Gary Vaynerchuk rose to fame as a scrappy entrepreneur who launched WineLibrary.com, the first video blog about wine. A marketing superstar, he co-founded the agency VaynerMedia with his brother, AJ, speaks around the world on marketing and social media, and is a New York Times bestselling author (Crush It! and The Thank You Economy). 

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I invited Gary to Marketing Smarts to discuss his latest book, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World.

Here are just a few highlights from my conversation with Gary about why he had to write this book and how marketers can use each social network's unique properties to tell their story.

To choose your platforms, work backwards (04:54): "[Marketers] need to reverse-engineer what they're trying to accomplish. It depends on what you're selling. If you're B2B, LinkedIn and Facebook become more obvious. If you're B2C and you're targeting females, Pinterest has to be part of the conversation. If you're B2C and you're targeting the youth, Instagram and Tumblr have to be part of the conversation, so if you are not willing to allocate the resources, which is money and people, into creating content for all the platforms, you have to go through a reverse-engineering process of the places where you think your end consumers most live and spend their time."

Invest the time and resources to tell your story well on social networks (5:41): "First and foremost, I don't think that people are allocating enough proper money or time or people to the concept of storytelling on social networks. I see a lot of people continuing to pour a lot of good money down the drain with banner advertising, pop-up ads, a lot of things I think are diminishing on returns.... There's a lot that's going on, so first and foremost the mental allocation of money and people to actually create content. This isn't community management. This isn't saying 'hi' on Twitter. This is putting out content daily as a gateway for what you're trying to achieve in business."

Mobile must be the primary consideration for marketers (15:00): "[Marketers] need to be thinking mobile first. I'm redesigning GaryVaynerchuck.com, and the first meeting is about how it's going to look on mobile, long before we start talking about desktop, because people are consuming on their mobile devices, and they will continue to at a scale that will trump desktop in a substantial way."

Participating in social media is no longer optional (18:15): "Think back to 2003, 2002... It was so different... You literally walked around the world and you didn't have access to the Internet. Now we all do at all times. Now, everything is different, where we spend our time. All these things...are being disrupted. We're spending countless hours on Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat and Twitter, and all these hours used to go into somewhere else, and as businesses if we can't intercept and get involved in these conversations, we're going to be boxed out of the awareness cycle of our consumer."

For more information, visit GaryVaynerchuk.com or follow Gary on Twitter: @garyvee.

Gary is one fast talker, so we talked about much more! Be sure to listen to the entire show, which you can do above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience. Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes or via RSS and never miss an episode!

Music credit: Noam Weinstein.

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Published on December 11, 2013