THIS IS IMPORTANT BOOK

I’m sitting in a McDonald’s in Dewitt, MI and I’m re-reading Gary Vaynerchuck’s book, The Thank You Economy.  This is probably one of the most important books I’ve read in recent years outside of the Bible.  Why?

Why would I make such a strong statement about a book written by a thirty-something wine merchant from New Jersey?

WHO SHOULD READ IT

He has good, necessary answers for anybody who relies on communicating a message.  Who would that cover?  Small business.  From the person with a local lawn service to the person who sells Great Lakes Red.  From independent local restaurants to the small auto repair shop.

Who else?

Local churches and ministries who rely on dealing with real live people to local city council and township board members who form the bedrock of our governmental system.

Do you fit into one of these categories?  And how do you deal with the people you serve?  Do you rely on phone calls, mail, websites, face-to-face contact?  What else?

SHARE MY NOTES

As I re-read Vaynerchuk’s book, I want to share my notes and point out his important points.

Open up Chapter 1 and read the few pages and you get his major point about the importance of having relationships with the people you serve.  He says relationships are central to life and a metric for the quality of your life is the depth and quality of your relationships.

EXAMPLE FROM CAPITAL HONDA

Think about what that means.  For me, it meant that the car dealership that sold me my Honda Civic almost three years ago bent over backwards to fill a car need that I had before my wife and I went on a short vacation this summer.  Capital Honda in Okemos, MI, could not figure why a set of CDs of sermons that I got from my church would not play on the car’s CD player.  They would play on other Honda models at the dealership.

Knowing that I was leaving on vacation the next day and that I really wanted to listen to the CDs, they picked up the discs from my home, researched the problem and burned the sermon recordings in a format that my Civic could handle.  They met me to see that I got them in time.

They went out of their way to help me.  Did that help my relationship with them?  You bet.

Vaynerchuck’s point in the first 15 or so paragraphs is that business is built on personal relationships.  And that doesn’t happen with one way communication.  The same goes for the other organizations I mentioned.

How do you maintain this kind of two-way communication with large numbers of people.

He points to social media which he describes as more than neat computer tools.  Social media, Vaynerchuk says, represents a big cultural shift in the way we interact with each other.  It’s a mindset.

That’s the very first section.

More notes to come as I re-read more.

Do you send out or are you planning to send out e-mail newsletters.  There are federal rules and regulations for doing this and big penalties for violating them.  Here are links I found on Google providing details about what to do and not to do

• E-mail responsibly blog: Here are the basics of what to do and not do.
• BBros.US blog: CAN-SPAM best practices.

First, read this Time magazine essay about how the news cycle has changed for the White House with the web and it’s ability to get info out as it happens.  Contributing to this is cable news channels with their wide-variety of choices.

This means that politicians need to be constantly monitoring what’s said about them in all these different places all the time and they need to be able to respond.

But read down a few paragraphs in the essay and you will see that Obama has created his “own media empire” with the 13 million he has on his e-mail list and who subscribe to his periodic e-newsletters.

The lesson: Politicians and political candidates need to be collecting e-mail addresses from people.  They can be gold if they’re used properly.

How many of you already do this?  Do you ask people for theirs?

This is the best free advice I’ve seen in a long time for anybody trying to persuade or sell a product or a set of ideas.

There are so many individuals and groups with so many important things to say and they’re failing at it.  Chaos rules in the whole communication arena.

Pastors struggle with it as do politicians, including and especially local officials like city council members, county commissioners, state legislators and whole lots more.

Gary Vaynerchuk is a young New Jersey guy who gets it.  He understands what has happened in the marketplace with changes that started before the web.  He’s a wine guy who has a turned into a bastion of wisdom.  His daily wine podcast is downloaded by thousands.

Watch this CNN interview  if you have a need to see your ideas or your product.  Then leave your impressions and questions.  I really want to talk about this more.

There are a handful of personal blogs that I read pretty faithfully.  They give a birds-eye view of an individual, a family and the situations they deal with.

Some are a daily script of their everyday life and others have been given special circumstances to deal with like this young mom, Morgan, whose son was born with Downs Syndrome.  The blog, Learning From Bear, is a transparent account of dealing with issues relating to their son and sharing what they learn.

Their story is a positive testimony from a committed and focused couple.

Do you have any favorite personal blogs that you can share along with the reasons that you like them?

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with newspaper front pages.  As a kid when my mom would go to new places, the gift I wanted was a local newspaper, so I could look at the front page and its innards.  On my personal blog, Daily Grit, today, I write about a website from the Newseum in Washington D.C. where you can check out each day’s front pages online.  Really neat.

Yesterday, I posted about the Cluetrain Manifesto, a document put together by early web thinkers about how the Internet will be changing the marketplace. It would be easy to scan this and yawn.

But, regardless of your position, a pastor, teacher, city council member, construction company owner, mortgage broker or anybody else with a message, you need to spend some time with this document.

You need to sort out how this applies to you and your endeavors.

A quote from the Cluetrain Manifesto:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.

Does this apply to you?  You better be sure about your answer.

If you’re a business person, a politician, a pastor, a neighborhood activist, part of an interest group, a political party leader, then you need to know about the Cluetrain Manifesto.

Without getting into all its background, it’s a document put together more than a decade ago by the big thinkers at that time who could see the changes taking place in the way consumers process information.  These thinkers could also see that the Internet was moving these changes a head at break neck speed.

Just about anybody over 30 years-old knows the old way of communicating with consumers.  Keep in mind that these are consumers for any kind of message, all the way from business, to politicians, to the church.

Go to the 95 Theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto and read the first few points.  Number one says that the marketplace is now a conversation.  People don’t want one way messages.  They want to be able to respond, ask questions, express concerns and share their point of view.

Don’t miss that point:  The marketplace is a conversation.

This is so important that I have a link to the Cluetrain Manifesto in the right margin under the category heading, Resources.