Dave Concannon

Last night I headed along to hear Gary Vaynerchuk speak at the Hillside club in Berkeley, one of the stops on his current tour for "Crush It! - Cash in on your passion".

"Crush it!" details Gary's techniques for growing his 60 million dollar wine business using social media, and spinning off a successful media company which consults to Fortune 500 companies. The message is relatively simple, but it's a breath of fresh air in the sort of society where everyone wants instant results and get-rich-quick schemes to rescue them from boredom in a desk job.

At it's simplest the core message is similar to Tim Ferriss' "4-hour work week" in that both authors propose that time spent working at a job you hate is intolerable and every effort should be made to escape if there's an alternative idea you could be pursuing that would make you happy.

What's different about the approach in "Crush it!" is that Vaynerchuk isn't going to pretend that you can achieve success on a few hours a week - the key to his success is patience, perseverance, and in his own words "hustle". He regularly works spartan hours answering every single email sent to him by fans and critics alike, and engaging with people on twitter to build personal brand equity.

Overall it's quite a short book, and for people who've been using social media for a while, or following Gary's conferences and speaking engagements might find it repeats what he's said in the past. At the signing he mentioned that a large proportion of sales are "thank yous" from people he's engaged with over twitter, facebook, winelibrary etc over the last few years - This in my mind definitely rings true about the power of creating personal relationships. Gary was happy to chat with people after the signing, giving advice on how people can ramp up their personal projects.

Some snippets from the book:

1) Don't drop your job straight off the bat, work spare hours early in the morning or late at night to chip away at your passion project.

2) "It's never a bad time to start a business unless you're starting a mediocre business"

3) "Do the right thing by your customers, because the right thing is never the wrong thing" - Customer service is everything: If you have to sacrifice money to keep your customer happy it'll pay dividends it because that satisfied customer is going to tell everyone they know how you looked after them. Gary cites word-of-mouth as the most effective form of advertising he knows of,  quoting around an 89% repeat business vs ~12% for radio/tv/magazine business. He's got a few nice personal stories of delivering cases of wine to customers when someone screwed up to turn around a sour customer relationship.

4) "Traditional media are going out of business, where's that 3 million dollar a year ad spend going to go?" - Gourmet magazine is shutting down, yet online food portals are ramping up. That advertising spend has to go somewhere, and social media is going to grab the lion's share of it.

5) Patience and hard work win in the long run - If you cut corners, eventually someone with more integrity is going to come along and clean the floor with you.

There are many techniques for trying to develop an intuitive user experience, one I particularly like is "persona-based design". With persona-based design you're basically trying to figure out the personality types that are going to use your design, and then put yourself into the mindset of the user, figuring out their needs and desires.  The key to this is determining their true intention, and presenting the options to them that most closely match.

An example of a site which has really impressed me this week - Zipcar.  Zipcar is a car sharing service. You sign up for a small fee and get a handy ID card which gives you access to hundreds of cars for as short a time as an hour, up to several days. All very handy for someone who's moved to a nice new city which doesn't require much access to a car.

The application process for a non-national is a little more complicated - After the standard web sign-up I had to apply to my old insurance company to get proof that I'm not some car-wrecking psychopath. So, I fired that off and here comes the clever bit - when I come back to the Zipcar website a few days later it understands what part of the process I'm waiting on, and immediately directs me to a page reminding me that I need to send off my documentation and how long the process takes for verification.

This morning I received a welcome pack in the post with my ID card and some instructions. When I go back to the Zipcar site again, it immediately takes me to the "Activate your new card" screen, with simple instructions on how to proceed.  I haven't even been in one of their cars yet and I'm already a happy customer - At every turn the information I required was right in front of me.

The next time you're putting together something that a customer is going to interact with, stop for a moment and think - What's their intention? What do they want to know, or what do they need to do?  If you can answer the question before it's asked, you will amaze and delight.