Gary Vee: 'Stop Throwing Cash Down the Toilet'

Ask ANYONE who heard Gary Vaynerchuk speak at R4 in Las Vegas whether this author and social media visionary is worth your attention.

After they rave about him, spend a few minutes reading some quotes from his presentation and asking yourself if your approach to social media is truly serving you well.

Later, watch some video and order his new book, "The Thank You Economy," which was released the day he spoke to RE/MAX.

And if you can't find anyone who was at R4, it would be a good idea to read on anyway.

Insights from Gary Vee: – "What's the ROI of social media? I don't know. What's the ROI of your mother? What's the ROI of your best friend? There's a lot of things you can't put black-and-white numbers on, especially when it's this early. You're in the people business, and people are now talking publicly on the web in a way we've never seen before. Your ability to mine it with no cost, to look at the data and interact with them, is zero except for the time you put into it."   – "Every business wants to talk. We want to push our message and our agenda, our phone numbers our websites. The 'Thank You Economy' is all about listening. You guys have all been in business and have never had a listening platform. For the last 100-plus years, the only way business had to communicate was by talking. It's not your fault, it's the way the game was. But guess what, it's about to change."   – "In the last 15 months, 55 percent of all new homeowners were 30 years or younger. How do you think you're going to talk to them? You think they're going to get pumped for those billboards and bus ads? Because I promise you, when they're in a bus they're looking down at their iPhone. Social currency will be the dividing line between selling your properties and not."    – "We've all been in the push business, but now it's pull. So many in the audience say 'Well, we tried this Gary.' I know what you did in social media – you pushed. You said 'Come to our open house.' You were talking; you weren't listening. You weren't giving to your community. You were using the skill sets that it takes to give a presentation; you weren't using the skill set that it takes to be good at a cocktail party. Everybody treats social media like they're a 19-year-old dude; they're all trying to close too fast. You need to relax. People want real. If you don't want to be real, you're going to lose."   – "People don't think it's practical, and some say that I don't understand. 'You don't get it, Gary, we're a different business.' I do get it. We are in the people business, and people have never been more attainable. The reason I can answer this guy's Facebook post is because I want to. The cost is much lower than the way I used to have relationships. And I don't want to hear that we're losing relationships. It's the opposite. I believe everybody's dramatically more in touch with their friends, much more social. I get it, I know it's new and it's a time commitment, but you have to reallocate."  – "While I was a junior in college, I launched winelibrary.com. From 1998 to 2005, I grew the business from a $4 million to a $45 million business. I built that business in a traditional way – billboards, radio, print with local TV ads, bus stop ads. I believe in traditional media; just do it right. I think you should do everything you still do, but please don't close out where it's going. When things get tight, people retreat and they go to tried and true. Don't go back to what got you in the bad place. You go in a different direction."   – "No tweet left behind. Everybody who tweets has to be responded to. How are we going to do that? Take three commercials, don't do them and instead hire nine people to actually care about your end user. Stop throwing cash down the toilet. Maybe you don't buy a Yellow Pages ad this year. You don't need it, I promise. You're better off doing smoke signals off the top of the building. It's 2011. If you go into the trenches of social and go to one-on-one, making a contextual relationship with your end user or the person who can give word of mouth through another end user, you will be living through the five-year gold rush of this system."

• Social media value
• Future of business
• Real estate
• Pull, don't push
• Practicality
• Traditional strategies
• About the end user
• Not an age thing – "I didn't grow up tech. I didn't have a computer until I was 20 years old. I hear people say, 'Gary, I didn't grow up with this, I'm older.' Well, you didn't grow up driving, but you figured it out. It's not an age thing – it's a DNA thing. From the beginning of time till 2003, there was this much content. Now every 48 hours, that much is produced. What that means, my friends, is one thing: It's going to be difficult to break through. The only thing that's going to break through is caring about the end user. Personal relationships close the day in every business. Once you create that emotional context, things happen.

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