Gary Vaynerchuk Killed it at SXSW

I am so happy that I decided to go to Gary Vaynerchuk’s talk today at SXSW here in Austin Texas.

There was a significant amount of buzz around Gary’s talk so at the last minute I changed my plans when my colleague Jenn Lowther said it was something that we couldn’t miss. Also, most of our crew checked out his secret wine party last night which added to the buzz and anticipation of a great talk. If you do not know who Gary Vaynerchuk is, at least read his Wikipedia entry first. He is a wine video blogger that made it big, really big in about 4 years.

Gary brought up some extremely good points about customer service and predicts that we will all be much more customer service focused in the near future. He explained that companies don’t care and are still using social media to sell, sell, sell to their friends and followers rather than truly interact with them. He explained that not enough of us are saying “thank-you” when we are mentioned on Twitter or “you’re welcome” when somebody thanks us. It’s a simple point but I think that he hit the nail on the head when he says that businesses do not care enough. He went on to further explain that caring is not scale-able and that we have to take the time and effort to truly interact with each person/friend/customer in a one-on-one environment. Some people from the audience challenged him on this (while pitching their own stuff… grrr) and he responded saying that companies are not doing a good enough job of recognizing their fans/supporters/customers and mass communication is not authentic.

“Everyone is trying to be a 19-year-old dude.”

[Pause]

“Everyone is trying to close too fast. Give it a little time. It’s so amazing what a soft sell can do.”

Be sure to read Andre Mager’s summary and hopefully there will be a video online soon. If there is one video to watch from SXSW, this will be it.