#AskGaryVee Episode 120: Should You Delete Old Tweets & Posts?

“today, without anyone
knowing who you were, ” “how would you find talent?” – Kyle, first of all I’m
gonna answer the real answer, and then the question I
think you’re actually asking. The real answer is, I would never, and this is going to give a
lot of people a lot of insight, I’m always trying to provide
value, Sid, as you go through your career, you wanna
provide value, so I’m going to answer twice. The answer is I would not
start VaynerMedia, I actually will never in my career
start a business, or be in a business that I don’t have
disproportional leverage from the beginning to
affect the outcome of the business, so the thought
of starting a social media agency, where I am not a
known entity, and I don’t have leverage with brands
already, VaynerMedia started much like the
networking video that Sid, was taught by DRock,
actually link that up DRock, let’s give Sid, this
is like a Sid episode. It’s a Sid explosion guys. Let’s have a little ding,
ding, ding right here, if you haven’t seen it
check out the video. I talked about networking,
and somewhere in that thing I said, let it come
to you, have the leverage. When I started Vayner, I had the leverage. I was already a known entity,
in this space, at that point probably for about 3 or 4
years, 2 or 3 years, brands were coming to me. I scratched the itch,
I reverse engineered. I had a business because it came to me. A talent came to me, because
I was known as a thought leader already in the space. To start a business without
leverage, either having the pure talent, I’m great at
cooking, you know, baking, and thus I have a chance. Maybe I don’t need to
be known for my baking skills, but I have the skill,
or I have the disproportional known factor. Now to answer your question,
you need to go out and network, ironically. If you are somebody who’s
inspired by me, listen, I see a ton of you 23 year
olds starting your social media agency because it feels easy, right. Like, I’m a kid, I know what Vine is. You know, remember these
businesses, need business results, so just because you
use SnapChat to hook up, or whatever you’re doing, right,
just cause you know how to swipe to the right, doesn’t mean you know
how to sell cups of coffee. So, I think what’s really important is do you have the skills first, second, you gotta
go out and network. If you’re starting an agency,
if you’re asking that question selfishly for yourself,
to what should you do, I think you need to go to
meetup.com, go to every social media meet up in your
general area, go to 5-15 conferences, big ones,
around social media, you know Social Media Examiner does
a big one in San Diego, like scrounge up the dollars
and go, network, network, network, learn, learn, learn,
follow people, multiple people, because they’re all
bringing different values. Learn, learn, learn, engage
on Twitter, it’s the open cocktail party of the internet. Engage with people that
are engaging on comments within my Facebook posts. Become parts of communities, leverage, remember jab, jab, jab,
right hook, don’t go in there and be like, “Hey, do
you wanna work for me?” Like, become part of a
community, then leverage the aspects of being part of that community. – [India] Nice. – But it starts, India, with
becoming part of the community. Like I don’t wanna glaze over that. I appreciate your nice,
but I want to make sure we really get it here,
like you’ve got to become part of the community, and
then you can leverage it. Don’t tactically be, don’t fake the, don’t go into the reddit
and your first post is spam, right Steve?
– That’s — – Because you get fleem to
death, and I think a lot of people try to do that,
and they think they’re clever because they’re patient for a
month and acting like they’re part of the, People can sense shit. If your intent was to
become part of the community just to extract value
out of the community, people can sense it. – [Voiceover] Tyler asks, “In
a Snapchat/Instagram world, is

video quality more essential
than in years’ past? – [India] (mumbles) more
essential than in years’ past? – No. Eat it DRock. Best question ever. Well, let me go into it. India, I feel like I have
some depth in this episode. Look, at the end of the
day, creative is subjective and we all like different things. Plenty of people, 20
years ago, most of our parents, even mine, for
an old guy, told us that rap wasn’t music, like can we get over, like that reality TV wasn’t entertainment, that YouTube wasn’t real stars. I mean this always happens
guys, so you know like plenty of people like
content that doesn’t have the perfect mic or the perfect lighting, that being said, a lot of
people made comments that my last video, the networking
video, was different than the others. Hmm, makes sense, Sid
did it instead of DRock, you know, and they didn’t
say they liked it better or hated it worse, or this was, it’s just different, but that
doesn’t mean that there’s one that’s right or wrong. Clearly there is enormous
upside to great editing, and lighting, and mics,
you know, like clearly, there’s value to that, but there’s also, listen, Wine Library TV worked,
and Steve, I looked like a hostage in Iraq.

