Online marketing trailblazer Gary Vaynerchuk (VAY NER CHUK) is a 33-year-old entrepreneur whose dual identity as both business guru and wine guy has made him known as the “Social Media Sommelier.” A self-trained wine expert, he revolutionized the wine industry with his video blog, Wine Library TV (affectionately known as The Thunder Show), and grew his family wine business from $4 million to $60 million in five years. What raised Vaynerchuk’s notoriety even more than his business acumen was his foresight combined with his pioneering, multi-faceted approach to personal branding and business. While his youthful following broke down barriers in the wine industry, the business world (and Web 2.0) admired him for creating a new generation of branding, focusing on the Internet and leveraging social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter. As his viewership swelled to over 80,000 a day, and his family’s wine business grew to over $60 million a year, he made television appearances on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Ellen DeGeneres, NBC’s Today Show, CNBC’s Mad Money with Jim Cramer, and The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, was featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and has become a consultant for Fortune 100 companies, and a keynote speaker around the world.

The World’s Foremost Marketing Guru & Business Week’s “Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age,” Seth Godin is a best-selling author, entrepreneur and agent of change. Named one of the top 21 speakers for the 21st century by Successful Meetings Magazine, Godin draws on his bestselling books and years of being a marketing pioneer to bring audiences of all kinds to their feet.

Listen to audio of the keynote above, and follow along with notes below.

Make Art

• I’m not interested in what’s next in marketing, but I’m interested in what’s now.
• Things can change when one person stands up and chooses to act differently.
• Betty Crocker is important because when General Mils put her on the radio, they would buy a half hour of air time, and people would phone in and ask questions about baked goods. They hired 250 women to answer cooking questions.
• Duncan Heinz brand started with restaurant guides, then quickly grew to canned goods, and food.
• All that mattered back then was that your product would get in front of people. Ads and interruptions were the work.
• Your boss keeps saying MORE!
• We are told that we are marketers need to interrupt people and put our product in front of people.
• I call it the TV-industrial complex.
• Buy TV ads > Get distribution > Sales > Profit > BUY MORE ADS, and it keeps going around and around.
• If you’re going to interrupt everyone you better put something in front of people that everyone wants to buy.
• The number of food items was overrun.
• Then we had an overage of media channels.
• The number of channels is too big for you to become a mass marketer.
• There isn’t a shortage of noise.
• The average American watches 3-4 hours a TV per night but they can’t remember any of the ads.
• We grew up believing that our job was to buy into this perpetual machine of profit.
• One time I was driving with my kids and they were being loud in the backseat, then all of the sudden they were quiet for about 4 seconds, because they were staring at a cow. It was just a normal cow. So I kept driving. But what if it was a purple cow?  I would have stopped and taken a picture.
• Remarkable – worth making a remark about it. 
• The art of marketing is to start being the first step in the process of making things that are worth talking about in the first place.
• We are no longer in an environment where you can out buy your competition.
• Your product needs to be for someone not for everyone.
• Attention is the asset of the future. The privilege of marketing to someone who want to be marketed to is the only asset that matters.
• If you make an average product, why would someone want to hear from you? They don’t!
• You have to make something that people care about.
• Revolutions disrupt things.
• There have been 4 revolutions in history
• Cheap energy – kerosene, oil, or gas
• Cheap output
• Cheap media
• Cheap connection – it is cheaper to connect now than ever before in history. All of that stuff that used to be scarce is now abundant, but what is scarce is who is willing to listen to you?
• These connections lead to tribes.
• The internet is allowing all of these tribes to show up.
• We like being in alignment. Human beings like being part of people who are in sync. Most people would rather vote for the winner of an election than the person they actually want to win.
• Is it how am I going to run some social media campaign? No. That’s silly.
• The challenge is, who is my tribe? How do I find this group of people?
• The niches are better markets. What can you do to go to edge?
• As you try more stunts to get noticed you end up worse, because it’s not the masses and you don’t have a chance to scale.
• Why is it hard? Because this isn’t what you signed up for, right?
• Henry Ford popularized and perfected this notion of mass production.
• Interchangeable parts and mass production are what allow us all to have the standard of living that we have. But we also needed interchangeable people.
• This led to schools to train factory workers of tomorrow.
• The reason they want you to fit in is that once you do, they they can ignore you.
• Only 200 years ago the job was invented. If you wanted to be a coal miner, you didn’t start your own coal mine. You went to find a guy who had a coal mine.
• There aren’t many great jobs left where someone tells you what to do all day.
• The jobs that are being created are art. 
• This is a human being making up their own rules to solve a problem. This is authentic human work.
• Art is doing something that draws a line in the sand.
• There is no map for art.
• Competence is no longer a scarce commodity.
• If you can write it down, I can find it cheaper.
• The first thing you can do is stop bowling. The problem with bowling is that the goal is to be perfect. You’ve got to figure out how to do something worth talking about.
• Writing down the answer doesn’t help anymore because I have wikipedia. I need to pay someone who can figure out a new problem.
• What the internet is saying to you is here, pick yourself! 
• Here is a microphone, what do you have to say?
• The only people who are going to win are the people who are going to figure out how to innovate.
• We need monopolistic creativity.
• If failure is not an option you’ve just announced that neither is success.
• The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.
• No one has ever done creative work on a blackberry. It’s function is to say “its okay, you’re not going to get bit by an alligator.”
• This is the lizard brain.
• The lizard brain is the one that causes you to get nervous when your boss calls.
• The lizard brain causes you to act like a sheep at work. If someone tells you what to do then it means that it’s not your fault.
• Artists understand that the opportunity is an a chance to give a gift.
• An artist would rather give their art than sit at home and waste it.
• Don’t strive to be heard when you’re here. Work to be missed when you’re not.
• If you stay on the plane it’s United’s fault, if you get off, it’s your fault.
• Is this seat taken? Do you know how many people want your seat? Want your job?
• Your job is the best platform you’ve got to do art, take a risk, to connect with people.
• Make art
• give gifts
• If someone says to you, “How was your day?” and you say “fine” then you’re a manager. But if you’ve got a story then maybe you’re a leader. Maybe you have a passion to change everything.
• You have everything you need right now, except making a choice to lead us. “We need you to lead us.”

