Gary Vaynerchuk on Marketing and Social Equity

” It’s funny. Marketing is just a part of life I think, for everybody. Everybody is selling something, usually themselves if nothing else. Very early on a lemonade stand, baseball cards, pencils…I would just sell. I was a salesman and I think you start off as a salesperson and then you grow up the ladder. There’s a big difference between a marketer and a salesperson. A marketer thinks long term. I got involved in my Dad’s family liquor store business when I was fourteen and that’s where I think I really honed my chops in marketing. I definitely learned a lot about wine and wanted to be a salesperson. Then I started launching websites, winelibrary.com in 1997, and built a sixty-million dollar business, mainly through marketing.

Unfortunately, I have seen people use marketing in the wrong way and that creates a scenario where the brand of marketing has been hurt. I’m very focused on social. I am dramatically more Mother Theresa than I ever thought I could be, but it’s not because I’m a great guy, it’s just because the world is dramatically more transparent. Internet marketing has some real negative players in there and I think those people are going to be weeded out because word of mouth, now, has so much more power that it’s hard to get away with doing the wrong thing.

I talk a lot about social equity in my book, ‘The Thank You Economy’ I really think that corporate America has is wrong. They think push market with billboards and radio and television with no emotional attachment. I think small entrepreneurs have it wrong because they think it should be all SEO or building lists. I think the only thing that’s going to break through, in this new world, is really intent and caring and one-on-one marketing. I still like putting lists together and offerings and having my other 250 days to myself. I just think it’s going to get more and more difficult. I just think it’s the reality of the marketplace that the social revolution is changing the landscape and really there’s no other choice. It’s like what happened to people in print when the internet came along. They didn’t want to believe it, and they got wiped out.“