Sitecore Blog: Focus on Community

What is Gary Vaynerchuk’s advice for marketing leaders? Humanize your business, now.

By Community Team, April 11, 2011 | Rating:  | Comments (2)

The Thank You Economy book from Gary Vaynerchuk

We hear so much about social media these days that it’s difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Gary Vaynerchuk knows first-hand how to grow a successful business with social media investments and patience. Tune into our conversation on video as we discuss Gary’s new book, The Thank You Economy, and tips for marketing leaders.

The new economy Gary sees unfolding is not just about saying “thank you” in a daily tweet but that's a step in the right direction. The Thank You Economy perspective is all about infusing deeper and wider caring and personalization in the business for every interaction we have with customers, key stakeholders and influencers. And we should operate this way in real-time to create an immediate and long term competitive advantage in an increasingly growing media environment.

Your first reaction about providing one-on-one attention like this may be – “that won’t scale!”  Not so if, for example, you apply business and marketing strategies that:

  • Puts business success over internal leader success (this can be challenging for some)
  • Understands the goodwill and business growth that are a result of genuinely caring about customers, employees and partners
  • Makes engagement and personalization a priority in the marketing mix and global strategy
  • No longer relies exclusively on one-size-fits-many marketing and communications execution
  • Redirects more classic marketing investments for better scaling of one-on-one engagement
  • Hires and empowers relationship-oriented problem solvers and creators across the business
  • Balances human-touch with technology enablement to create and grow communities around brands and key stakeholders
  • Organizes teams to focus on content and context

 

Focus on Community conversations 

It was a pleasure sitting in on Gary’s recent book tour stop at Books Inc. in San Francisco after participating in similar conversations earlier in the day at the Forrester Marketing Forum. The @TYEbook crowd was charged up, Gary’s advice was to the point and witty, and vino was pouring from The Winery SF.

In this brief video, Gary and I discuss what CMOs and heads of marketing should do with The Thank You Economy thinking; sooner rather than later. I was happy to hear during our conversation that Gary and his brother’s media company is working closely with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, a mutual client that has experienced tremendous success in the past few years. Recently, GMCR reported very good news.

It’s always nice when you meet someone who coincidentally shares common interests and aspirations. Thank you Gary for all that you do for the marketing community. Thoughts from others?

 

Comments

  • Will plan to read Gary's latest on the iPad while listening to our fans on Facebook. Seriously, I appreciate the fundamental practice of taking a moment to audit the business and processes and resetting expectations if necessary based on end goals. keeping it simple is key and we're hiring our first "ninja" this week!

    - John Phillips
    April 12, 2011 at 2:01 PM

  • Completely agree about an audit, John. The way social, and digital in general, are moving -- it makes sense to have an informal audit in place at least once a year if not every quarter (depending on strategic planning and reporting cycles).

    Monitoring and listening daily to your community is a given but the audit should address more strategic issues like outcomes, content/context, channels, people, process and technology. Thanks for sharing and good luck with your new hire.

    - Erick Mott
    April 12, 2011 at 2:59 PM

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