I'm back at it at Sitecore Symposium day 3 in the keynote session with Gary Vaynerchuk. Still a little groggy from last night at Haze tearing it up with all the die hard Sitecore employees, partners and clients.
Gary opened with a joke about how few people at the conference knew who he was despite his large twitter following. He followed up with a brief history of his innate business prowess leading into how he methodically approaches business and sales. His skill isn't just in taking advantage of the bleeding edge of technological innovation to increase sales through focused customer engagement, but also in having an impressive sense of humor.
Gary begins forming the body of his argument about the importance of social media not just because of the power of the technology but more importantly, because of it's ability to improve human engagement. This, of course, is the corpus of sales and marketing. He was able to relate his understanding of the growing landscape of information rich social media site to give a meaningful talk to the audience given that Sitecore's major focuses is the customer engagement platform. He clearly has a masterful understanding of fostering powerful customer relationships evidenced by his explanation of his book "The Thank You Economy". He deftly works the crowd with his anecdotes and strategy of engaging the audience throughout his talk. He makes a point to reiterate the importance of great story telling for good business vs. the abusive or tone-deaf marketing strategies. He himself practices what he preaches as his story telling ability is engrossing a large swath of a sleep deprived audience. Sadly all of what he's saying about an appreciative business model should be common sense but is often held back by risk averse leaders. Here's hoping he reaches people on a deeper level to affect change in their respective industries.
However few people in attendence knew him before he started, there will be a near non-existent list of people who won't remember him now.