- Gary Vaynerchuk – Be Passionate
- Arianna Huffington – Make Your Own Game
- Chris Brogan – Have Enemies The Community Will Be Better For It
Watch one clip of Gary Vaynerchuk and you can tell very quickly that @garyvee is a very passionate guy. Watch a few more clips of him on WineLibraryTV or on garyvaynerchuk.com and you will quickly realize that he is genuinely passionate about his brand, his family, building businesses and wine. If you run a business and you are not this passionate about your brand or your product, find the most passionate person around your product or brand (customer or employee) and give them a platform in your communications strategy. Forget employing the typical commercial model to represent your brand, beauty and looks matter but passion trumps everything else. Make Passion the focal part of your strategy.
In Trust Agents, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith highlight Arianna Huffington in a chapter called Make Your Own Game. Arianna has certainly created her own game, with her “blog” - huffingtonpost.com. In a sea of other political blogs, Arianna differentiated her offering by providing celebrities and other notable stars with a platform from which they could share their political views. This angle on typically dry political news, definitely differentiates her from the rest and gives her the opportunity to “leverage” celebrities’ names. What’s your game? Have you developed that strategy / model / angle that will differentiate yourself?
I was reading through some of the comments on one of Chris Brogan’s blog a few weeks ago and came across one comment that read “This blog really sucks” or something to that effect. Two things: (1) the post was actually a fairly good one, don’t ask I can’t remember, but trust me; and (2) the comment was posted by some user with a non-descript name, obviously someone who did not want to be identified. Now, I use the same comment management system as Chris (DISQUS) which basically allows bloggers to monitor the comments being posted and with that the opportunity to ‘Delete’ these sorts of less than favorable comments. But Chris either left it there for all to see or he missed it totally – or he was being ultra strategic 
. In any case, I know how I felt when I saw it, “This guy is a coward because he elected not to leave his real name plus he is probably really jealous of Chris’ success” and I am guessing most of Chris’ followers probably felt the same way.
I could probably write a whole blog post about the effects of this one comment on Chris’ blog, but I will be brief. Because Chris does a great job fostering a sense of community and actively cultivates that community, when I read the comment I immediately felt a part of something unique, a part of something that was not for everyone. Can established brick and mortar businesses do this as well in their communities? They sure can, as long as they are part of the discussion (not just marketing and advertising to their clients) and foster the community around their offering, they can surely use smear campaigns as a way to rally their most passionate patrons and solidify their base.
Surely there are other lessons that brick and mortar can learn from these three, but who are some of your favorite strategists?