@DylSell on Twitter, and I
have a question for the show. – DylSell. – DylSell. – Recently I’ve heard plenty
of social media experts, mainly spurred by Mark
Cuban and Evan Speigal. – Oh okay, they’re real people. – Are you for deleting the
history of their tweets and other past social media posts,
because they say that the context is out of play 8
to 10 months in the past. I was curious what your
thoughts are on this, and if you have a counter punch. Thanks Gary, love your show. – Thanks brother. I don’t think I have a counter punch. I actually agree with both. I think, first of all, I do
think that Snapchat is the closest thing to real life communication, like everything you say
to your friends doesn’t get recorded for life. I think that’s why Snapchat exploded. When I finally made that realization, I’m like, wait a minute,
this is actually the real way we communicate, that’s when
it started getting exciting to me, that’s why I started
in late 2013, mid 2013 starting to get really bullish on it. You know Cuban with
Cyberdust, Evan with Snapchat, I know where you’re going
DylSell, I think that, I think that it has a place,
and I do believe that a disproportion amount of
the content deserves to be in a place where it disappears forever, however, I think there’s enormous value, as a matter of fact, yesterday
was one of my favorite moments in a long time in my career. Somebody tweeted, sweet
red wine is starting to explode in the U.S. I made that prediction
on a Wine Library TV episode, seven years ago,
and he linked towards it and it was fun to see a
younger, less fit Gary, make a tremendous
prediction about where the wine market was going, and
so I think that there’s content that I think, Is anybody here devastated
about the fact that they have these great pictures,
or videos, or comments from three, four, five, six years ago? No. Both, the answer is both. But it’s not an all or nothing. And definitely the Twitters
and the Facebooks created this kind of all, forever, and
I think the reason Snapchats working, the reason Cyberdust
has value and is working, is because they play in the
ying to the yang and this and that, and so, that’s that. I think they both work. I think they both have a place
at the table, and I think there’s probably, you
know, this is why Beme, and Meerkat, and Periscope, live and real time content has a place at the table, and there’s probably some sort of fourth thing I haven’t even thought about yet that has a place of the table. There’s a lot of seats at the table my friends, and I think people
get way too all or nothing, and they don’t realize
how many chairs there really are. – [India] That was beautiful.

“characteristic that you’d like
to pass down to Misha and” “Xander, and what’s the
number one characteristic you” “hope they don’t get from you?” – Great question. The number one characteristic
I want my children to get from me, boy there’s
a lot, because I think I’m really fucking awesome, so
if they can be a complete replication that’d be great, sorry Lizzy. I’m just kidding, I’m kidding. Let’s go with first thoughts. The first two thoughts that came to were and this may seem interesting
to you, depends on how well you know me, number
one, the first thing that I thought of, it’s sad that
this was first over the second one, but maybe that’s an insight
that I need to deal with. The first one is competitiveness, you know, it makes me sad, because I know it’s
less noble than a lot, the other one is humility,
which I know, for so many of you, especially if this like
the sixth episode you watched, or first, you think it’s
completely ego, but I’m telling you, like I know how
much my humility is the engine of my success,
and I have plenty of ego, it’s me pulling in those
opposite directions, but my competitive nature
has been a very, very positive impact on my
life in a lot of ways. It’s just I associate that with myself. I think my kids, no matter
what they do, and I don’t mean competitive to like make
money, competitive to write the best song of all time, competitive
to raise the most money for this disease of all time,
I think being competitive is a very, very lucky attribute,
and I think that my family and me specifically, take it too far. It can be very unhealthy at
times, it causes friction, but I would never give
it up, I just wouldn’t. I think it’s just too damn important. It gets me through so much. It gets me through so much. I want them to be kind, I like being kind. I think kind is incredibly important. I think the one thing that
I think that a, that a, you know it’s funny, I really
do think I’m a paradox, I have ying and yangs
to all my own feelings, I’m trying to think about what
I don’t like about myself. (laughing) God, I love myself. What don’t I want them to have? – This is hard, by the way,
you ever want to stump me, try to have me talk
negative about my own self. (laughing) Look, I think there’s a
ton of things I do wrong. I think at times I wish I
was a little more selfish. At times I wish, I, man my parents did a really good job. I would say the number one
thing that I don’t want them to take from me, is I
think that I could have done a much better job in my early
years on work/life balance. The only resemblance of a
regret I have is the first five to six years of
my marriage with Lizzy, I think that I left 2 weeks
of real quality together time per year on the table, and
those are twelve weeks that I can never get back and
that I really wish I had, and luckily I am way
young enough to more than make up for those 12 weeks,
and so I will, and so I think that would probably be it. I mean, at the end of the
day, I just, as you can tell, my brain as a computer
is not very capable of looking at too
many of the negatives. – [India] I had a negative
question here before, but

– My name is Caleb Maddix. I’m 13 years old, and I
just wrote my first book, Keys to Success for Kids, you can get it on Amazon.com, and my question is, if you were in my shoes, what would be the first step to promoting the book? #AskGaryVee show – Caleb, the first thing
I would do is I would try to find a thought leader, with
a very big audience, that had let’s say either a blog
or a podcast or a show, and I would try to make a piece
of content that would catch his or his team’s
attention, so that then that person would promote
it to that enormously large audience that probably has
a lot of kids or younger brother and siblings, and you would get a disproportion, organic,
awareness play that you didn’t have to pay for, and
an instance what you did was you hacked it by making
very compelling content. That would probably be what I would do.