Has Gary Vaynerchuk Lost His Snapchat Mind?

Last week a friend of mine on Facebook posted this:

Gary Vaynerchuk says 90% of your ad budget should be spent on Snapchat and Instagram.”

I would have missed this dialogue except he tagged me in the discussion so I said “WTH???”

Later in the discussion my friend made a video discussing the value of Snapchat. Here’s my reply:

“I find it ironic you’re sharing a YouTube video on Facebook to describe how to use a CRM to leverage Snapchat.

“This would be like me sending a text to a friend reminding them to open my email, which is an email reminding them to check their snail mail for an invitation to a cow-tipping party and the invitation has instructions on how to pick up this Sunday’s newspaper and cut out the coupon for access to the party and a free drink upon arrival.

“‘You can upload your contacts from your CRM and find them on Snapchat.’ That is cool but what if I upload my contacts to Snapchat…and they aren’t on Snapchat? (If my wife leaves me at home and I make a statement…am I still wrong?)

“I haven’t even opened Snapchat in a week and have spent maybe 3 minutes on it in the last two weeks.

“Snapchat has value. I get it. So does the YellowPages for some businesses. But I wouldn’t make a blanket statement ‘You need to spend 90% of your ad budget on YellowPages.'”

“QR codes still work for some businesses. Goodyear does okay with a blimp.

“I’m sure I’ll use it more soon…probably…if you’d send me a printed newsletter…with an invitation to a webinar…that invites me to a workshop…that shows me how to use an auto-responder…and a CRM…to collect leads from a trade show…so I can talk at them for 10 seconds on Snapchat.

“Whew! Just in time for me to kill the ROI and pay for my second son’s college.”

The next day my friend posts this update:

“UPDATE: I reached out to Gary and the context in which this statement was made was if you’re targeting 15-20 year olds in America.”

Ahhhh…that’s a rather important distinction. 

So to answer the question in my title: NO, GARY VAYNERCHUK HAS NOT LOST HIS SNAPCHAT MIND.

What lessons can we learn here?

1. Be careful whose advice you follow.

2. Find multiple sources to verify what you hear, read, see and even believe.

3. Another way of saying that is “trust but verify.” It’s great to have trusted resources and experts to shorten your learning curves, but nobody is perfect. (Well, actually, I did think I was wrong once…but I was mistaken.)

4. There is no silver bullet or easy button or magic pill or pixie dust. Snapchat won’t turn your business around if you have a crappy business. Neither will podcasting or blogging or PPC or SEO or PPC or Twittering of FaceTubing or YouBooking. 

5. If something doesn’t make sense, there’s something you don’t know. This advice given about Snapchat didn’t make sense. Turned out there was something I didn’t know and I thank my friend for having the courage to correct his statement on a public forum.

Addtional lesson learned: 

 Growing a business takes work. 

People don’t know you for one of two reasons:

1. They haven’t heard of you.

2. They have.

Get #2 right first. Then do everything you can to make #1 as big as possible.

If you need some help, let me know.

Wes