GaryVee: the Multimillion Dollar Personal Brand Built on Social Media

Name: Gary Vaynerchuk

Job: entrepreneur, investor, author, podcaster, vlogger, speaker

Career duration: over 10 years on social media

Country: the United States

Net Worth: $160 million (2017)

“I think anyone can be anything they want, as long as it’s their truth”

– Gary Vaynerchuk

Introduction

Gary Vaynerchuk, or GaryVee (his online name), is one of the most prominent people on social media today. He’s become a master of producing highly engaging and inspirational bite-sized content on social media. He has over 2M subscribers on Youtube and over 1.8M followers on Twitter (as of April 2019). He’s written New York Times bestselling books, and he hosts a successful podcast. He also provides social media and strategy services to Fortune 500 companies through VanyerMedia, the social media focused digital agency co-founded with his brother that now grosses over $200 million in sales annually.

As one of the very first people who have realized the potential of online marketing and succeeded in possessing strong online presence using social media, Gary has built his own Personal Brand all the way from scratch, which now amounts to as much as multimillion dollar’s value.

Unique values that differentiate Gary from others

Gary has a remarkable career as an entrepreneur. He is a self-made multimillionaire who knows how to make money, and he shares his knowledge and experience of making money in “his way”, which is usually in the form of media contents. He is well-known for his penchant for swear words, but he is always authentic, confident, intriguing and extremely practical. His language choice is unconventional especially in the business world, but it is one of the reasons why millions of his followers are glued to him listening to his insights on entrepreneurship and life.

Successful entrepreneur and pioneer of Internet

Gary started his entrepreneur life very early. When Vaynerchuk turned 14, his father had him working in his business, a wine shop business, on the weekends and on every school holiday. Gary said that this experience helped him to learn many valuable business lessons like the importance of nurturing long-term relationships with customers.

Following his graduation in 1998, Vaynerchuk returned to his hometown of New Jersey to continue working in the family wine business. While at college, Vaynerchuk was exposed to computers and the Internet, and he quickly realized that they could be powerful resources for growing his father’s wine business.

Long before email marketing was a thing, he found creative ways to market his father’s wine business, often emailing weekly discounts and specials and sharing his favorite wine recommendations through his point of view.He started a websitecalled WineLibrary.com with the hope that he could dramatically increase the rate at which inventory from the wine store was sold. Within five years of launching the website, sales from the store increased from $3 million to as much as $60 million a year.

Self-made successful social media person

With the rise of social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter in 2007, Gary slowly started to become famous by building a strong online presence.

Gary’s rise to fame all began with a 20-minute daily YouTube show that he started in early 2006, roughly a year after YouTube was founded. The show was called Wine Library TV, and it gave Vaynerchuk a wide platform to share wine reviews and indirectly promote WineLibrary.com.

Gary has fine-tuned content creation machine. His daily vlogs show him in real-life such as client meetings, employee interactions, press events, and doling out financial advice, such as “My 5 Biggest Failures in Business” and “How to Find Your Path to Happiness.”He later became a very active Twitter user. There he built an audience of more than 1.3 million people.

Blatant but Authentic

Gary is well-known for his curse words. It has drawn critics for a style that is loud, bombastic and blatantly self-promotional. In one episode of Ask Gary Vee Show, he once stated during an interview that his favorite swear word is “di**face.”

While some people may be turned off by his cursing, according to Gary, “It’s just something that happens when I have a camera on me” He considers it a reflection of his need to “be me”. Actually, it gives people a feeling that he is transparent, and he shares hisexperiences honestly.

Personal Branding traits of Gary that made him influential

He has it all

Gary Vaynerchuck (aka GaryVee) is known by many people. He’s a serial entrepreneur, four-time New York Times bestselling author, venture capitalist, popular podcast host, and sought-after public speaker serving an audience of millions. He seems to have it all.

But it’s not like he is very lucky to have it all at once. Gary said, having it all is the ability to fly and he left to have it all from the day he was born. At college, he started working in a liquor store by his rules, his way, his journey, and he decided that he wanted to help to build the business for his father. And then he decided that he wanted to be a video person on YouTube when it first came out. And then he decided to build an agency which everybody thought was a stupid idea. And then he decided to come out as a speaker and write books and do all the stuff. If you start thinking $100,000, $1 million or a Lamborghini, or being on whatever magazine, you will never have at all. When you think itself, the trying, you’ve got it from the day you start. It’s what Gary believes.

He’s not afraid of starting something new

Vaynerchuk doesn’t agonize or hesitate when starting something new. He dives in voraciously, working hard and learning as he goes.

When he launched WineLibrary.com at the college, internet was not a common thing. Most wine shops didn’t know yet what the Web was for. Expecting a new trend and being a pioneer in the field can only be done by someone who can take risks. Moreover, it’s not his but his father’s business, which must have made him feel more pressured.

