Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk

capabilities is an important place to find market opportunity, and there are millions of people searching on Flickr. As with all content, you work the content on this site in two ways. You can post photographs so that when people click on them they find out who you are and then follow your link back to your blog, or you can click on other people’s photos and leave comments that intrigue people enough to link back to you. If your passion is something that photographs well, like birds or jewelry or hairstyling or interior design, it’s a place where you can do a lot of good damage. If I throw a wine party, I can post pictures of the event, which could pique someone’s interest. Or, if I put up a label of every wine I discuss on my show, I couldconceivably draw a lot more traffic to my blog. In fact, now that I think about it, it’s insane that I haven’t done this already. Anyone who cares about wine should be able to find me on Flickr, so I’d better get on that.
    I admire Moo (www.moo.com) because they have used Flickr and Facebook to reinvent old, tired products—business cards, notecards, and stickers. Customers can use their own photos or upload images from any of Moo’s partner sites. You can even print a different image on every card within a single pack, allowing you to let people choose their favorite one and creating a ready-made conversation piece around your brand. It goes to show that any product can be huge when approached from a new angle.
    youtube and/or viddler
    These are both video platforms that I use and like. YouTube is like the ocean—it’s huge, you go out in it, and you can come home with a boatload of fish. But you’re also competing against millions of fishermen. Viddler is much smaller, which allows you to see and be seen with greater ease. It also allows you to brand your player, so that anyone who watches the video sees only your logo at the bottom, which I think has value. If you use YouTube, the YouTube logo appears at the bottom of all of their videos. Viddler also allows you to tag your video, which means you can earmark important moments for your viewers by placing a little dot within the video stream linked to a key word, allowing for easier searches should someone want to see a particular part of the video without sitting through the wholething. For example, if I do a thirty-minute wine show and am discussing three wines, and you’re only interested in the third wine, you can go straight to that segment of the video because I’ll have marked within the video stream where my review of each wine begins.
    YouTube has a larger user base, which can definitely be an advantage. You can embed from either site, which is as easy to do as copying and pasting the embed code. I do give Viddler an enthusiastic thumbs-up for the way it takes care of its users. Have you ever wondered how certain videos get featured on these sites’ homepages? YouTube is so huge and so swamped with video submissions that featured videos are usually a result of random luck, biz dev, and inside deals. Because Viddler is smaller, however, their staff is quickly able to assess new talent on their network and support that talent by featuring it on their homepage. Viddler doesn’t wait for you to make it big; they’ll give you a shot for a day or two if they think you’re good enough. They’re great at identifying talent early on.
    ustream.tv
    There is no way to overstate the importance of Ustream, one of the biggest brand-building products that I’ve used. It’s a platform that allows you to launch live video, but the cool part is that it also has a chat function that allows you to interact with your audience in real time, much like a radio call-in show.
    How does the content you post on Ustream differ from what you post on your video blog, if that’s your preferred medium?Think of your blog as a formal presentation, a prepared speech about a predetermined topic in which you control the message and all the