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Social media marketing guru Gary Vaynerchuk is one of the smartest people around. He’s always on top of new trends and developments within the social media space, so it’s important to stand up and take notice when he puts his reputation behind a new service or product. In this case, the new service is Vayner Talent, a social media offering that he unveiled in 2016. He designed it for “established and emerging talent.” Pay Gary Vee $25,000 per month, and his marketing agency will turn you into a social media superstar.
A new type of marketing agency for the social media era
What’s interesting about this offering is that Vayner Talent is really a hybrid offering – part marketing agency, part PR agency, and part talent manager. You don’t just hire Vayner Media to map out a social media strategy and then execute on it (as you would with a traditional social media agency) – you’re also hiring Vayner Media to put together entire social media platforms for you to get your message and story out here. For example, Vayner Media can set up podcasts, YouTube vlogs, or web shows for you. Basically, you can transform yourself into your industry’s version of Gary Vee.
So who would pay $25K a month for this service? Gary Vaynerchuk suggests that anyone who is not already one of the biggest 100 names in the social media world could benefit from his new talent service. The idea is that you will land a whole lot of other sweet deals – book deals, movie deals, speaking fees – by becoming a social media influencer. In other words, becoming a social media influencer is the path to future success. (In the old days, we used to call this “having a career.”)
Personal brands and career trajectories
And that is perhaps the biggest mindset change out there – there is an entirely new generation of social media influencers who don’t think in terms of traditional career arcs. Spend some time on YouTube, and you can see exactly how this happens. It starts by someone putting out some really authentic videos and developing a base of loyal supporters. Over time, you begin to add more and more platforms to your core YouTube platform, almost as if you were a media company yourself. The more eyeballs and more clicks you can attract, the more sponsors and advertising deals you can bring in. Eventually, if you get big enough, you’re talking about movie spinoffs of your YouTube web show!
In many ways, you can think about people like Martha Stewart in the 1990’s and early 2000’s as a sort of precursor today’s social media influencer. Back in the 1990’s, though, there was no Instagram, no Facebook, and no Twitter. So people had to build entire companies to get noticed.
Today’s version of Martha Stewart is probably already out there, perhaps living in an Airbnb rental property, carefully curating photos on Instagram and re-tweeting fellow designers. Or think even bigger – as in Oprah big. The top YouTubers out there now make more than $1 million per year, and have their own movie and book deals in the works.
Final Thought
The big takeaway here is that personal branding is more important than ever in the social media era. Who wants to be just a bland, unknown cog in a soulless corporation when they become a global superstar with hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of followers by doing what they love to do? That’s something that Gary Vaynerchuk realized back in 2016, and something that you need to recognize as well.
Read More: How Gary Vaynerchuk is winning with social media, podcast, and video
