Crush it – Gary Vaynerchuk – book review

This book came to my attention via a colleague of mine (@mspownall) who sent a link to a competition on the e-consultancy website. I’d never heard of the book, or the author, but e-consultancy is a trusted resource of mine so I entered it. All I had to do was explain what my passion was.

I sent an email:

My passion is…divided. Work/life balance is very important to me, so family always comes first. Parenting is a hugely rewarding challenge, especially when you have 3 children at the age of 28! Professionally I thrive collaborating on exciting, innovative products and campaigns for a variety of clients.

Anyway, a few days later I received an email with the subject line WINNER. Bonus! Another few days went by and the book landed on my desk. A signed version no less. Queue the questions from everyone in the office asking who the hell Gary Vaynerchuk was.

“No idea” was my reply.

But hey, what better way to find out than stick my nose in on my daily travels to and from work!

It turns out Gary is a the epitome of the American dream. And was recently listed in the top 10 internet entrepreneurs of the moment.

Born in Bosnia (or Serbia, I can’t remember) he moved over to America when he was a young lad, and eventually ended up working at his fathers liquor store. He’d always had an entrepreneurial instinct but working day in day out in a liquor store has it’s limits.

Then the spark happened.

Gary discovered the Internet.

There are lots of similar stories out there, granted, but Gary’s sheer enthusiasm for the power of the Internet, and belief in following and promoting the one thing you are truly passionate about really struck a chord with me. He also stresses the importance of personal branding, and delivers some great insight into how to promote yourself whilst remaining true to your personality. He is a family man, like myself, and it is refreshing to hear that you can put family first, but still ‘crush it’.

Anyway, this lad Gary really knew his stuff when it came to wine, so he set up a video blog, pimped himself all over forums and the social web, and Winelibrary.tv was born.

The hard work didn’t stop there though. His straight forward language and abrasive style really caught on, and his sheer determination and effort to engage fully with customers and prospective viewers/ customers very quickly made him his fortune.

He now runs a consultancy firm that guides businesses on how to reap rewards from the Internet.

It’s a really easy to read book. Gary’s personality really comes across and his advice is spot on.

Passion + hard work + good use of online tools = success

Simple as.

You can buy the book from Amazon or if you want further views email me at mail@kevcharlton.com – (tip from Gary, include your email address as often as you can )

FITC Amsterdam

Mid February seems me heading over to Amsterdam again, this time for 4 days to the Flash in the can conference. Visit the conference site at www.fitc.ca.

I’m heading over there with Andy and Nigel from fuse8 as well as our new Concept Director Grzegorz Kozakiewicz, who will be doing a talk entitled ‘Behind the Scenes: Pencil Rebel’. A fuse8 invasion! I’ll be tweeting and blogging as much as I can whilst I’m there, so any shenanigans will be made public. Ha.

Whilst we are over there I’ll also be doing some interviews with some of the speakers, as well as an article and accompanying photography for www.designtaxi.com, so keep your eyes peeled for that.

Gonna be an interesting one for me. Never really been heavily into full on flash websites, but you don’t have to be an expert to know that’s how most of the truly creative work is being done online. At fuse8 we have an excellent record in producing nicely designed CMS driven websites, but Gregorz’s appointment should see us stepping more into the interactive flash arena…which in turn enables me to go on jaunts to Amsterdam! Exciting times!

Uniqlo Calendar

Uniqlo are renowned for producing outstanding flash websites, but this one really takes the biscuit. Great tiltshift video, that when clicked displays clothing ranges in colours that are picked from the footage. You need to see it. Look now.

Micro-blogging within businesses

Since being given the responsibility of managing a team in my current role at fuse8 I’ve been thinking of ways we can interact, share ideas, and generally keep each other updated about what we’re working on, other than face to face meetings (you can’t beat those! – although they’re not always practical). As a test I decided to start using what has been labelled ‘Twitter for Business’, Yammer.

At work we’ve always relied on email and MSN, so basically you get a lot of emails containing links, location updates, invitations to nights out etc etc, all amongst the stuff that matters….work. MSN just adds to the interruption with people expecting instant responses, meaning concentration can soon become a pretty much impossible task. So I was worried that Yammer would just add to the noise, and end up distracting people and harming these concentration levels.

The initial testing group consists of me and 5 of my team. These include an Information Architect, Concept Director, User interface developer, HTML coder and an SEO consultant. Some were avid Twitter users, a couple of them don’t use it at all. So…a mixed bag. It’ll give me an idea whether using Yammer would work across the whole company…the suits, the hardcore developers and even the creatives. I started by introducing it to the team as an experiment in the hope that the actual usage of the tool would give us a good insight into how it could work. The results so far have been very positive.

It’s proved a good way of team members updating other’s what we’re working on. We all work in for a digital full service agency, so everything is relevant to everyone, meaning everyone can have input. There have been several occasions so far where we’ve collaborated on a project which we wouldn’t have done in the past, and ended up improving the output. It’s also helped keep track of where people are. In the past I might have popped into a meeting, and if someone was away making a cuppa they wouldn’t know where I was. Now they do.

To share articles, inspirational websites, and videos we all use Delicious, but people still send links around via group email. It’s just a quicker way to get everyone looking at something you think is interesting. On Yammer I can share links with an individual (via private messages), group, or all of the team. You can also integrate it with Google Reader. Also, just like Twitter, Yammer has it’s own iphone app, and also works via SMS. So if someone’s gonna be late in, they just Yammer it. Easy as.

All in all, it’s still early days. It’s a test to see if it really could change the way the whole company communicates. I’m fairly optimistic that it will.

Ed – Since writing this I’ve found this great article on The Economist – worth a read.

Great animation by David Shrigley
for Pringle of Scotland

I love David Shrigley’s work, so this is one of my fave finds of late. It basically acts as a promo vid for Pringle, but it’s done in such a quirky way that it doesn’t feel like it’s pushing the product. The script and voiceover compliment the animation brilliantly, there just seems to be something about the Scottish accent that makes things sound better…wish I still had mine….tha nos.

Animated tribute to classic advertising!

Genius, just genius. A must see!

Michael Bierut on clients

2010/01 Michael Bierut from CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

This is a great talk from Michael Bierut from Pentagram. Interesting for anyone that works with clients. He is right about so many things…but especially like the section where he discusses never talking about educating the client. It’s a sbject that doesn’t get talked about much, so it’s definately worth taking time out to watch.

Inside the fuse8 office!

I’ve been busy over the last week taking some pics of the fuse8 Leeds office. This particular shot is of my current monitor setup! Loving the vertical widescreen for blog/twitter reading!

For a sneak peek inside the office of a digital agency, check out the rest of the pics on the fuse8 flickr page

The NY Times – Motion typography

Loving this one minute advertisement for the launch of Turkish Edition of The New York Times.

Art & Copy

Liking the look of this film trailer for a documentary about creativity.