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This is the GaryVee audio experience.

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Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the GaryVee audio experience. I'm Mike from Team GaryVee and on today's episode of the podcast, we are sharing a keynote Gary did at the Alder Experts event in Abu Dhabi last year. In this one, he talks about the reason most people don't produce content. He shares some practical advice on how to leverage social media platforms, and talks a little bit about underpriced attention. I hope you all enjoy.

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I'm very happy to be here. Lots to talk about, very excited about getting into the Q and A and really answering a lot of the questions in this audience. But I will frame up my conversation in the macro and the micro of what I see is the opportunity for most people in this room. And when I say macro, micro, what I'm referring to is you've had the luxury to hear Ryan speak and I didn't get the luxury of catching the talk. But watching him build his brand over the last half decade and interacting with him quite a bit in New York, if he was talking about building personal brand, that's obviously incredibly important. But clearly he had a very different path than the majority of this room because 99.9% of this room is not going to end up on a hit television show at the height of cable consumption for a decade. To get that level of awareness, the majority of you would have to go down the path that I've gone through over the last 15 years, which is creating your own creative and content and using the free distribution of social media to build that brand. And I'm going to go into that a little bit because the most interesting part for me being in social media creative for the last 17 years is how much it's changed in the last 24 months and what that means for everyone here. To give you the Cliff Notes and the preview for 2006-2009, there was an incredible land grab of attention with early Facebook and Twitter that I and others took advantage of. That got harder as the world started to figure it out over the last 24 months. Over the last 36 months, the TikTokification of every social media platform has changed everything. There are literally people in this room who've never produced content for social media that can next week make a single video and start a completely different path of growth in their career. And that's pretty remarkable. That hasn't been the case for the last 10 plus years. And that's something every single person in this room needs to take Very seriously, but we'll go to that in a minute. That to me is the micro. The micro is how do you make content? Like what kind of content, which platforms should you be producing for, what content works on which platform? That's the micro. The macro that I want to talk to everybody about in this room is none of you have a chance of succeeding in the biggest opportunity you have, which is building your own brand and leveraging that against your ambitions if you don't have the macro pieces in place. The macro pieces in place are strictly mindset and perspective, strictly the reality of how life works. Everyone's ambition here, business wise, is completely dictated by what's going on inside of them. Emotionally, there's no chance you're going to work hard enough, produce good enough content or anything else that's required to achieve what you want unless you're in a good place. It's as simple as that. I've done this for a very, very long time and the reality is it's not sustainable unless you've got solid foundation. It's no different than building a home, the things you all sell. It doesn't matter how well you decorate the living room or how nice the color of the paint is in the master bedroom, right? If you do not have steel and concrete that holds up the building. The steel and concrete for every single human here is their emotional stability and what they actually feel. And so the thing that I've been fascinated by was I didn't realize why all my businesses were working in my 20s and 30s until I went a little further on my journey. I am the byproduct of incredible mothering. I am lucky that I had a world class mother who built accountability and self esteem in me, which made me completely capable of doing everything that I've wanted to do in my business career. Not everybody is as lucky as I am with the luck of the draw of who their mother or father or circumstances were. I was lucky that I was born in the Soviet Union and came to America and we had nothing and had to grow up grinding it out because I never was able to form entitlement because nothing ever came easy to me. These are just the circumstances of all of our lives, one way or another. But before we get into how you're going to sell more stuff or build your business, you've got to actually be in a place of asking yourself, are you emotionally capable? The macro, are you emotionally capable to deal with it? Because the biggest issue, the single biggest issue is the single biggest opportunity all at the same time. For the reality of this room, the biggest opportunity on earth for every broker that exists, is making content on social media at scale, period. Right now in 2023, as we sit here in this room, there is no second option compared to the truth. That is, if you sit in here and are capable of producing 15 to 25 pieces of content a day across four to five platforms a day, that the business ambitions you have will come