However, Gary was confident about his idea that internet would bring a revolutionary change, and his father also trusted him. His father gave Gary an ad budget as well as “enormous freedom.” (In turn, they later renamed the store Wine Library.) Gary took advantage of new tools he had learned about, like then-burgeoning Google AdWords (which let him pay for his site to appear against searches for “wine”) as well as more traditional print, TV and radio advertising to grow the shop’s annual revenues from $3 million to $45 million by 2003.

There is one statement made by him that well sums up the philosophy and his mindset that propels him ahead in life and business. “I’m not crippled with being perfect. I’m crippled with not doing” — So, avoid hesitation and seize the moment at all costs.

He has entrepreneur spirit

Gary has had entrepreneurial spirit from his early age. One of his first entrepreneurial endeavors involved pulling flowers out of his neighbor’s garden, and reselling them right back to them. He also ran a chain of multiple lemonade stands as a child, before selling baseball cards (and making thousands of dollars) in his early teens.

He was not an ‘A’ student in school, but his parents didn’t mind it that much. It’s because he was making anywhere $2,000 to $3,000 a week from his various business ventures while in middle school.

It is largely his talent in entrepreneurship along with supporting actual outcome that makes people admire him.

He’s hardworking

Gary is hardworking, especially that his high level of involvement on social media is largely responsible for his business success. Can you believe that according to The New York Times, at one point, Gary sent out an astonishing 70 tweets a day? More surprisingly, during the same period, 90 percent of his messages were responses to other people. This clearly shows how much work he really puts in.

Although he started to try balancing his work and life after getting married (the very first words in his Twitter profile are “Family 1st!”), he still puts a lot of time and energy into his work. When someone said to Gary, ‘You’ve only achieved this because you’re big on social media,’ he pulled out his phone and showed his calendar. The calendar for the next few weekdays was jammed with meetings or phone calls — some of them one-to-one talks with colleagues. “It comes from straight-up immigrant fucking hustle,” he said.

He knows how to draw attention to him

There is always GaryVee himself at the center of every social media strategy that he presents. While it often makes him get criticized that he is too self-promotional, it has greatly influenced him becoming a living “Personal Brand”.

Let’s just simply take Gary’s Instagram account. It is predominately filled with his selfies. In fact, his known fondness for the selfie was even on display when he pulled out his phone and mimicked taking such a pic while being introduced as a judge at the 88th Miss America Pageant.

Three years in, Wine Library TV was as much about Gary himself as it was about wine. (The opening animation showed the pouring of a bottle labeled, “Vaynerchuk: a fine New Jersey cabernet.”) He was dispersing wisdom on much more than wine: topics like branding, career advice, and shaping an online identity. And his following on Twitter had grown, reaching 145,000 followers by 2009, when the service was just three years old. He had drawn so much media attention that in the same year, he inked a seven-figure, 10-book deal with HarperStudio to write business books with motivational titles like Crush It! and, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. (The HarperStudio imprint has since folded, so Vaynerchuk’s fourth book, in early 2016, was published under Harper Business.)

What’s impressive about Gary is that if you only promote yourself without enough engagement with others, people may get interested in you for short-term but become fed up with you easily, as there’s nothing they can keep getting from you. That is what people call “too self-promotional”. However, Gary knows when and how to engage with others, and he’s very active at counseling or giving out his knowledge under his name and photo.

He’s self-confident

In many interviews, Gary attributes his success to his unshakable self-confidence. “I do believe that people who care less about what other people think about them tend to have a better life. It’s just liberating,” said Gary, speaking at the SXSW Conference and Festivals. “I genuinely believe that self-esteem is the ultimate drug in life.” He said he got his confidence from his mom and he is, in turn, obsessed with driving self-esteem into his children.

Living so publicly online, Gary has to hear what a lot of people think about him. However, his confidence isn’t swayed by the comments of strangers online. Gary is now a mentor for others, and he has observed that those who care deeply about what people think of them are hobbled by anxieties. As those anxieties and insecurities not only hold people back but also can pollute office culture, he said he may have to fire some of his employees who are talented but so worried and anxious. He says, “Insecurity is a killer. It leads to all the bad s — — and so it’s the difference between confidence and security.”

He’s a passionate motivator

Gary is passionate in everything he does. If you have ever seen him talking, you must have noticed that his energy level is very high. He is passionate in everything he does, including getting others to be as pumped up as he is.

“I am trying to become the injection of audacity into the people that watch me that gives them the courage to jump into the pool that they are scared to swim in,” he says.

This applies to Gary’s employees as well. One of his most consistently impactful leadership strategies is to instill in his employees a presumption of success.

“Sometimes tricking people into thinking they’re better than they are — by building up their self-esteem — can work wonders,” he says. “I’m an HR-driven CEO, and while we don’t know a lot about the brain, we do know that a funny thing happens when you actually think you can do something. So I rule with positivity.”

Gary’s social media branding traits

Below are some advice from Gary on how to grow an audience on social media that he previously shared with Forbes. In short, be constant, patient and be yourself:

Create a lot of content

You should be putting content out every day, constantly, without worrying about one vanity metric. Of course it’s hard. No, it should be hard. Gary advises, “Don’t focus on the 13 people that are doing that. Pay attention to the 30 trillion that aren’t, and realize the ratio, and go put in the work and be patient.”

