Telling your story and how so many miss it [5/6/09]

hey everybody it's Gary vuk for garyvaynerchuk. com and uh I want to talk about storytelling PR you know branding stuff I love of course um I think there's way too many companies it's starting to get obvious to me there's a lot of companies that really don't understand the importance of telling your own story the amount of Brands and websites that I see being reactionary to let's say a tech crunch article or a Mashable article or the Wall Street Journal or ad age is baffling to me I don't understand in this day and age let me phrase that I do understand most brands corporate structured companies have PR teams that are really playing by the old rules of PR is fundamentally changed there's so much more authenticity in it press releases are like doing smoke signals do you understand what I'm saying when you've got CEOs and personal Brands and Brands within companies the face of tech company maybe it's a CFO maybe it's a CTO whatever it may be I don't understand why they think they need to have a filtered canned response to anything I don't understand when you launch a new product or a feature why they don't take a flip Cam and just say hey this is what we're doing I know some of you might not like this you know directing the story already knowing what the stumbling blocks I keep getting involved in these Consulting powwows over the last couple of weeks where people are like we're going to launch this we know what's going to happen a couple people AR going to like this I'm going to like that but you know it's 90 5% better this 5% is going to bother some of the original users D I don't understand when they tell me it's so real and they're coming from such a good place and they don't want to hurt anybody but they understand there might be a 7% retention of anger over this little subtle thing I don't understand why they don't take a flip cam or a video and just say that and when they launch it when people sign on to their site you know that pops up and they talk about it people are waiting for people to cry about it and they come out with a canned response it's just a whole thing is broken communication is what keeps a marriage healthy a relationship healthy be the first to communicate if you're a business or a brand and you'll always win wait for somebody else to tell your story and then you have to mold it is a losing proposition please rethink the way you handle PR in your company and here's the problem and I'm going to get a lot of flack for this because I have a lot of friends in PR a lot of them don't want you to rethink it when you bring this up they're going to kind of dance you know they don't want to change their jobs cuz their job are changing everybody who's in the pr business today has a different job than they did 24 months ago see you next time i. com