GGV Capital hosted our Q1 CEO dinner last night in SF at the wonderful AQ restaurant. We had a terrific crew of 30+ CEOs on the topic, “Got Social,” which was highlighted by a great conversation led by Gary Vaynerchuk, the founder of Vayner Media, which advises companies such as Pepsi and Microsoft on their social media strategies. Gary is also the CEO of WineLibrary.com and the author of “The Thank You Economy” and “Crush It.” As many of you know, Gary is a ball of fire and a fountain of knowledge and experience when it comes to how to harness social for the benefit of your business.
Here are some of the highlights I took away from the event:
- Social media should be looked at as great defense that can also help you score more.
- While social media is helpful for customer acquisition, the real opportunity is to use social for retention, conversion and to increase percent of wallet spend.
- Too many people are using social as a presentation layer to push more marketing messages. Use social to engage in the customer conversation. Move from “presentation” mode to “cocktail party” mode.
- We are living through the biggest culture shift of our lifetime, but as we look more like the Jetsons, we behave more like the Flintstones. Our grandparents are better equipped to flourish in this new world. In their time, when a customer came into the butcher shop, the butcher knew what meat and what cut the customer wanted without having to ask. They had a relationship with their customer. Today, we don’t know how to do that, but with social media, customers and prospects are raising their hands and telling us lots of what we want to know.
- Put social media into the ethos of your company strategy and make a habit of getting to know your customers as human beings. Don’t be afraid to put humans against this task. The ROI is different for every type of business but there are lots of benefits to responding to all Facebook and Twitter mentions of your company and adjacent topics.
- Eventually marketers will ruin this, but we have a 3-5 year window to listen to all that the customer is willing to say know and be responsive without being drowned out by noise.
- Don’t try to close the deal on the first response. Give advice, be useful. The opportunity to sell will come as you build context. Become like Consumer Reports before you become a sales guy. In all A/B tests Gary has run, the group with context always performs better.
- Humanizing your logo and your brand can have huge benefits. You can scale behind the logo with more and more people, but you can’t scale your personal brand nearly as well. In the future, we’ll humanize successful brands just like we’ve humanized pets in the past 60 years.
- If you’re a CEO, get on Pinterest immediately. Play with it and get to know about it. Pinterest and Tumblr represent the interest graph – this converts the best since it has the most context and emotion.
Thanks to all who joined the event. This is a really important topic. I know I’m not alone in feeling that I learned a ton from Gary and really appreciate his support!