Reading an extract of Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book, The Thank You Economy. You can grab the same extract here. First thoughts, it looks a lot better written than the first. More mature. Excited.

Here’s a paragraph:

At its core, social media requires that business leaders start thinking like small-town shop owners. They’re going to have to take the long view and stop using short-term benchmarks to gauge their progress. They’re going to have to allow the personality, heart and soul of the people who run all levels of the busi … (extract ends here, so have to assume he says something like “shine through / be available to customers”.

Aw man. I love social media. It’s so “revolutionary“. It’s so “us against them“. It’s so “change or die“. My exuberance is tempered with the last round of “change or die” that we saw on the web — remember when people ran around telling you that if you didn’t have a website and if that website didn’t have eCommerce, you might as well pack up and go farming? Yeah. Well that resulted in the biggest bubble-burst an industry has ever seen. So let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.

I do love it though. Here’s my only question. One to which Gary would answer “just try”. How does that scale? How does a bank, an insurance company or a massive retail institution put the people and processes in place to give mom-and-pop-style business service to EVERY customer, 24 hours a day? And more importantly, how do they do that without passing the costs onto us?

Maybe social media will never scale well for big business. I’m certainly proud of the companies that are trying. But maybe, this is more an indication that consumers are going to fragment off into niche brands because of the better experience than stay within the stability and low prices of any Walmart-esque retail / financial giant.

I certainly like buying coffee from the Ron at the Bryanston Organic Market. He’s a cool guy. We chat. Maybe that’s the first move away from the retail giants.

I don’t know …

Good times!

Author

  • Andy Hadfield is a digital native (can’t remember life without the Internet) and is fascinated with the impact it is having on our lives and businesses. An entertaining and compelling personality, Andy speaks with authority and insight about the new shape of life, work and play in the digital world. Importantly though, he’s not a “techie”! Andy understands the hard realities of business, and delivers pragmatic, realistic lessons from the future, which every business will find valuable. His intensive front-line experience underpins these viewpoints. He has played in every corner of the digital industry, launching his first startup at age 19 - getALife (gAL) was a social network before the word was even invented. The site was a political and community mouthpiece for South African students between 1997 and 2005 and was covered on every major media platform, including Time Magazine. It also has the dubious honour of being sued by Robert Mugabe. He then spent the next 7 years honing his strategic skills across a range of industries, including finance, professional services, construction and media. With The Virtual Works, this included building the digital platform that underpins “The Deloitte Way”, a real time strategic assessment, staff engagement and reward programme. He was also involved in creating Africa’s first monetised niche social network (www.designmind.co.za) which drives communication and collaboration across the construction industry. At First National Bank, Andy helped develop a team to manage digital strategy across the consumer banking segment. This included projects such as corporate crowdsourcing, the bank's first official FaceBook presence, a major overhaul of www.fnb.co.za and a world-class “Amazon-style” online sales system for financial products. Since 2010, he founded and operates www.OneBigWidget.com, a boutique strategic consultancy and stable of pioneering digital projects. You can find him on www.andyhadfield.com or tweeting his love for cricket, wine and the new style of business on www.twitter.com/andyhadfield.

    View all posts

READ NEXT

Andy Hadfield

Andy Hadfield is a digital native (can’t remember life without the Internet) and is fascinated with the impact it is having on our lives and businesses. An entertaining and compelling personality, Andy...

Leave a comment