Seth Godin on the publishing industry model

• I’ve tried really hard not to be a hypocrite. When the number of books goes up, but the umber of people stays the same, something has to go.
• When I can deliver the right book to the right person, all of the sudden the scarcity of shelf space and all of these other things goes away, and replaced with abundancy instead.
• Doing things that don’t make sense is what artists do all the time.

What is your favorite failure and what did you learn from it?

• I did a video aquarium.
• The biggest failure of mine was when I wrote a book and spent $80,000 and sold 300 copies, but two guys started yahoo.com for less than $80,000.
• It’s not the resources you have, it’s what do you see? What do you notice?

• Circuit City didn’t do anything wrong, and because of that they are now Circuit City gone.
• How do I use this as platform for valuable change?
• Weirdness is already becoming the new norm because people are doing what they want. They are visiting the website they want. We’re seeing more and more people as we get wealthier, we’re using that wealth to get weirder, to be more like ourselves.

Avinash Kaushik is the co-Founder of Market Motive Inc and the Analytics Evangelist for Google.
Through his blog, Occam’s Razor, and his best selling books, Web Analytics: An Hour A Day and Web Analytics 2.0, Avinash has become recognized as an authoritative voice on how marketers, executive teams and industry leaders can leverage data to fundamentally reinvent their digital existence.

