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‘My minimum daily read is 500 comments to content’ – Gary Vaynerchuk at Mumbrella360 Asia

In a pre-recorded Q&A session, VaynerMedia CEO Gary Vaynerchuk responded to queries that had been put to him by the readers of Mumbrella. Speaking about his most preferred source of news, Vaynerchuk said that he preferred to read comment threads to content or mainstream news.  

The Q&A session was preceded by VaynerMedia vice president and head of Singapore Avery Akkineni making a presentation called ‘The Gary Vee Way: How To Spark Social Virality’. 

Akkineni spoke about how “products that are not as cool as Gary” could nevertheless harness some of his techniques to get an edge.

She said that one of the advantages of VaynerMedia was its beginnings in the post-iPhone era. It meant being immune to barriers of virality such as the sluggish pace of corporate decision making. She said: “You are never going to be viral if you make three tweets a year. And if your Facebook posts have to be cleared by 37 stakeholders in the company.”

Pointing to Vaynerchuk’s constant documenting of his life, Akkineni said: “That’s hero content – in the same way, a brand could have a long form commercial that could be turned into bite sized pieces more relevant to short form consumption.”

The secret sauce when it came to content however was the comment thread. Akkineni said that Vaynerchuk paid a lot of attention to the comment threads to find what people like and dislike and used that to pivot and make content in the future more relevant. 

Some of the steps she recommended that brands could take were:

Building a hypothesis engine: Create and test content to see what worked and what didn’t, keeping in mind different groups of individuals. Then, scale the content for these groups. 

Know your moments: Anticipate moments where there’s likely to be a binary outcome and work with content teams to create for both of these. It was not as important to jump on every trend as the ones that were right for the brand, finding a sweet spot in the intersection between an unfolding event and what the brand stood for. 

Think beyond text: Akkineni pointed to the wide appeal of images and reaction gifs. She also recommended that brands be ready to put out exclusive pieces that were not part of standard content.

Her presentation concluded with a successful case from VaynerMedia in which snack food brand Mr Peanut, transformed a stray tweet on the NBA into a highly prized limited edition sneaker called ‘Crunch Force 1’.

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