Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion

Crush It!Reviewed by Brian WingCrush It, Why now is the time to cash in on your passion, a book by Gary Vaynerchuk, written in 2009, is a book that discusses the use of social media and the internet to develop and market your own personal brand. The book is written in a very conversational mode, where Gary tells a story of his own brand development and the tools and methods he used to make himself the man and brand he is today. Along the way he imparts many of the core values of brand marketing and promotion.Gary Vaynerchuk, an immigrant from Babruysk Russia, born in 1975, comes to America with his family. His father opens a liquor store in northern New Jersey. Along the way Gary educates himself in wine, a growing market, and proceeds to grow that business from a single store to a wine empire.Gary delves into his "DNA" and talks about how he sees value in collectible items, such as baseball cards. His focus evolves into entrepreneurship and he takes over the wine business and grows winelibrary.tv into a wine empire. He has become one of the most prominent figures in the wine reviewing business, and commands a ransom to present on social media and the use of the Internet to promote branding and new business development.The book "Crush It!" focuses on utilizing new, free tools on the Internet to capitalize on branding and developing a business. Some of the major themes include: Becoming the foremost expert in your "passion"; Use of social media and the Internet to promote yourself/brand; Differentiation; Hard work; and Caring.In "Crush It!," Gary's first pearl of marketing wisdom is take whatever it is you love the most and develop that into a business. Educate yourself in every aspect of your passion. Read every bit of material about your subject, find others who are considered experts in that subject and learn from them. Insert yourself into the conversations on the topic and make your opinion known. Once you become an expert in your field, develop content to "sell" your ideas to others. The key to developing this rapport is building trust. Gary states over and over be authentic and original with the content and the "eyeballs" will come.A great deal of the book is dedicated to developing and using new age media an social networks to promote your newly developed brand. As we have discussed (at great length) social media networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and a multitude of others, have gained great traction with many "old school of thought" marketers. More and more Facebook and Twitter "badges" can be seen on old media promotions. For example, television advertisements will have the Facebook and/or Twitter logos at the end of the ad, and suggest that you "find us on X." This is the new value marketing play. Brand loyalty is perpetuated by "fans and followers" of these social media networks. New networks are arising daily if not hourly. One such example is "WOMMA " a website devoted to the development and support of word of mouth marketing. Large, household names like Best Buy, McDonalds, Kraft, and Pepsi-Co are all contributors.A whole new network of social media marketing gurus has been developed. Each has a focus and specializes in certain market segments. Another, more local, company two-five media, specializes in wine and hospitality in Sonoma County. Companies now have the ability to use these social media networks to conduct targeted research as well as have "personal" communications directly with their consumers. This is the most powerful tool to come to marketing in a generation.Differentiation is another core marketing value discussed in "Crush It!" With the Internet age upon us it is exceptionally easy to blend in with the noise and chaff. One must truly be exceptional to stand out in a crowd. A favorite quote of mine from the book is "So how are you going to differentiate yourself from all the other clowns? ("Clowns" is, of course, used in the best possible way.)" It's this, in-your-face method that Gary delivers the message that you need to be the best you that you can be. It's a challenge, no doubt. Just Googling "differentiate using social media" gives the following: Results 1 - 10 of about 59,500 for how to differentiate yourself in social media. The social media landscape is moving at light speed and a marketer needs to "hustle" just to keep up with it, which leads me to the next pearl.Hustle! Gary Vaynerchuk makes no bones about the fact that 99% of the people who embark on a journey to "Crush It!" will not have the "chops" to get the job done. Hard work and patience are the two keys to making it happen. Another gem Gary provides is about patience, he says "If you contact me within a year of starting your business to complain that you haven't made the money you thought you would, you're not listening. I said that you could make a ton of money being happy; I didn't say you could do it overnight." Patience and hard work, seems reasonable, right?Gary devotes an entire chapter to the next pearl of wisdom. Chapter nine is called the best marketing strategy ever. The entirety of this chapter consists of only five characters, C-A-R-E-. It may be just that, the best marketing strategy ever, many companies have lost touch with their consumers. This harkens back to the use of ethnography and psychographic segmentation. Both of these market research strategies hinge on understanding the emotional connection with brands and products as well as the behaviors that motivate a consumer to make the choices that he or she does. By "Caring" a marketer should be able to glean this information.In summary there are some great anecdotal stories in "Crush It!" that expose Gary's brash and cavalier personality. Behind these stories lay some basic marketing strategies that can and should be applied to any marketing situation. Understand your business and be the most knowledgeable about your market and products. Use technology to your advantage. Your competition is! Differentiate yourself and stand out in that online crowd. Work your ass off but don't expect instant results, hard work takes time and patience. Finally and most importantly, take the time to care about your consumer. They are after all the sponsor of your business and their recommendations are worth more than anything you could pay for.

