ego Searching. First, I wrote and posted the article around lunchtime, close to 1pm EST. By 6pm I had a Direct Message from Gary letting me know that he saw my post and was doing a video about it. That video was up shortly thereafter. It was a quick thing on his end but it only took 5 hours to put out a response.
Ego Searching – its the act of googleing or searching for information on yourself – and its important. If you’re a business or person playing in this space, you need to know what people are saying about you. This can be hard and easy. Two quick and comprehensive ways to get a pulse are to search your name or your business’s name on the Google Blog Search (didn’t know they had a blog search, did you?) and also to search Twitter. There’s a ton of other networks that you SHOULD be on, but lets start there. If people are talking about you, positive or negative, it’ll probably show up. Now that I think about it, Gary has a primer on it.
Let’s face it. MY blog?? I’m nobody in terms of traffic, but I did do things to make my post easier to find (after all, I want people to read it, right?). And I’m just assuming that its through one of those searches that Gary found the post (Gary Vee, if you’re out there, please correct me if I’m wrong).
But what he did was a great example of how to react, and interact with your fans, or your customers. He saw a post about him, and he took an opportunity to answer some of the questions posed on the blog, as well as reach out to me and others in his community. It was done in a positive way, he showed that he CARED, and started a positive conversation within his tribe. Those are all good things. Does YOUR organization behave like that? Do YOU take a digital pulse?? Do YOU engage with your community?? If you’re not, you’re missing a huge opportunity.