 Metrics

• there are 3 things that I am very interested in in life
• Influence – how do you find people, and where do you find people, and how do you influence them?
• If you are a brand or company that wanted to go find people then the newspaper industry is where you went.
• 51 years worth of advertising in newspapers disappeared in 8 years.
• Today 40% of Americans time was spent on TV. 23% of time is spent on mobile, and 1% of advertising budget is on mobile.
• Influence people where they spend time rather than spending money where their grandfathers spent time.
• Experience is all about delivering tiny little experiences to people.
• How can companies spend millions of dollars on TV advertising, and yet they don’t have a website that is compatible on the iPad?
• It is very important to understand that you can’t write checks for things that won’t deliver for the customer.
• These things combined should deliver value and an experience.
• We have way more data than we need
• But how do we measure data? Click?! Impressions?! Pageviews?! Followers?! Fans?! Likes?! This is garbage.
• This is how we record HITS – How Idiots Track Success
• When you create experiences you should measure bounce rate. “I came, I puked, I left.”
• Measure brand destruction.
• Measure speed. Every 1 second delay on your website loading time reduces conversation rate by 7%.
• Newspaper websites are measured in page views so they fill their home pages with 347 links.
• Deliver such a great experience that I will come back again and again and again.
• This is called customer loyalty.
• Average back out on checkout sites is 70% because there are too many pages on your checkout.
• In the context of everything that is possible, what share do we have as a company? Compare your stats against your competitors.
• Measure your share of search. xxx/290 million queries.
• ask 2 questions about your site:
• why are you here?
• were you able to complete your task?
• Task completion rate.
• Super lame
• clicks
• visits
• emails sent
• page views
• video views
• “engagement”
• Super awesome
• loyalty
• conversion
• task completion
• Look at:
• Acquisition
• behavior
• outcomes
• Put all traffic into 3 buckets
• traffic that i’ve owned
• earned
• paid
• #dontdatapuke
• We spend a lot of money, time and attention trying to acquire traffic. We’re good at shoving people onto our website, but the average conversion rate is 2%.
• What about the rest of the hard earned traffic?
• What is the one most important thing that people are trying to do on our website? Then also consider all of the rest of the smaller things that are important to your business. You care about the 2% but I also care about the 98%.
• When you obsess about the 2% you’re saying that the micro conversions don’t matter.
• You should care about the micro-conversions.
• Value everything that is important for this quarter and this month, but also value everything in the future.
• #beyond2percent
• Don’t settle for 2% because you’re optimizing for a tiny number of people.
• As the web becomes more sophisticated the payment process becomes more sophisticated, but also more bloated.
• How do you optimize your digital marketing budget?
• What marketers do is optimize every channel in a silo.
• Don’t optimize individual portfolios. Optimize for a broader view.
• Create a chord diagram for the drilling down data.
• sunburst diagram.
• To get these amazing tools click here – http://zqi.me/vizd3
• 1. Understand. 2. Test. 3. Be less wrong.
• Social media indicates this fundamental change in how we do marketing. Better understanding of who is on the other end.
• Shouting is becoming less effective over time.
• I don’t use internet marketing, I use “intent marketing.”
• Social media is creating this bi-directional conversation.
• Our ability to influence people is becoming greater.
• Marketing is changing from shouting to conversation.
• What is your plan to market as a conversation?
• What do likes, or followers measure? Nothing.
• Improve your audience’s life.
• Esquire magazine
• Understand who your audience is and improve their lives.
• Add value to your audience. If people want to connect with your staff then connect them with your staff.
• To be social you must think different with data.
• Measure 4 metrics across
• Conversation rate – the number of audience comments, or replies per social contribution. If you can’t have a conversation
• Amplification rate – less than 10% of your followers will read what you say on Twitter. BUT the secondhand network (the people who follow those who follow me) is crucial!
• # of retweets
• # of shares
• # of “forwards” per contribution
• Applause rate – # of positive clicks per contribution. Quality to engagement.
• Economic value – social media doesn’t exist to take money from people. It exists to have a conversation. But if you don’t measure economic value it doesn’t matter.
• truesocialmetrics.com
• #thinkdifferent
• “Information is powerful, but it is how we use it that will define us.”

Keith Ferrazzi is the world’s foremost expert in relationships, bringing 20 years of research and experience to the art and science of business relationship development. His signature focus on success through relationships – a deeply energizing passion – has fueled his own incredible rise to prominence. Both Forbes and Inc. have called him one of the world’s most “connected” individuals.

