Click on WORD or PDF for full content
The Twitter IPO made big news recently. The Sunday Business Section of the NY Times reported on a man who makes his living in the world of “social media.” The article is long, but helps understanding Twitter and its functions.
About once a week, Gary Vaynerchuk posts a Twitter message that reads, “Is there anything I can do for you?” He means it literally. He is inviting his roughly one million followers to send requests for any kind of help or favor. And if you respond, he will try to punch you in the face.
This will not be a conventional punch in the face, but a Vaynerchukian punch, which turns out to be the opposite of violent. Mr. Vaynerchuk, 37, is a social media marketer with some very big clients, and he’s a tireless self-promoter. Anyone fitting that description is all but required to find novel ways to win attention and coin catchphrases, and his new favorite is “jab, jab, jab, right hook.” That is also the name of his coming book, which is due out this month and is subtitled “How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy, Social World.”
A jab, in Mr. Vaynerchuk’s lexicon, is anything of value — a joke, an idea, an introduction. Or a meal. Not long ago, a follower in Minnesota joshingly responded to one of his can-I-help tweets with a request for a cheeseburger. The next day, a cheeseburger was delivered to the guy’s home. When a follower in Canada wrote “Just ran out of Tabasco,” Mr. Vaynerchuk overnighted eight bottles.
It’s unclear how a smack in the jaw came, in Mr. Vaynerchuk’s ever-churning imagination, to mean a gift. But after he delivers a few jabs, he — or the many companies that hire him to promote their brands through VaynerMedia, his agency based in Manhattan — can then hit you with a right hook, which in his world translates into a request to buy something.
Jab, jab, jab, right hook means give, give, give, ask. “A funny thing happens when you give value up front,” he is fond of saying. “You guilt people into buying stuff.” …
… One of his services is ensuring that a company stays on top of the latest trends in social media; he’s like a friend who knows the addresses of all the cool parties. He is the reason that G.E. had a Vayner-produced video on Vine, the six-second-video-sharing app, on the day the platform went live.
He is also the reason the company mailed out 314 pies in March.
“How do you thank people on Pi Day?” asked Ms. Boff of G.E., who was talking about March 14, or 3/14, which is as close as the calendar gets to a numerical representation of pi. “Gary came up with this idea.” G.E. sent 314 pies to 314 people who tweeted about pi that day.
It may come as a surprise that a company with $147 billion in annual revenue would consider sending a few hundred pies across the country to be an important part of its marketing strategy.
“Most people still associate our brand with appliances and lighting,” Ms. Boff explained. “But that’s a very, very small part of G.E. We are early adopters; we are a brand that is about innovation, invention, discovering things. And early adopters are the kind of people we want to be talking to, the kind of people who might want to work at G.E., or partner with us, or invest with us. And we want to humanize the company. We want to throw open the doors and behave the way a person behaves.”
And it’s not just about the 314 people who got the pies. It’s also about the people who read about the pies — perhaps, for instance, in The New York Times.
Mr. Vaynerchuk’s clients also include companies that just want to sell products. In the foyer of the main entrance of VaynerMedia, which is spread around two floors of a high-rise on Park Avenue South, there’s an enormous blackboard where a writer with fine penmanship has chalked — and this is the G-rated version — “We love social media because it sells things.”
For many, that premise has yet to be proved. …
… Much of what is produced at Vayner, in fact, looks like a digital version of the kind of work ad agencies have produced for decades. The company’s employees include dozens of “micro content producers,” who make images and videos for clients, using Photoshop and other programs. Zach Lansdale, a senior art director who oversees content producers, was at his desk one day in late October, creating GIFs for Furby, a brand of electronic doll sold by Hasbro.
“People are going to be scrolling when they see this,” he said, looking at a Halloween-themed Furby ad emblazoned with “Toastbusters” across the top, a riff on “Ghostbusters.” “Our goal is to catch their eye for a split second.”
There is little difference between this ad — which, it should be noted, is a word rarely used here; it’s called “content” — and one you might see in a magazine. But thanks to the endless demographic and lifestyle information spun off by sites like Facebook, the Furby ad can be aimed at consumers who are likely buyers, or fans of the brand.
