The Conversation Manager

I just wanted to write a quick blog post on a video I ran into of Gary Vaynerchuk at the SXSW conference of 2010. I saw Gary for the first time on LeWeb in Paris and he is a great speaker but most of all, a man with a vision. Gary has 850.000+ twitter followers(@garyvee), wrote a book Crush It (inspiring and empowering readers to pursue their passion for a living) and the only thing he wants to buy with his money is ‘The Jets’.

This video only takes 7 minutes of your time and is giving you a down to earth wake-up call on the changes going on. He kicks off, in his own style (which I love), by explaining that we all say what we are not going to do, why he believes the opportunity lies in what we ARE going to do. Gary is pointing out that no matter what industry you are in, one day you will be in the customer service business, we need to start caring about our consumers.

Gary confirms what you can read in the book ‘The Conversation Manager’: The world is changing and everyone has an audience and a voice. He uses an example of his brother going to a restaurant … nice one! Gary very often gets the question after he was on stage … how do you scale the efforts? ‘Scale is important, of course, but I can try’ is his answer. Caring is massively underestimated.

By the way, I also love my parents a lot :-) For those who get fascinated by Gary and want to see another nice video, check this one. Gary talks about his person, his family, his road to winelibrary.com, honesty, numbers of followers and the emotion of the audience, consistency, relationships, mobile allowing us to be lazy, Google and Facebook on search, …

The American snack Wheat Thins wanted to surprise its fans. When a fan tweeted something like: "O no, I’m out of wheat thins", the machine started to work. The brand surprised these fans with a real-time treatment, by taking out their ‘Crunch is calling’-Van and driving towards the fan to deliver a new load of snacks.

After a while fans started to understand the idea behind it and spread fake ‘Cries for help’ on Twitter. So, at that point the brand could not handle it anymore. However, they made a video of their first few actions which was watched by quite a lot of people. Next to that they made it into the offline press to boost conversations about the brand.

Last week, fashion brand Mer Du Nord launched its own radio station: radio MDN. You can listen to their radio through their own site or download it as an iPhone, Ipad app.

Listeners are motivated to share this radio channel with their friends through Facebook & Twitter. The station plays non-stop music. It contains a playlist that demonstrates the images of the brand through music.

Music: something that creates emotions that normally aren't there. Ever watched a movie without the sound? It takes away all the emotions we have when watching a movie. Music is one of the key ingredients to make people feel happy or sad. By launching its own radio station, Mer Du Nord, opens up a new channel where brand fans can connect on a more emotional level with the brand.