Gary Vaynerchuk went corporate. The wine impressario turned social media superstar hit a home run with his first book Crush It!, which encouraged young, hungry entrepreneurs and small businesses to follow their passion. Now, with his new book The Thank You Economy, the fan club is going to be wearing ties instead of T-shirts.
The Thank You Economy is a very solid, well researched and written exhortation for businesses of all sizes (tilting toward medium and large) to recognize the power of lifetime customer value and “outcare” their competition.
Filled with case studies and spot-on observations about the present and future of real-time business, The Thank You Economy deserves a place on the manager and executive bookshelf. It’s a fun yet important book that eliminates some of the over-the-top elements of Crush It! (my review here), and adds in a bunch of relevant advice served up with just enough spice to keep it interesting.
Candidly, one of the reasons I enjoyed The Thank You Economy so much is that I humbly suggest it’s in many ways similar to the book I recently published with Amber Naslund, The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter, and More Social. Gary covers much of the same ground (although of course in a different sequence and style). We even have a few of the same case studies and specific points. Because The Thank You Economy takes a somewhat broader approach with a focus on overall customer experience, it would be a terrific pre-cursor to The NOW Revolution. The former is a shopping list for social business design. The latter is a recipe. I’m surprised Amazon isn’t packaging them together yet.
There’s a lot to like in The Thank You Economy and I recommend it for business owners and managers. It’s less ideal for the solopreneur audience of Crush It! To give you a flavor, I’ve identified 13 nuggets of greatness that had me grabbing a highlighter and shouting “Hell Yeah!” (quietly, as I read it on a plane).
- At its core, social media requires that business leaders start thinking like small town shop owners.
- (business leaders) are going to have to allow the personalities, heart, and soul of the people who run all levels of the business to show.
- Unless you are building a new company from the ground up and can install caring as your businesses’ cornerstone, you have to be willing to embark on a complete cultural overhaul so that, like a local mom and pop shop, every employee is comfortable engaging in customer service, and does it authentically.
- If you’ve already experimented with social media and it didn’t work, there are only two possible reasons: your product or service isn’t any good, or you’re doing it wrong.
- Social media’s arrival was simply a catalyst for a revolution that was already brewing in the minds of consumers sick to death of feeling isolated, unappreciated, and ignored.
- …the risk that your business will die before its time grows bigger every day that you don’t use social media.
- When faced with two equal choices, people often buy for no other reason than they associate one choice with someone they know.
- If you’re not passionate enough about what your company does to find fuel for conversations every day, for hours on end, with as many people as possible, maybe you’re in the wrong business.
- Unfortunately, it’s going to be a lot harder for social media campaigns to attract earned media by about 2012 or so, once the public has become used to communicating directly with brands.
- If your view of social media is so tunnel-visioned that all you care about are the number of fans or retweets or views you’re garnering, you’re missing the whole point.
- Letting the consumers decide for themselves that they really want to know you, versus persuading them that they should, can make a very big difference in the relationship that ensues.
- It’s not your imagination; marketing really has gotten harder.
- We will one day dust off the bones of companies that fossilized because they didn’t think (caring) could “scale,” or because they didn’t think it was worth the effort, or because they could not stop drawing lines in the sand.
(disclosure: I know Gary, and consider him a friend. He has helped me with some marketing ideas for my book, and he bought many copies for his company. I also bought many copies of his book as prizes for the SXSW party for our book. But, he certainly doesn’t need a review from me to sell a ton of books, and I wouldn’t waste my time writing a review for a book I didn’t like.)
(photo of Gary by icedsoul photography .:teymur madjderey)