Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk Page A

content. Once you’ve said your piece, you’re done. If anyone wishes to challenge you or ask for clarification or comment, they certainly can, but some time will pass before they get their answer. By the time you get back to them, you may have to remind them what they asked you in the first place. And if you decide to address their questions in a follow-up video, you have to hope that they come back to hear what you have to say.
    Your Ustream video allows you to talk about your brand the way you might at a cocktail party during which you get a chance to work the room and find out what’s on everybody’s mind. By responding to chats while you livestream you can establish the most powerful—and empowering—interactive brand experience any consumer has ever known. Even live television can’t provide this kind of immediacy. It’s so sticky—people love to know they can come talk to you one-on-one. Best of all, it costs you nothing. Ustream is another classic example of an Internet platform that costs the brand and product nothing to use yet provides amazing return on investment.
    ----
    N atasha Wescoat is an artist known for her candied landscapes and whimsical characters. She is rising in popularity as a result of using social media tools to connect with her audience and engage with her collectors and potential buyers. As a result, her business has grown 50 percent in six months and her business network 80 percent. In addition to Twitter, she uses Ustream.tv to livestream her painting in the studio. It began as an experiment but within a week shehad viewers buying directly from her LIVE online. Since then, she has used it as a tool for studio sales and auctions. By allowing her viewers to watch her create something, it inspires them to buy directly, then and there.
----
    word-of-mouth power moves
    There are a few additional tools that can add a real boost to your word-of-mouth potential.
    Just as it would be a shame to decide that Chardonnay is your favorite wine when you’ve hardly tried any other varietal, you should try every platform to see which ones work best for you. Now, when I was just getting started, Chris Mott, my camera guy, had to spend hours every night individually uploading the blog onto every single platform we were using. Luckily, there are now two sites that are going to make life a lot easier for you.
    Ping.fm is a service that allows you to post a limited amount of text, such as a status update, one time, and then automatically distributes the update to any of over thirty social networking sites, including Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, Wordpress, Jaiku, Friendfeed, MySpace, and Del.icio.us. Currently the service doesn’t allow for video, but according to the site that capability is coming soon.
    If you are a video blogger, you must have a TubeMogul account. It’s a website that allows you to upload your video once, then distributes it to countless video-sharing sites for free. It’s also a tracking service, offering analytics about who is watching your videos, when, from what sites, and how often.
    Analytics
    ----
    I use analytics very rarely and I urge you not to rely too much on them either, especially if you’ve got good business instincts. A lot of times the stats and percentages related to my business just don’t support what my instinct says is true, and I’ll trust my instincts over numbers every time. What if your analytics tell you that you’ve only had seven views on Break.com in two months? Are you going to stop posting to that platform? The data are telling you that you should probably drop it, but what you don’t know is that one of those seven viewers is a producer for The Today Show . There’s no reason to think that can’t happen.
    The numbers can be a trap that changes your behavior. People see they’ve only gotten fifty viewers in a few weeks and decide they suck and they stop trying as hard. Or their video catches on and gets watched a thousand times and they