Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk Page B

think they’ve made it, and they stop trying as hard. Metrics can be useful, of course, but the effect of your online interactions and the excitement building toward your brand isn’t accurately reflected by the number of viewers you have. It’s not about how many viewers you have, it’s about how passionate they are. If you must use them, analytics should remain a minor-league detail. Focus the majority of your attention on your overall brand positioning.
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    Facebook Connect is a service that allows new users of your site to skip the long process of registering personal information—how many hundreds of times have you filled inboxes asking for your name, address, password, and so on, by now?—by pulling it from their Facebook page. It will also pull Facebook profile data to save them the slog of having to fill out yet again all of the personal and professional information onto the new site. So Facebook Connect is a huge time-saver for your viewers. In addition, when a Facebook member clicks “Connect with Facebook,” an announcement will be sent to her friends’ Facebook newsfeed and on her wall that she is now a user of your site. By now you should know why that’s a good thing—people with similar tastes to your new user see that newsfeed and think, “Hm, what’s that?” and then come see you for themselves. If you’re telling your story well and putting out awesome content, there’s no reason they won’t return and bring more friends with them.
    We’re going to see a lot more of Facebook Connect in the future. It allows such quick interaction and site building that it has the potential to become as omnipresent and necessary as your cell phone and e-mail account.
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    F or a comprehensive list of many more tools and applications, go to www.somewhatfrank.com/2008/12/social-media-my.html
    And check out these blogs:
    TechCrunch
    ReadWriteWeb
    GigaOm
    SocialTimes
    Endgaget
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    differentiate yourself
    Everything we’ve talked about in this book so far—passion, knowing yourself, personal branding, word of mouth—has always been important to every successful business in history. These social networking sites have only changed the game by giving entrepreneurs a reason to ditch the sinking traditional media and advertising platforms in favor of a communication method that opens them up to markets that would have been inaccessible until just a few short years ago.
    The thing is, just having a presence on these platforms doesn’t get you any further ahead of the competition because most entrepreneurs are getting wise to the need of having a Twitter and Facebook account, not to mention all the other platforms we’ve discussed. So how are you going to differentiate yourself from all the other clowns? (“Clowns” is, of course, used in the best possible way.) You’re going to do your content better, and you’re going to do it your way using the tools we just discussed.
    Vitamins can give your body a real boost, but they won’t do you much good if you don’t also incorporate exercise, proper nutrition, and even vaccines into your healthy habits. The same goes for all of these platforms. Each one individually gives your personal brand strength and reach, but if you use them together properly, they can turn you into a force to be reckoned with.
    The other thing you’re going to do is accept that just having good content and Internet access is not enough to take yourbusiness to the top. There are a lot of people who have good content, and everyone has the same access to the same tools as you do. What they don’t have (though they think they might), and what we’ll talk about in the next chapter, makes all the difference. After all, lots of people can play the piano, but not everyone can be Billy Joel.

seven
keep it real…very real
    authenticity
    W e’ve talked about paying attention to your DNA, but while the concept of authenticity is closely related it’s not the same. Your DNA dictates your