“We have a client who sells dog food,” said Chris Gesualdi, a Vayner supervisor who handles paid media. “We can get so granular on Facebook that we can find people who are interested in specific breeds. Like: ‘Hey, you’re interested in cocker spaniels? Here’s some content.’ ”
Where VaynerMedia starts to look really different from conventional ad agencies is in its emphasis on speed. Social media are also interactive and immediate, so everyone here is on high alert for any event, any news that could be leveraged by any brand.
“The people I’m trying to hire here are journalists and improv actors,” Mr. Vaynerchuk said. “Creative today is more about breaking news. We need clever, funny and quick. If orange juice trees burn down in all of Florida, is there a play for our Tropicana client?” …
… Most of Mr. Vaynerchuk’s clients split their marketing dollars between social media and some combination of television, radio and print, making it hard to divvy up credit (or blame). But in August last year, Mondelez International, a snack and food conglomerate spun out of Kraft Foods, started an experiment. It spent every single ad dollar for one brand, Nilla — those little vanilla wafers — online, and put VaynerMedia in charge of the account.
“No other marketing,” said Bonin Bough, the company’s vice president for global media and consumer engagement. “No TV, no in-store. This was a brand using social in isolation.”
VaynerMedia created a campaign called “Momisms,” a series of Facebook ads aimed at mothers, the key Nilla audience. Many ads had the brand’s yellow background, and in red lettering offered cute homiletic quips like, “The best families are like fudge, mostly sweet with lots of nuts!” Vayner would try five different ads at the same time, aiming at a small group of Facebook users. Once it learned which ads were most “liked” and “shared,” Vayner spent more to push those ads to bigger audiences.
It worked. The Nilla Wafers Facebook page grew from 15,000 to 356,000 likes. More important, Mr. Bough says sales are up 9 percent so far this year compared with the same period in 2012. And the advertising costs for that increase are a small fraction of a conventional media campaign. (He declined to get specific.) The reason is efficiency. Instead of huge outlays for campaigns that would be seen by vast audiences, on television for instance, Mondelez spent small sums on people who had demonstrated an affinity for the brand.
“All of a sudden,” Mr. Bough said, “you’re talking about a new paradigm of marketing, built around microcontent.”
It’s hard to draw long-term conclusions based on a sample size of one. But if campaigns like Momisms build sales, you can be sure that there will be more of them. Which gets us to the tricky part: The more campaigns there are, according to Mr. Vaynerchuk, the less effective they will be. …
Last week on November 6th, Pickings led with a blog post titled Government is Magic. That blogger, Daniel Greenfield has come up with another great post about people who live in the government cloud. This is long too, so that’s all you get today.
Uncertainty and struggle are what we most often associate with poverty. Not knowing if you can still afford to pay next month’s bills and worrying over how much more you can cut back when you’re already barely getting by. This way of life has become more associated with the middle class than with those at the very bottom.
The statistic that shows that average black household worth is at $4,955 while average white household worth is at $110,729 is often quoted, but these numbers are not comparing similar things. Comparing the naked numbers is as misleading as comparing the average salaries in Tokyo and Bombay. What matters is not how much money you have, but how you live.
The $110,729 and $4,955 don’t reflect different standards of living; but different ways of living. Much of that $110,729 is home equity. But why do you need to shoulder the burden of a mortgage, when the government will just give you housing for free?
It’s misleading to think of the $110,729 families as privileged and of the $4,955 families as oppressed.
The $110,729 and $4,955 families both have large flat screen televisions, smartphones and the usual baseline consumer toys. They could both eat equally well, except that the $4,955 family doesn’t bother watching its food budget. It just takes whatever it wants off the shelf and worries about prices later.
In terms of personal satisfaction, the $4,955 family is happier than the $110,729 family.
To understand this, think of the “Cloud”. You can buy a laptop powerful enough to store all your programs and data. Or you can get by with a mobile device whose apps connect online to a “Cloud” of someone else’s servers which store your data. The laptop is heavier to carry than the mobile device, but makes you more independent. Or you can just live in the “Cloud” confident that no matter how you mess up your device; your data will be backed up.
America is being divided between the workers and the dwellers in the government cloud. …
Isn’t it nice to have a day without posts about Stupid?