At the Voice summit this year, I discovered that I shared a commonality with many of the folks I met there: we’re all big fans of Gary Vaynerchuk. Many people even told me that the reason they were at the Voice summit and interested in the voice technology space was largely influenced by Gary and the content he creates (see Scot Westwater‘s tweet below that Gary retweeted).
For those who might not be aware, Gary owns a digital media company, VaynerMedia, and is a content creation machine, publishing a wide variety of digital content daily. He was also very publicly transparent in his bullish sentiment around social media’s rise and importance in the future more than a decade ago. He’s now a big proponent of voice technology, predicting that it will be a transformative technology into the 2020’s and give way to companies the size of Instagram and Facebook.
This is humbling https://t.co/8wXuLbQdzV
— Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) August 15, 2019
For today’s update, I thought I would share the piece of Gary’s content arsenal that has resonated with me most, which was this article titled, “How to Tell a Story on Social Media.” Here’s how the article begins:
For me, I’m only interested in one thing. The thing that binds us all together. No matter who you are or what your profession is – whether you’re an entrepreneur or in sales or a designer or a developer – no matter what you do, your job is to tell a story.
That is never going to change. The way you build your business and the way you make real impact is by great storytelling.
This is REALLY important.
We all need to reverse engineer what’s actually happening in our world to win. My whole career has been predicated on reverse engineering – Understanding what I think is going to happen in the next 24-36 months and then figuring out how to work backwards from there to map out the path to capitalize on it.
My biggest problem right now, in general, is that I feel that the far majority of people in business organizations and media companies all across the board are storytelling in 2019 like it’s 2009. It’s all I think about.
The article is truly a masterclass on the art of telling a story in 2019 using the tools available to us. Gary walks the reader through today’s world that is “hyper ADD” and the challenges associated with a world where every type of storyteller is competing for our attention. Therefore, to cut through the noise you need to reverse-engineer how people consume content today in order for you to understand how to produce content that caters to people’s content consumption habits in today’s world.
Through this piece, Gary helped confirm in my mind that I needed to eventually move my blog’s cadence to a daily format in order to allow me to create an on-going narrative, which is what I did shortly after reading this. This was the motivation behind starting my flash briefing too – another way for me to tell the story.
One of the biggest takeaways I have had since moving to a daily cadence is that it allows for better storytelling, because I’m constantly building on the overall narrative/story, and providing myself more opportunities to extrapolate out of what’s going on in the news, broadly or industry-specific, and regularly apply those key points to the overall story. It’s not as if what he’s saying is novel, what resonates is that he communicates this message through the lens of storytelling in 2019.
“Attention changes. Tools change. The mediums in which we storytell continue to change.”
-Thanks for Reading-
Dave