Gary also emphasizes a lot about documenting. He thinks the office is a hit sitcom all around the world in every version of it. He says, “What I’ve done well is documenting my day-to-day. I’ve done such a good job of creating content because when I’m in between meetings, and I go to the bathroom, I can go on Twitter. I can reply to a DM. Tonight, when I’m on a flight back to New York, I can go live for seven minutes. I can reply to 84 DMs. I can send three tweets. I am in constant motion.”

Be patient

There are many people who have ‘lottery ticket’ mentality, thinking that they’re going to make a single YouTube video that is going to go viral and change their life. However, life doesn’t work like that. Slowly growing an audience is the way to become successful. In order to do that, you should not overly be obsessive with follower count. You need to love the process. Gary says: “If followers are your KPI, then you’re finished. You have to love your process. I did WineTV for 18 months because I loved making wine videos. No one gave a f — -. I was losing money on the wine business. No one gave a s — — . But I kept doing it, while I was honing my craft. I liked it. And even the one nice comment (on the video) fulfilled me. You’ve got to love your process and not focus on getting something from your process. If you’re trying to get something out of your process, you’ll always lose because you won’t be patient. You’re like, ‘Why don’t I have a fat watch or a million followers yet?’”

Be yourself

Everyone is multifaceted in some aspects and so does Gary. Gary is an entrepreneur, a Jet fan, a YouTuber, a hip hop head, an investor and a million other things. Many experts suggest focusing on one subject to create content around, as diversifying your subjects will be confusing to an audience. However, Gary disagrees. He says, “I think everyone can do it successfully (showing multiple sides of themselves online) as long as you’re true to yourself. If I went to a surfing conference, and tried to be in it, it wouldn’t work. If you’re not about it, you’re finished. I think anyone can be anything they want, as long as it’s their truth”

How Gary deals with criticism

Becoming a social media guru and self-stylized branding expert led to riches and renown, but also the aforementioned criticism. The Wall Street Journal called him “continually overexposed.” The New York Times called him a “tireless self-promoter.”

However, he doesn’t shy away from keeping his own style because of those critics. Being self-promotional and putting yourself out there, there are so many people with different opinions about him. However, he believes that as long as people that actually know him have the opinion they have, versus the people who have never met him but have heard him say ‘F — -’ on stage, as long as he is good with the people that actually can look under the hood, then he will always win. “So if you feel good about who you actually are, you need to get loud. And if you don’t, fix your s — -,” he says.

Gary believes the success of VaynerMedia, a digital agency he co-founded with his brother AJ in 2009, has also helped to change the minds of some of his critics. “I’m excited because this company has completely confused the market,” he says. “When I first started it, everyone was like, ‘Oh, Mr. A-lot-of-Twitter-followers thinks he can compete in this world.’ And we’ve not only competed, we will be considered a new standard.” He compares his company’s potential to other big marketing agencies like AKQA and Digitas: “We’re going to be that, for the social generation. We are the winner of that game.” And, he points out — albeit in trademark GaryVee language — that this side of his story has nothing to do with his persona or charisma: “I’ve put my head down and I’ve grinded the shit out of it operationally,” he says.

While being self-promotional and seemingly arrogant, he puts out lots of practical and useful tips for things that people are actually curious about. And it works in favor of him, creating mystique and credibility around him. While there’re many disrespectful and insulting comments about Gary, quite a number of them also give him credits, like @BMilneSLO in 2012: “@garyvee you’re still annoying… and obnoxious… but you’re right,” or @AndersRiis the same year: “this bloke is a bit annoying to listen to, but he does have valid points on social media.”

How Gary will be remembered

Gary Vaynerchuk is one of the most famous entrepreneurs on social media. While he is the king of social media marketing, which is definitely worth recognizing, he’s also much more than just a voice on platforms like Twitter or YouTube.

He’s the business man who understands how to use social media to facilitate his success, who knows how to enjoy the process, and a man full of self-confidence who isn’t afraid of showing himself. As a living Personal Brand dispersing useful knowledge and wisdom, he’ll continue to strengthen his Personal Brand. And thanks to his well-established multimillion dollar worth Personal Brand, while he looks like a man who has it all, he’ll continue to have more.

Gary’s Personal Brand key points

1. If you establish a solid Personal Brand, it will open you a lot of new opportunities to monetize on your Personal Brand. And social media is a great channel to build your Personal Brand. You should have strong online presence.

2. It’s okay to be self-promotional, but make sure you give people what they need, and engage with them.

3. While it is important to accept constructive criticism, not all critics are worth paying attention to. People tend to care a lot about what others say due to insecurity, but it is that insecurity that makes you hold back.

4. Rather than worrying about failing to make things perfect, seize the moment and dive in.

5. Be yourself. It’s okay to show several sides of you, as long as they are the true parts of “you”.

6. Enjoy the process and don’t be obsessed with reaching certain KPIs. Having it all doesn’t mean reaching every KPI.

Do you want to know more about marketing on Chinese social media? Check it here: www.aicy-create.com