When Do You Know You Have a Community? [6/5/08]

hey everybody it's Gary vaynerchuk and uh I'm just sorry I'm a mess I look horrible I know I'm sorry I just uh got into uh Houston again I've taken uh four or five flights at 5 o'clock in the morning in the last couple days and then again tomorrow as I go to Chicago for seed conference hanging out with kudel and Jason freed and those guys so looking forward to anybody I se in Chicago but what I want to talk about today on Gary v. com is community a lot of people over the last three or four days have been running into a lot of tech peeps saying when do you know that you have a community and this has really hurt my feelings uh I I don't know why

nobody's figured this out but you have a community when one person listens to you community communication you're communicating to somebody and as long as you have one person to talk to you have a community and I think way too many people are looking at how many Twitter followers to have or how many RSS people they're having following them and that's a mistake guys you need to embrace your community no matter how big or small I mean everybody started off real small I mean wine liary TV had 5 10 15 viewers at first and you know what I did I answered every single comment not just

the emails I got but if somebody left a comment I jumped in and answered every single one of those of course I can't do that anymore but you know what in the beginning those are the Glorious Days as a matter of fact I miss the days of when my community was much smaller because it was extremely intimate and those are amazing times and so stop worrying about the spats and the numbers and oh I don't want to do a video every day nobody's listening anyway stop crying and stop embracing the fact that you have somebody who cares about what you say having one viewer watch a video or one reader listen to a or excuse me read a

blog post is an amazing feat and something that should be embraced and I'm just so sick and tired of all these people not embracing and realizing how lucky they are that anybody cares about what's going through their beautiful little brain and so I wanted to make this video and I hope a lot of people pass this on because I think the majority of the people in social media right now need to listen to this message and I hope other people can add to this conversation because when way way too many people are taking for granted the lovely people that are following them and I just will never do that and I've got a lot more lately and it's very flattering so I thank everybody each and every one of you and I hope you thank each and every one of your community members