I have rarely felt the need to review a book or even comment on it after a read. I don't believe I've ever left a review here, which will likely be obvious.In short, I loved the book. I bought a copy locally the week it came out, then ordered another through Amazon to pass along to someone else. It is a very brief read. It could be read anytime a spare hour or two is found.If you aren't familiar with Gary Vaynerchuk, this book does cover his background pretty well. I had heard of Gary about a year ago through a blog or online mention (Tim Ferriss, I believe). I saw a few minutes of his show but wasn't very interested because I don't drink wine, so I didn't care about the topic of wine (like he VERY obviously did). He seemed kind of funny, but I was too busy to watch a show about wine, and didn't think much more about it.A month or so prior to this book being released, I began to hear this "wine guy" pop up among people I associated with online and in meatspace. I watched a short keynote speech he gave at an event about Web 2.0. In the video, he gave a passionate, cussword-laden speech about the nature of business and changing times. Everything he said was very spot-on."Crush It!" is an expansion of his business keynotes, filling in a bit more detail about the how and why of the changing business world.Being in business used to be a lot more difficult when the gatekeepers of the big media outlets were the only game in town (radio, tv and print). The little guy could perhaps compete on a very local level, but it took huge dollars to get seen by the masses in years past. With the largely free tools available to anyone with access to the internet, you can get your brand seen by more and more people every day.This is in no way a "Get-Rich-Quick" book. The 3 major tenets in the first chapter of the "Crush It" methodology are:"Love your family.Work superhard.Live your passion."Hardly a get-rich-quick strategy unless you skip all the parts where he talks about working until your eyeballs bleed instead of playing video games or watching tv.Several times throughout the book, he talks about the realities of how hard you will have to work to make even a decent living like you may make at your current job. As he says, if you are even 1% unhappy with your job, you should work to change it. He does NOT suggest quitting your job to become a blogger. But if you want to change and do something you love, work your ass off after work until you can get to that place.Hard work and hustle is the theme of the book that he never lets the reader forget. He goes into more detail about starting out for the person who may be completely new to the "social media" scene. It is not a detailed "one size fits all" approach to what specifically every person should do for a living. There are several examples of possibilities people could follow that can open eyes, and more than enough to get them started. It's not about selling chachkies and passing that off as a living. It's about working hard, becoming known as an expert in your field and doing something your grandkids will be proud of.Everyone has something they are passionate about. Something we would be doing if we didn't have to be working (that job that makes you unhappy. If you're 100% happy this doesn't apply). There are ways to do what you are passionate about, and make a decent living doing so. You may not get filthy rich doing it, but there are so many ways to make a living, it only makes sense to use the tools we have nowadays. They have made it far simpler to get started than in the past.I've been involved with the tech world since well before there were computers in every household and mobile phones existed only in the movies. The tools that now exist and the eyeballs that are on these platforms Gary discusses are changing the way business is done.It's still a big deal for Gary to get on the Today Show and do a little sniffy-sniff with Matt Lauer, but advertisers are spending more and more money on internet platforms. The numbers of people watching each is changing daily. The little guys without the big dollars the mainstream media channels have available are able to be competitive in this rapidly-changing world. Money follows the attention. More attention is on these internet tools every day.Work your face off, and you can build a business that thrives, doing something you love to do. This book is a good starting place to start getting the ideas flowing.I don't work for Gary, have never met him, and am not being paid to say any of this. I still don't drink wine, but when it comes to business, I agree with him. As busy as he is, he answers emails and twitter comments. If there is anything you find unclear about the book, he tries to answer any questions.

Inspired me to push harder with social media. And to work to being more of my authentic self. Awesome book and will be recommending it to friends and family!

Some of the thing Gary talks about in this book are old now, but the concept still remains. If you want to improve with sales and marketing this is a must read, especially if you're just starting now!!It's an easy read with no super complex terminology. Simple but straight to the point.I bought the English version because I couldn't find it in my language (portuguese).

I discovered Gary’s YouTube videos while looking for information about content writing and marketing. The first thing that spoke to me was his genuineness as a person. There’s no apologies for who he is, which is absolutely massive. Why live your life by how other people try to define you? After subscribing to his YouTube channel, I bought this book. And queue the transformation scene where the caterpillar emerges from the cocoon with one of those captioned ‘KAPOW’ bubbles that appeared in every fight scene in the original Batman series. Gary delivers with passion and expertise step by step on how to get yourself out there, encouraging constant improvement. It’s a refreshing, authentic read that really challenges you to look at what drives you and makes you realize you have enormous potential. Just let the genie out of the bottle.

Es un buen libro, con mucha facilidad de lectura, tal vez las herramientas comentadas no son las más nuevas, sin embargo en nuevas plataformas con el mismo principio puedes obtener los mismos resultados, si quieres comprar este libro te recomendaría comprar el nuevo crushing it!

One needs some kind of motivation to keep going. It is true that passionate people do have passion. But it is also true that this passion doesn't always makes you keep working towards your goal. At least that's the case with me. I need to keep myself constantly updated through a some external stimuli. And what better stimuli can be than a book?This book does the job of making you work towards your passion tirelessly. Why do we get tired when we work for long? Because we don't love doing that. And, when we do something we love, any chance of getting tired goes away.What is better than a book that motivates you to work towards your passion? That the book is informative. Yes! This book is easily a booklet on all the tools on the internet that can be used to cash in your passion.I felt like I knew whatever is being told in this book about passion. I think we all know it deep down. That working on your passion through the night won't get you nowhere. Maybe we just don't believe in our passion strong enough to just go for it. This book even had an answer to this: if you enjoy doing it, it's worth it. Isn't all this simple yet fascinating?This book talks about how we can use each of the social media platforms including Facebook, twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, WordPress and many more to built your personal brand. The tools have been explained in detail as well. Even though the book was published almost a decade ago, most of the information is still relevant today as well. Since social media platforms like Instagram weren't present when this book was written, there is no mention of them. But a passionate person will surely do things the updated way, keeping this book as base.This book has so much information, written in a precise manner. It is certainly not possible for me to tell about each one of them here. But I'd surely like to talk about one last concept mentioned here which I think everyone should know. It is that legacy always outweighs currency. This book talks about how being true to your audience or customers is much more important than making money. Sure, it'll work for the long run in terms of money. But won't it give you peace of mind as well?This book surely boosted up my willingness to pursue my passion. To all the passionate people out there: do read this book, for it'll help you to a path full of passion and happiness.