BusinessNews Publishing - Summary: Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: Review and Analysis of Vaynerchuks Book

Book Abstract

Professional boxing is the perfect metaphor for doing business in the social media age. Prizefighters dont walk into the ring and immediately go for the knockout punch. Instead, they first deliver a series of well-planned jabs to set their opponent up. They work at getting the lead-up jabs working so their right hook will then connect when it is unleashed.

This is how you should approach marketing in the digital age as well. Instead of going for an immediate sale the first time a prospect gets to hear about your brand, you should first build the relationship by providing high-quality micro-content with no strings attached. Thats the equivalent of a prizefighters jab. Once youve delivered a series of jabs, you can then present them with an alluring offer (your right hook) to buy something you sell. If youve engaged them intelligently, they will then respond to your offer.

Admittedly, fights arent won on jabs alone but most businesses today arent working on perfecting their jabs nearly enough. If you can be a little more patient and distribute stories and content people like using social media tools, your subsequent attempts to make sales will be far more productive.

No matter who you are or what kind of company or organization you work for, your number-one job is to tell your story to the consumer wherever they are, and preferably at the moment they are deciding to make a purchase. People are just not watching television, listening to radio, reading print, or even paying much attention to emails. At least, not as often as they used to. Theyre on social media. Its time to learn how to use the system to achieve your business objectives, and put more time, energy, and dollars into the place where the consumers actually are, and not where you wish they would stay. Social media platforms offer us our best chance to stretch our marketing dollars the furthest.

Gary Vaynerchuk

About the Author

GARY VAYNERCHUK is an entrepreneur, a story teller and the CEO and co-founder of Vayner Media, a digital marketing strategy consulting firm established in 2009. From 2006 to 2011, he ran WineLibrarytv.com where he grew the business from $3 million to $45 million in annual turnover. His latest company, Vayner Media, works with Fortune 500 companies like GE, PepsiCo, Green Mountain Coffee, the NY Jets and the Brooklyn Nets to build their brands through social networks. He is the author of New York Times bestsellers Crush It! and The Thank You Economy. Gary Vaynerchuk immigrated from Russia to the United States in 1978 and is a graduate of Mount Ida College in Newton, MA.

The Web site for this book is at www.jabjabjabrighthook.com .

Important Note About This Ebook

This is a summary and not a critique or a review of the book. It does not offer judgment or opinion on the content of the book. This summary may not be organized chapter-wise but is an overview of the main ideas, viewpoints and arguments from the book as a whole. This means that the organization of this summary is not a representation of the book.

1. How to market in the social media era of business

Almost everyone carries a mobile phone today and if you look around, youll find that around half the time people are using their phones they are on social media. That fundamentally alters the dynamics of marketing in the digital age. Social is not only cannibalizing traditional marketing, its cannibalizing digital media too. Your target market is now mobile and youd better be too if you want to have any chance of reaching prospective customers.

Great marketing is all about telling your story in such a way that it compels people to buy what youre selling. Thats a constant. Whats always in flux, especially in this noisy, mobile world, is how, when, and where the story gets told, and even who gets to tell all of it.

Gary Vaynerchuk

Over the past five years or so, marketers have started dividing their campaigns into three distinct categories:

• Traditional print, TV, etc.
• Digital email, banner ads, pay-per-click
• Social Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.

Today the impact and effectiveness of traditional marketing and digital marketing continues to steadily diminish but social marketing is booming. This shouldnt be a surprise when you consider there are 325 million mobile phone subscriptions in the United States alone. If you look around any public space, youll see people working away on their smartphones and tablets and about half of them will be using those devices to connect to their social networks while they are out and about. More than 71 percent of the population of the United States are on Facebook and more than half a billion people worldwide are already on Twitter.

What all of this means is social media is already well on its way to becoming businesss most effective marketing vehicle. Social medias cannibalization of traditional and digital marketing will continue to accelerate in the future and will become an unstoppable force. Using social media to market is now well on its way to becoming an imperative rather than something which is nice to do if you get around to it.

As of the end of 2013, there are effectively five social media networks which have enough scale:

Other emerging networks are snapping at their heels and may yet come to prominence in the future but circa 2013, the Big 5 dominate social media. Thats significant because although all five have various traits in common, they also have individual strengths and weaknesses. If youre serious about using these platforms to deliver effective marketing, you need to tailor your content so it leverages the respective strengths of each individual platform.

You cant just repurpose old material created for one platform, throw it up on another one, and then be surprised when everyone yawns in your face. No one would ever think it was a good idea to use a print ad for a television commercial, or confuse a banner ad for a radio spot. Like their traditional media platform cousins, every social media platform has its own language. Yet most of you havent bothered to learn it.

Gary Vaynerchuk

Traditional marketing was all about compelling people to act on an offer. To use boxing terminology, it has usually been a series of right hooks:

• But one and get a second for free -- today only!
• Dont miss out on this once in a lifetime opportunity!
• Grab your keys and come see us today for a great deal!

In social media, however, delivering a constant barrage of calls-to-action doesnt work. If you keep doing that, people will switch off. Hard selling is frowned upon and actively discouraged. Instead, social media consumers expect you to pay attention to them, allow them to voice their opinions and more before they will even consider doing business with you. For social media platforms, the smart marketing strategy looks more like this: