Dear friend,

Last week I posted up a special interview done by my friend Rich Schefren with a gentleman named Gary Vaynerchuk, and what I found very interesting about this interview and about this whole concept of Gary Vaynerchuk is that Gary has built this most popular wine video blog on the internet and has become what you would call a maven.  So a go to guy, somebody who is the authority online about a particular niche and he’s done all of that in less than two years, starting less than two years ago with his daily video blog he was able to get on the Ellen DeGeneres show, on the Conan O’Brien show, be mentioned in Wine Spectator, be on Nightline, be in Time Magazine, be in the Wall Street Journal and has become recognised as the online authority in wine.  Not to mention build a very successful business that was already successful before he started doing the video blog, but to build an already successful business into an even more wildly successful business riding on the strength of the new popularity of this mavenship.

And you know it’s very interesting when you start thinking about the opportunity that we have available to us right now, and when I say right now I mean this year in this time with the technology that’s available to us.  You know there have always been mavens, there have always been people who are the iconic head of a particular niche, it’s just that for years and years and years it’s taken a big media empire to build a maven.  And when you think of people like Martha Stewart who has chosen a category called Living and has become the go to person for all things to do with living, including decorating and cooking and being creative within your home.  She has spent years, her entire life building that mavenship and she has an audience of people who are very, very passionate about what she does.  Oprah Winfrey for years has been a maven for women and has built her empire over 20 years and all with a flagship television show.

Jim Cramer’s the name that comes to mind most recently when you start thinking about investment advice.  You’ve probably seen Jim Cramer, he’s on at night on CMBC or MSNBC with a show called Mad Money and he’s that crazy guy that’s very passionate and is talking about investment advice and he’s got a very passionate audience.  And you know he reminds me a lot of Gary Vaynerchuk, in my mind Gary Vaynerchuk is sort of the Jim Cramer of the wine world.  Now when you start to look at and examine what is it that all of these mavens, and I’ll call them old world mavens, because they were mavens before you… it was really at everyone’s fingertips to become a maven, and they did it the old way where they’ve spent millions and millions of dollars and years and years of time to become the maven for their category.

When you start looking at them, when you start looking at some of the things they have in common there are lessons that you can apply, that you can take from what they’ve already done and apply to your own situation.  So I’ve identified four that I think are the key four ingredients to becoming a maven in the new world, and here they are.

Key Characteristic 1: They all have a clearly defined audience.

None of them are really generalists, they’re not speaking to an audience of everyone, there is a very clear definition of who the audience is.  You know if I say is about people who are interested in investing, Martha Stewart is the maven for living, for home making, Oprah is a maven for women.  You think of people like Jamie Oliver, if you’ve seen him on The Naked Chef or you’ve seen Emiril or you’ve seen any of these people who have a very specific niche that people tune into because they are interested in that very well defined group or passion.

Key Characteristic 2: They are passionate about what they do and they’re passionate about what they are a maven about.

Being a maven is not something that you can fake and when I say passionate I mean they’ve got a personality that comes through as a genuine, real person who is just as passionate or more passionate about their subject matter as their audience is.  And for whatever segment of the market you can think of there is an irrationally passionate audience of people who are… they live, eat and breathe this topic, and it’s very interesting that they gather and gravitate to people who share that passion.

Key Characteristic 3: Free content

That when you look at in both the old world and the new world it’s free to take advantage of the information that a Martha Stewart or an Oprah or Jim Cramer has to offer, it doesn’t cost anything for you to take advantage of their information.  Now do they have things that you can buy?  Of course they do, there is an entire collection of things that you can buy with the Martha Stewart brand, there are books that you can buy with the Jim Cramer brand, Oprah has magazines and books and all of the things that you can possibly think of that her audience would be interested in learning more about.  And that’s the thing is that the flagship that they are providing their information from is a vehicle that gathers their audience.  The audience is gathered and she and Jim Cramer and Martha Stewart are able to lead people in a direction because they have first gained their trust by providing valuable free content.

Key Characteristic 4: Consistency

Consistency meaning they have been doing what they do on a regularly scheduled basis for years and years and years.  That they are consistently delivering either a daily TV show or a weekly show or a magazine or whatever it is that they’re doing there’s that consistency to it, it’s not sporadic, it’s not when they feel like it, it’s not whenever they get around to it, it’s consistently week in, week out, month in, month out, year after year that people know where to find them, how to get the information and they know that when they do go to get the information it’s going to be valuable and worth the visit.

Now that’s the lessons that we can learn from the old school mavens, the old world mavens but what is happening now, what’s happening in the new world is that anyone with a clearly defined audience and a passion for that audience who has personality and is willing to deliver valuable free content on a consistent basis can very quickly rise in the ranks to mavenship.

