I remember the first time I watched a Gary Vee video – his website had been hacked and he was explaining what happened and how he was resolving it and his character and passion just jumped off the screen (you can watch the video at the end of this post).
That same character comes through right off the page in Crush It! as well. This book is not for those who are afraid of change. What Gary presents is a roadmap to understanding yourself, tapping in on your passion and building a brand around yourself to get the job done.
While the book is aimed at the entrepreneur, there’s a lot of takeaway for big and small businesses alike. The 13 step plan he highlights in the book can be applicable to anyone but one thing he emphasises is that while monetary cost may be low, this is going to require a heck of a lot of hours. “Just Do It” isn’t a strategy that’s going to work here unless you’re prepared to put in those hours.
Crush It! is as much about knowing yourself as knowing your audience. Gary Vee makes you think hard about what you think your “passion” is, whether you’re an audio, visual or text person and what medium is best for you and if you’re really going to make it work.
At the end of the day, what Gary Vee encourages is building your personal brand first (not pushing your product in front of people’s face!) and letting that passion energise your audience, grab their attention which then you can monetise later. If you’re willing to do this, for free – it can pay back big time later.
Who should read this book?
If I had to pass this book to someone, I’d pass it to someone still in school or a fresh grad. Never before has having a personal brand and standing for something been so important. Maybe it’ll work against you in some cases – but when you connect with the people who are genuinely interested in you for who you are and what you stand for, you’ll be Crushing It.
Earlier in the year I reviewed Tactical Transparency and said that it’s a good book for an introduction to the social media scene. However, I now feel Personality Not Included is the book I would recommend as the intro book, simply because it explores more than social media, and is about really changing the mindset of organisations from within, which is what the vast majority of organisations these days need to do. Social media is merely a byproduct and tool to helps make achieve this change in mindset easier.
There are five main thrusts to the book:
Find (and use) your accidental spokespeople
Define your personality by being unique, authentic and talkable
Craft a backstory people will care about
Conquer internal fear about embracing this change
Finding and using personality moments
The first half of the book is about explaining why these are important and providing many case studies of real world examples, and the second half provides steps that can be taken to bring the aforementioned concepts to reality. Of course, the steps are general guidelines and must be tweaked to be made relevant to your organisation.
Many of these concepts and steps will sound simple and intuitive to those of us who have grown up in a world where mere transactions aren’t enough anymore, but is probably difficult for the Generation X or Baby Boomer boss at work to wrap their heads around. If so, buy this book and give it to him or her, and make it an office copy after that.
There’s a really good video introduction to Personality Not Included that I encourage you to check out at the Personality Not Included blog (sorry, I couldn’t find a way to embed it on the site!)
The biggest compliment I can give to Joseph Jaffe’s new book, Join The Conversation (currently #37 on Amazon’s business books list), is that I took so long to finish it despite receiving it in late February as part of the UNM2PNM initiative. I whiz through fiction fairly quickly, but when it comes to non-fiction, specifically marketing, communication or social media specific, I need to read the book with an open notebook and pen next to me so I can take notes and review them later. Obviously, this means more time because doing that on a bus can be a hassle, so many hours of camping at Starbucks and Borders later, I’ve finally finished the book and what can I say, it it any surprise I love it?
The first thing I need to tell you, is that if you’re already well immersed in this social media fishbowl, then as Joseph has said many times on the Jaffe Juice podcast, this book isn’t really meant for you. It’s less of a “how to” book and more of a “why you should” book, which you should probably pass on to your manager or CEO to read, and get more buy in for your social media experiments.
What I really enjoyed were all the case studies. I’m almost embarrassed to mention that I didn’t recognise most of them. I’ve realised more and more that case studies are important when trying to sell your social media idea. Showing the best examples of initiatives that worked, and the worst examples of ignoring the consumer (the latest comes from Joseph Jaffe himself with Delta Airlines), can work wonders in getting execs stuck in their prehistoric ways to wake up.
If you’re currently struggling with implementing a social media experiment, or even thinking about it, give the book a read. Learn from some successes and failures and do better! If you don’t have the time to read it, try tuning in to Jaffe Juice (the podcast). I’d recommend starting with #105 which is a nice roundtable discussion with executives from different companies talking about their initiatives and the results, or check out the Join The Conversation blog