true. The problem is the reason most people don't produce 15 to 25 pieces of content a day is not because you have no time. If you understood that it was the single biggest reason that you would make more money, you would find time. If you Understood that you would 4, 5, 10, 15, 100x your revenue or your sales or your commissions, the dollars in your bank account, you would find two hours a day to do it. Instead of having a two hour meeting, you would find it. The reason most people do it or don't do it, excuse me, is because they can't deal with the emotional feedback that comes with putting yourself out there. The single reason that this room, I find it very hard to believe that this room in Q1 of 2023 does not understand that social media output is a driver of business. I don't believe there's a single person that has come to this conference that does not understand that to be true. If that's true, and if you came to this conference, I think about this all the time. Why are you even here right now? We're in the middle of the week, in the middle of the afternoon. Why would you even be here? The answer to that always for me, is because you're ambitious, because you want something to happen that you're putting in the work to make your thing be better. If that's true, that means that everybody in here is in play to execute the model that creates the growth. This is what brings me to the biggest thing that I want to talk about in this room, which is insecurity. The biggest reason 98% of this room will listen to everything I'm about to say, will do the Q and A, it has complete historical affirmation to be true, and you will leave this conference and still not do it in the face of the truth of it working is 100% predicated on insecurity. To me, this is the biggest pandemic in the world that many of you will not double your business this year because you are not capable of people leaving negative comments on your social media account. To me, the craziest thing when it comes to Business is that people in this room will not go and figure out how to make content. Not because you don't know who to hire, not because you don't know where to post, not because you don't know what to post. All of the things that are disguised when we get into the Q and A, when you're like, ah, Gary, what platformer? Who should I hire? What kind of camera should I use? The camera that is on your phone right now is a better camera than Hollywood was using 20 years ago. The camera's not your problem. The finding the employee to post for you is not your problem. The problem is the macro. I promise you this. The problem is the macro. You're scared to post because you're worried about what other people think. You're worried about what your buddy thinks about you doing it. You're worried about somebody saying you don't look good. You're worried about that your makeup's not right, that your muscles aren't good, that your face isn't right, that you are scared. Fear is the biggest way to not make money. Fear is the biggest way to not achieve what you want. I find this very ironic and I'll tell you why. The whole world is scared to post because of insecurity in comments. But I find that funny every time I talk to real estate brokers because brokers do something that most people are scared of, which is sell. Most people are scared to sell. Most people are scared to ask for the listing. Most people are scared to sell. Most people are scared to sell. This group in this incredible arena has already crossed the chasm into an area that most people are scared to do. As a matter of fact, many of you try to encourage or you razz your friends for being scared to sell because you're not scared to sell. What's most interesting to me though is selling is very important. But sales never beats branding. Branding always beats sales. Sales is just bad branding. Most of you, when I look at this crowd, this is a very well dressed, attractive put together crew. The amount of brands that are being worn right now by people in front of me that I can just see in the lights is very high. From handbag to tie to suit to dress. Nobody sold you those products. You went and bought them because they built brand. The biggest way for everyone here to die. And what's double important in this conversation is the following. I've spoken to brokers pretty much my whole career. I've done events of this nature around the world. But I think everybody sitting here, the stakes are double High comparison to what I've done in the past. Because you're in a market post pandemic that is one of the few flourishing markets in the entire world. You can literally be living almost everywhere else on earth and it is less exciting than being a broker in the uae. We need to clap that up for a second by show of clapping loudness. How many people agree with what I just said? Please go. If that's true, if it is true that by the luck of God, you have found yourself in the prime of your career in a market that has ridiculous upside for looking around probably the majority of the rest of the people's careers here. Why would you not execute to maximize the opportunity? And the simple answer is you fear what people are going to say. This is like, as you can tell by the way I'm setting this up, this, this is like incredibly emotional to me. I am sitting here looking at thousands of people when I know 98% of you will not do what I'm about to say. Every single person here needs to make a dramatically bigger commitment to producing videos, pictures and written words