Now when I say things like that what I’m talking about is if you think about some of the new world mavens here, and I’ll use Gary Vaynerchuk as an example of that because Gary started less than two years ago from no recognition, from no or very small audience of people, maybe the people who locally came to his wine store in New Jersey to a world wide phenomenon that now everybody who is in the wine world and is online pretty well knows who Gary Vaynerchuk is.  I think of somebody like Perez Hilton from PerezHilton.com, Mario Lavandeira, that’s his real name.  That Mario has gone from being nobody, from being just a young kid in Miami to being the world’s number one celebrity blogger, where he’s got celebrity gossip all over his site PerezHilton.com and if you haven’t been under a rock for the last year and a half you I’m sure know who Perez Hilton is.  That if you look at that he’s gone from virtually nothing to being a very, very popular destination site and perhaps one of the most popular destinations on the internet.

So when I start looking at these things, I start looking at what is it that would stop you from becoming a maven in your market place.  And you know when I start thinking about it is what would stop you is not being willing to clearly define an audience.  A lot of times people don’t want to give up anything, they don’t want to become known as the lake front person or as the town house person or whatever, or the new construction person because they believe erroneously I think that that would mean that they wouldn’t be able to help people by horse farms.  But the reality is what you want to do is focus on an audience that you can deliver valuable content for and become the go to person.

When somebody’s looking for a very specific thing, if somebody’s in your area and they’re looking for lake front property or they’re looking for a town house all they’re really concerned about is getting the latest information on exactly what it is that they’re looking for, town houses or lake front homes or new construction or golf course homes or investment properties.  Whatever it is, there’s lots of opportunity for you to pick a market and focus on becoming a maven for that market.

Now there’s a skill set that you will need to develop if you’re going to pursue becoming a maven and there are three basic skills for this new world mavenship, and the three skills are

Skillset Number 1 is being able to make a video and post it on YouTube or online on Google video or any of the video hosting sites.

If you don’t know how to do that it’s going to be very difficult for you to become a video maven.  Now fortunately it’s very easy to learn how to do those things, you can make videos with very inexpensive digital cameras, you can go to YouTube.com and up in the upper right hand corner there is a four letter magic word that can open your key to becoming a video maven and that four letter word is H.E.L.P, help.  It’s right up there in the upper right hand corner, if you click on that help link you’ll be taken to an area where they will explain every single thing in very good detail about how to make videos, post them up on YouTube, how to get your own channel on YouTube, how to spread the word about your videos.  But what it does take is it takes a desire for you to do it and it takes time, it takes blocking off time that you’re specifically going to dedicate to learning how to make and post up videos.  Now you could do it in one weekend, literally you can learn the mechanics and the basics of it in one Saturday morning, you could get good at it by Sunday evening if you’re willing to devote that time to put it together.

Skillset Number 2 is knowing how to make an audio and put it up on iTunes.

What you’re listening to right now, Marketing Monday.com has been coming up on two years now of every Monday providing free, valuable information for real estate agents and mortgage brokers who want to become better marketers and use marketing to get new clients.  Now it’s very easy for you to do this, there’s… it doesn’t take a studio, it doesn’t take lots of expensive equipment, I’m doing this right now at my home with my laptop and a headset microphone that I’m going to put this whole thing together, put it up online, get it posted up on iTunes and it takes very little time.  Once you learn the moves of how to do it, it’s very easy for you to continue,  those are the things, the biggest obstacle is learning how to do it.

Skillset Number 3 is being able to create a blog and post it online.

now blogging is a very, very easy thing to learn.  If you go to typepad.com, they have a free trial service that you can try, you can learn how it all works again if you click the help button there’s lots of great information, they have a great knowledge base on how to make blogs, how to post up the blog and they do it all for you.  If you can type and click buttons you can create your own blog in very little time, again you can learn the basics, you can learn the mechanics in a Saturday morning, you could get good by Sunday evening.  It’s just a matter of taking the time to do it.

Now it’s not for everybody, if you are a self declared technophobe, if you don’t like technology, if the thought of using technology turns your skin green and makes you a little nervous or gives you a bad feeling in the pit of your stomach this might not be for you.  But if you are passionate about your audience, if you’re passionate about using these skills, using the new world where you look at the online world and you know that it’s not going to get any less popular going forward, you know that the entire new generation of home buyers and mortgage getters are all young people who are completely versed in using all of these new technologies, they’re comfortable with getting information online and you’ve got a whole new world, a whole new audience that you can appeal to.  If you’re not completely terrified by technology and you’re passionate and you want to use the new world technologies here to get new clients and to build your mavenship, then there’s nothing stopping you, doesn’t take very long for you to learn the mechanical skills of doing this,  and the good news is the more you do it, the better you get.

So this’d be something that if you’ve got some time over the holidays as you’re sitting around, it’s a little bit slower, you’ve got some time on your hands you can spend a little time on learning a new skill set before you get crazy busy again when you go in to the New Year, these would be fantastic skills for you to learn.  So this is the last Marketing Monday of the year so I wish you all a happy holidays, a safe holidays and a Happy New Year and we will see you in the January with a completely new year for Marketing Monday.com.  Thanks for tuning in and I’ll talk to you next year.