How Many Social Media Experts Does It Take to Change a Stock Photo of a Light Bulb?
This past weekend I stopped by Books & Co. at The Greene, a massive and luxurious outdoor mall that sits on a now leveled expanse that was once a wooded hillside in Beavercreek, Ohio. Apropos of nothing 1, I had missed seeing John Hodgman speak there by a day or two, though I was delighted to see that he had autographed every single one of the store’s copies of his most recent book, More Information Than You Require. Crossed out was his name, which had been printed in all caps in bold Helvetica, replaced instead by his name, which had been handwritten in all caps with a bold red magic marker.
Adjacent to the bookcases that shelved Hodgman’s volumes of made up facts were volumes of made up facts about business and “marketing 2.0” by wine-baron-turned-social-media-impresario Gary Vaynerchuk.
I’ll talk about why I didn’t buy his book in a bit, but first, some necessary backstory and perhaps a brief digression.
Gary Vaynerchuk was born in Belarus and emigrated with his family to New York when he was three. Not knowing a lick of English, his father began as a stockboy at a local liquor store and worked his way up the ladder, eventually opening his own store, Shopper’s Discount Liquor, across the river in Springfield, New Jersey. Against his wishes—he would later claim that he was making a thousand dollars a weekend selling baseball cards at the mall at the time—an adolescent Vaynerchuk went to work for his father, sobbing as he put in long hours and had only pennies to show for it.
Vaynerchuk’s “A-ha!” moment came when he realized that people collected wines the same way they collected baseball cards. Years later, a 20-something Gary V. would rechristen his father’s business Wine Library and grow the company’s revenues from $4-million to $60-million in a few short years.
In 2007, inspired in part by the uber-successful one year run of Ze Frank’s The Show, Vaynerchuk started Wine Library TV, a daily video wine blog noted for its brutal honesty and its host’s own manic enthusiasm. Thanks in equal part to his expertise, voice, and the fact that he was one of the first social media evangelists, Vaynerchuk’s popularity experienced the same kind of insane, logarithmic growth as his brick and mortar business.
Or so the story goes.
To make a long story short, today he has nearly a million Twitter followers and a seven figure, 10 book deal with Harper Studio.
So why did I reblog a great drawing from a months-old talk that Merlin Mann and John Gruber gave at SXSW?
Well, the obvious fact that I have a huge intellectual boner for the both of them aside, I had a chance to listen to the whole thing again in its entirety during my drive back from Dayton this past weekend, and was downright surprised by the extent to which much of it mirrored many of the same virtues that Vaynerchuk espouses.
(It’s not all the same, mind you, and I’ll get to that, and in fact it’s most likely that very diversion that makes me want to gay-marry Merlin and Gruber but unfollow Gary V. on Twitter.)
Both Merlin/Gruber and Vaynerchuk encourage people to establish credibility by pursuing the thing they’re most passionate about, whether that means writing a blog or doing a video show or building a house, and finding away to do that thing better than 80% of the competition. It’s hard to argue with that. Doing something because it’s an obsession is always more noble (and sustainable) than doing something because you think it’s popular or there’s money to be made.
Similarly, both camps encourage writers, designers, and stuff-makers alike to pursue ancillary revenue streams as a source of income, rather than in-your-face advertising or anything else that might alienate the the very people to which you’re trying to appeal.
Interestingly enough, that last point—that issue of appeal—is where they begin to diverge immediately and entirely; Merlin and Gruber ask the question “Who do I want to delight?” while Vaynerchuk asks the question “How can I delight everybody?” As it turns out, I find the notion of delighting everybody to be perfectly intolerable.
Later on in his book Crush It!, now a bestseller, Vaynerchuk offers an approach to that end. He suggests that people search Twitter for keywords relating to their niche, and then mingle like they would at a cocktail party to begin building relationships, and thusly, their audience. Lather, rinse, and repeat.
But you have to pause and consider who it is you’re interrupting with that approach. Seth Godin has made a career of talking about the money-making potential of interrupting the right people, but who are the Right People in this instance? I don’t know the answer to that, but it does seem a bit obtuse to believe that someone who shares the same interests you do necessarily wants to talk to strangers about them. If anything, the only people on Twitter or the broader social media landscape who desperately want to be interrupted are the people who use Twitter to talk about social media. (Which admittedly, is still millions of people.) And so what? Maybe it is a cocktail party. But to 90% of everyone else, it’s a cocktail party that you weren’t invited to. One man’s mingling is another man’s pinching a foul loaf in the punchbowl. Or put more simply, it’s Cold Calling 2.0 and you just made the Do Not Call List.
The other fallacy of Vaynerchuk’s approach is the idea that anyone else can duplicate his success. An entire segment of Merlin and Gruber’s presentation is devoted to dispelling that very notion, and is very poorly paraphrased below.
Ted Koppel wasn’t Ted Koppel because he was telegenic and had nice hair; he was Ted Koppel because the Iranians kidnapped a bunch of Americans and, armed only with his aforementioned looks and a passion for the topic at hand, ABC gave him a half hour up against Carson.
Gary Vaynerchuk is Gary Vaynerchuk because his timing was fortuitous and his expertise and enthusiasm were genuine. And contrary to what he says, he did not start from nothing—he started from the $4-million reigns that were handed over by his father.
And that necessarily means the rest of us are already behind the 8-ball.
(Those reasons aside, I didn’t buy Gary Vaynerchuk’s book because he convinced me not to: he’s spent years talking about how he’s not a good writer, and I heard him say in an interview once that he was hoping people would buy his book in a guilt-motivated gesture of thanks for all the free content he’s disseminated over the years. No such guilt here.)
My father is a philosophy professor at a small state school in Dayton, and last year he published a really great book about Stoicism. I want to share with you a passage about success which seems exceedingly apt here.
In order to win the admiration of other people, we will have to adopt their values. More precisely, we will have to live a life that is successful according to their notion of success. … Consequently, before we try to win the admiration of these other people, we should stop to ask whether their notion of success is compatible with ours. More importantly, we should stop to ask whether these people, by pursuing whatever it is they value, are gaining the tranquility we seek. If they aren’t, we should be more than willing to forgo their admiration.
In asking us to consider who we want to delight, Merlin Mann and John Gruber are echoing the same advice that dead guys gave to people two thousand years ago because they thought it could help make them happier. And even now, that advice is hard to disagree with.
Because, let’s face it: even Marcus Aurelius knew that caring what everyone thinks can’t scale.
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Incidentally, nobody says the phrase “apropos of nothing” more than John Hodgman. ↩