Relationships

• Start of a dialogue moving to action
• all of your relational styles circle around your psychography (your sense of people around you).
• while your psychology is set early, there is something that overrides that, you are a human species. As a result you long to belong. Our job is no longer to deprogram, but to tap into the essence of who you are.
• relationships are the number 1 predictor of your capacity to influence.
• do your employees feel that you care about their success?
• trust is key.
• relationships are key to your success.
• Make a People Plan!
• A people plan is, who are the 25 most important people who are critical to your goals?
• Everything you do in the future needs to be aligned around people.
• Relationship Action Planning
• Process: Focus > Target > Define > Alignment > Outreach > Renew
• Stumbling into intimacy is how we built relationships in the past.
• Recognize that you as an individual need to build an action plan.
• You need to go back and start teaching relationship action planning to your team.
• Recognize that this is something you need to apply in your personal life.
• In the increasingly virtual world how do we begin to think about people rules? It has changed.
• Organize companies around a loose network of individuals.
• Who are the 25 most important people I will be in relationship this year?
• Meetings are more sucky than ever before!
• We are now tribes of 1. We have increasingly less practice being tribal. We have less practice being the people we need to be.
• Have power to forgive, and be in relationship. We are more alone than ever before.
• We haven’t learned how to use the technology and put the new rules around it.
• In a study of 1,000 tele-presence calls people are on their email before the meeting starts, not small-talking.
• We started something called a personal/professional check-in before meetings for 5 minutes.
• Your capacity to deal with difficult people in the workplace is your indicator on whether you can be productive in the workplace.
• Your thoughts of other people define the relationship before it even happens.
• By taking a 5 minute checkin you have greater permission to be in relationship with those people.
• 4 core values 
• intimacy
• generosity
• candor
• accountability
• You can’t lead with intimacy. CRM systems aren’t good at tracking relational quality.
• Do you have those deep relationships that won’t let you fail? They practice generosity, and honesty, and candor.
• Are you the kind of leader who creates a team that has each other’s back?
• Be generous. You can’t lead with intimacy. You must lead with generosity.
• Don’t push back where you’ve come from. You should embrace where you’ve come from.
• When you’re generous with someone then you have permission to build the relationship.
• Lead with generosity. As a result build a relationship. Those people will return the generosity. This doesn’t mean it is fake. It just means that it matters.
• Serve together with your team. This will accelerate your team.
• If you have a goal, wrap a “WHO” around that goal.
• The key is not only what, but WHAT and WHO.
• Setting specific goals is only half of the battle.
• Identifying who can help you achieve those goals is the key to attaining them.
• Mission: write down 1 professional goal and 3 people that can help you attain your goal. Be specific.
• Be the kind of individual that people can count on.
• Lead with generosity, intimacy, candor and accountability.
• How am I serving those people?
• Send an email to these people and invest in relationships.
• you need to combine mission and humility.
• Are my relationships with my staff in the right place?
• Who are the 100 people that are most important to the growth of your organization?
• Marketing is not just a broadcast medium, it is a relationship medium.
• Raise the purposefulness of relationships. You can usher this into your staff.
• Who in your life are you not letting help you?

O yeah, and the top of my head is cutoff the entire episode, so there’s that…

Check out the video version below or listen to the audio above, OR…we are now in iTunes. So if you want to listen to us on your iPhone you can do that as well. Click here to listen in iTunes. Also see the show notes below for all the links that I talk about in this episode.

Shownotes:

• TwitBlock – Tool for blocking spam Twitter followers.
• NeuYear Calendar – Calendar that shows you the whole year.

First, some stats…

Since Pinterest launched in March 2010 they have grown to almost 11 million users while still being in invitation only open-beta. Yes, that’s right, they are still invitation only!

It has been reported that 97% of Pinterest users are women. 97% of users are women! This is a good thing to keep in mind when posting content.

It has also been reported that Pinterest is driving more traffic than LinkedIn, Google+, Youtube, and Myspace combined!

What is Pinterest?

• Pinterest is an online pin-board for things that interest you.
• Pinterest is VISUAL.
• Pinterest is a content water cooler.
• Pinterest is currently invite only (if you need an invite just let me know).

Should your church use it?

Now you should know me well enough by now that I’m not one to just recommend that your church should hop on every new social network out there just because its what is hot right now. Context is everything, and if it isn’t right for your context, and if your people aren’t using it, then don’t worry about it. But you should at least explore these new tools, and find out if your people are using them.

AND…

If your people are using Pinterest then you definitely need to create an account for your church.

How can your church use Pinterest?

Your church can use Pinterest in a couple different ways.

• As a church you can create different pin-boards that can be focused on different things. Here are a few examples:
• Sermon Series
• Book Lists
• Blog Posts

But what I’m really excited about is the opportunity that this gives churches to really be engaged in design and culture. Your church could create an architecture pin-board, or a photography pin-board, or a design pin-board. All of these things which are very visual but also point back to Jesus in some way. For example, Park is doing a photography exhibit for Good Friday and Easter and this would be a great use-case for Pinterest.

Another good idea I had was to create a pin-board for the neighborhood your church is located in. Or if you have multiple campuses. For us at Park, Chicago is a very multicultural city, so each neighborhood has it’s own feel and style. For Park we can create different pin-boards for different neighborhoods that could include restaurants, cafes, or other cool spots for people to visit and engage with their neighborhood.

