The Think eBiz Blog

Crush-It: Gary Vay*Ner*Chuk's Social Marketing Motivation Book

If you never heard the name Gary Vaynerchuk, you have not been on Twitter, Facebook, Podcasts, YouTube or, for that matter, anywhere online. Gary is a high energy way over-the-top social marketing show man, business owner and now author. He is loud (his words).

His genesis is Wine Library, a wine store in Springfield New Jersey - and then an engaging Podcast called Wine library TV.  In his episodes, he discusses wine but with an entertainment flair. He truly brought wine to the every-man/woman. He is passionate about all things wine and it shows. His podcasts are must-see and infectious. You want to try these wines; do the "sniffy sniff" and so on.

However; today we are talking about his book:   Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion

Crush-it is a motivational book; where Gary implores you to drive your passion hard into real cash, using all the social media tools available. His point - these tools are mostly free and there is nothing stopping you from achieving your goals; except yourself. The book is a quick read and although he doesn't go into details on how to use Facebook or Twitter, he gives you a feeling of empowerment. That yes - you can!

Yet this isn't a book just for make hiking (my passion) a lucrative business. It's a great read for any business owner and entrepreneur. In the coming weeks we will be leveraging Gary's ideas and strategies for a client in that promotes PowerPoint Presentation templates - and for our own... hiking. We will document are steps, strategies, successes and learnings. Stay tuned as we try our own hand at Crushing It!

Facebook: Privacy and 350 Million Connected People; a real challenge

Mark Zuckerberg announced yesterday that "It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.". He does on to discuss privacy, a real challenge when you manage a community of this size. How to you maintain an "open and connected" society yet place rules to protect ones privacy?

One thing is for sure, Facebook need to implement the ability to control privacy in an easy to  understand - intuitive manner. This is not as easy as it may sound, as this community has highly advance technology people - and those far less so. Yet online privacy is critical to the success of this and other social platforms. failure to secure personal data could be crushing to a social platform.

Currently, we can control who has access to our Facebook page and we restrict access to the content and images from 3rd party entities. The question; is it working? How do we know if the security structure we setup is actually what we intended and is correctly in place. To this; we suggest a privacy wizard that, after making your selections - it provides an easy to understand report and analysis. Further , we suggest the use of a graphical representation of your privacy settings; so it is clear who is in - who is outside.

We personally use Facebook for fun and pleasure (which is why we don't publish our Facebook page here); and yet we believe this is a highly strategic social media platform for B2B and B2C organizations. We will explore this aspect further in the coming days. Add your comments and concerns about privacy n Facebook; we'd like to hear from you.