Swearing in recent years, or maybe decades, has generally become more socially acceptable and is today more common in many areas of communications. There are of course different levels of and exceptions to acceptability, but for the purposes of this article the application of swearing is considered in paid to attend business conferences.
Social media for some is still a something of a dark art, many swear by it, and our host in the video below certainly comes into that category, literally. Whilst others still unsure, risk waiting until it is mature, and in so doing limit the upside.
In any product lifecycle chart social media is still in its growth stage and as such there is a way to go until it reaches maturity, and widespread adoption at enterprise level. When widespread adoption at enterprise level is reached, like TV and print advertising in their day social media will become unaffordable to many.
One reason any of us resort to swearing is to emphasise a point we feel strongly about, and that is applied regularly by the speaker in the video below, Gary Vaynerchuk.
Gary Vaynerchuk started his business life trading football cards at school and selling lemonade from his lemonade stands in Queens, New York. Aged 14 he then joined the family wine business.
In his own words he identified ‘the internet’ at that point in time, the late 90’s as a ‘land-grab opportunity’ and transitioned his father’s local liquor store into one of the first e-commerce platforms for alcohol in the US resulting in explosive growth. Renaming the business to ‘Wine Library,’ Vaynerchuk grew his father’s company from $3-60 million in sales during his tenure at Wine Library.
Recognising the opportunity from Google AdWords and email marketing in the late 90’s – and acting on it – was the key to Vaynerchuk’s early success. Vaynerchuk continued looking at internet opportunities and began angel investing in companies including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Uber, Snap and Venmo.
Vaynerchuk co-founded VaynerMedia in 2009, a full service social media marketing agency. True to his entrepreneurial DNA, Vaynerchuk never raised start-up funding and began the business in a conference room at Buddy Media. Just 9 years later, the company employs more than 800 people, servicing clients such as PepsiCo, GE, Johnson and Johnson, Chase, AbInBev and more. His personal nett worth in 2019 is circa $160 million.
In the world of social media, he is the world’s most sought after speaker, and he does swear a lot.
So, from lemonade stands to global media owner and CEO, and all done through the internet and social media. By his own admission he has only got started and one of his ambitions is to buy the New York Jets football team in New Jersey, we suspect he will achieve it.
As someone who has quite literally made his fortune on the internet his talk below, where he provides his insights to where social media is in its product lifecycle is valuable first hand experience.
He does swear a lot, but the message is a valuable lesson that we at H&C News have applied and benefited from substantially. Where the social media lifecycle is currently will be the central theme to H&C Social 2019. The build up to H&C Social 2019 is taking place on Facebook here.
We hope you enjoy and learn from the video. Thousands of people paid a lot of money to hear this talk from Vaynerchuk, swearing by his own product lifecycle experiences.