Visual

Again, I cannot stress enough how visual Pinterest is. Pinterest will force you to become much more visual and design savvy if you plan on using it for your church (which is a good thing!). In each of these ideas there are visual aspects, and that is what you need to remember.

An example of a church that is using Pinterest well is Mars Hill. So if you need any ideas before you launch Pinterest at your own church check out how Mars Hill is using it.  Tim Schraeder also did a great interview with Jake Johnson from Mars Hill over at Church Marketing Sucks about their use of Pinterest, check it out!

And if you need an invite, just let me know. I’ve still got some to go around.

Are you using Pinterest at your church?

Do you think churches should use Pinterest?

What other ways do you think churches could use this platform?

Let me know by leaving a comment…

The Details

You can upgrade your church’s Facebook Page to the new Facebook Timeline right now, and you will have the option to setup the page to make it look good, and then it will be forced to go live on March 30. Or you can just upgrade today and publish the new page.

The Facebook Timeline Brand Pages will have the same features as personal profile timelines…the ability to add a cover photo, scroll through the page explore the life of your church on Facebook.

One thing you should know is that Facebook Timeline takes away the ability for you to set an app as your default landing page (a bit unfortunate), but I think the features of Timeline are worth it.

Features

Timeline adds the ability to pin posts to the top of your Timeline for one week.

Also, (and I think this one is huge) Timeline gives the ability to privately message someone from inside your page. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished this feature was available. Anytime someone asks for information about Park or a class, etc. that is better to be sent over a private message I’ve had to send them a message through my personal profile and explain who I am and then give them the information they wanted. This feature is going to be nice.

All of these features and more can be found in the TechCrunch article that broke the story this morning.

Your Church’s Story

I don’t know about you, but to me I think this is going to be great for any church who is looking for new ways to tell their story. The fact that I can go back and add photos from back in the 80′s when Park was founded is awesome. It will even give our current attendees a better perspective on our church, and where we have been, and how that steers the vision for the future.

2.29.12, 5 PM, Update: TechCrunch just posted another article with more details on how to use Timeline for Pages. Check it out.

Are you going to upgrade your church to Facebook Timeline to get a preview?

What advantages or disadvantages does this incur for your church’s Facebook Page?

Leave a comment below…

• Probably the biggest and most exciting change in my life recently is that I am now engaged to be married to my best friend! It’s such an awesome feeling to know that I’m going to be spending the rest of my life with my best friend, Amy Wynne. Thankfully she said yes Did I mention she is Australian…that’s right, never would I have imagined that the girl of my dreams was going to be Australian, but God brought us together in such an awesome way. Hit me up, and I’ll tell you the story someday.

• Last week I was brought back to my days of college when I would stay up until 3 AM on a regular basis. I stayed up until at least 2 AM for 3 consecutive nights this past week to complete a project, and it just reminded me that I’ve still got a bit of late night productivity in me. Coffee was my good friend last week.
• My roommate and I have started our long lost podcast again. We started it back in 2006, and went strong for a couple years, then fell off. But we are back in action, and trying to record weekly episodes. The older episodes aren’t available anymore, but check out the new episodes. If you like to simply get an update on news, followed along with some funny commentary check it out. It’s in iTunes and we’re working on a website right now. Check out the JSquared Podcast.
• I am giving a talk at an event in SoCal next month on Church Communications, along with my friends Tim Schraeder, Dawn Baldwin, Curtis Templeton and Drew Goodmanson. If you’re in the SoCal area and would like to come let me know and I’ll hook you up. It’s going to be a good time.
• I’ve also started a new project that will hopefully serve as a resource for those in the church who are using social media as part of their communications. It’s called The Social Church and I’m still in the early stages, but let me know what you think.
• O and I just discovered some great music you should check out by Gotye.

And I think that’s it.

What has been going on in your life recently? Hit me up on Twitter, and if you’re in the Chicago area, let’s get coffee.

Also, we are now on iTunes! So if you wanna listen to us from your phone or iPod check it out here.

Shownotes:

• Apple’s HUGE profits!
• Facebook’s IPO
• Mcdonald’s Twitter Campaign gone wrong
• Hiker almost went into cardiac arrest!
• Tennis ball boy catches ball in mid-air!
• Video of tennis umpire hit in head was removed from youtube
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
• Star Wars Episode 1 in 3D
• The Titanic in 3D