on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, LinkedIn, YouTube, tomorrow. Let me tell you why. I don't know if you've heard, it's free. I want to say this one more time. I love when people are like, gary, Facebook shadow banned me. My Instagram, I'm not getting as many views. I'm shadow banned. I'm like, you're not shadow banned. You just suck. These platforms are free. People get upset and I'm not getting as many views. This is why the world has become so entitled. The biggest issue in the world is entitlement. People literally paint. Think about this. I'm 47. I used to pay for full page ads and newspapers. I used to pay for radio spots, I used to pay for local TV ads. These platforms are free. Free. We have become so accustomed to it, we now blame these platforms and the algorithm. Because your Instagram post doesn't get as many likes as it did two years ago. And instead of blaming yourself because you're posting the same crap over and over, you blame the free platform. Every time I have these kind of talks or conversations, one on one or with a smaller group, the amount of people that are capable of having accountability of what they're doing about it is almost non existent on a free platform. By the way, as many of you know, the platforms are starting to change a little bit. We're starting to see that they might not be free. We're starting to See that Twitter wants to charge this much a month or Facebook wants to charge that much a month. We are living, my friends, through the greatest era of free exposure of all time. In the history of the world. In the history of the world, individual small businesses or human beings have the ability to get free exposure attention, you know, the single most important asset on earth. Attention free in this group. Free attention in the single most flourishing market on earth. You can imagine the energy that I had in my body flying out here from Manhattan for this talk. I'm going to talk to thousands of people who are in the best market in what they do, facing the next decade during the most scaled free attention platform in the history of marketing, all at the same time. And yet 98% of the people in this room won't actually do anything about it. All based on the fact that they are insecure of not getting enough likes or getting a negative comment from somebody. This is what's called a conundrum. Hey everybody. Actually, if you're a really hardcore listener, you know I never do this. I'm sorry to be jumping in the middle of the podcast, but the truth is I'm like shitting the bed on this. Everybody else is getting people to review on Spotify and Apple and the vaynernation does none of that. Cause I've never asked. So if this podcast has ever meant anything to you, please go to Spotify or Apple right now and leave a review. By the way, even if you give me a one star review cause you think it's shit, I respect it. But just leave a review, an actual review, four or five stars, and the actual details of why. Yeah, that would mean something for me. So thanks. Now back to the podcast. My friends. Let me help all of you that struggle with people that leave negative comments. I'm gonna make this very simple. You are upset when you post and someone says you're ugly. You're not smart. This is stupid. You should get off of this. Your friend texts you and say you look silly, you're not good on video, whatever it is. I just want you to think about this for a second. Somebody on the receiving end of your content in their feed decided to take their own time and leave a comment to tell you that you're not good. Think about this. You should not be upset for yourself. You should be upset for them. Could you imagine how miserable of a life it is that you are so hurting inside that you need to go find somebody else's content and leave a comment to hurt them, to drag them down to Your pain, this is something you have to wrap your head around. It will change the paradigm of how you view this. We must leave this conference understanding this final truth, that the biggest growth in this industry around the world are from the individuals who are out producing their competitors in social media content. Whatever your feelings are about these platforms you don't like, your kids are on it. You don't like TikTok, you don't like this, you think it's silly. The market does not care what your opinion is of these platforms. The market is just acting like the market and we must, we must take advantage of this. Do we understand? Cool. So then I'm gonna double click into this. Let me talk to you about a couple things that I would like to see a lot more people do. How many people here, by show of hands, I'm gonna want you to raise your hand. Now remember, please don't lie, because if I see somebody raise their hand that I'm not sure about, I might jump out and we might check you and we're gonna record it. And if you're lying, I'm gonna put it on my social media and shame you to the whole world. So by show of hands, by show of hands, how many people here make YouTube shorts every day? Raise your hand. 1, 2, 3, 4. Four people in this room make YouTube shorts every day. Let me explain to you why this is a major opportunity. YouTube Shorts, unlike Instagram Reels, unlike TikTok, YouTube Shorts has a very unique thing that I think is going to matter to this room. YouTube, as some of you may know, not most, because people don't think of it that way. YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world behind Google. Now, Bing with ChatGPT may start growing and we'll watch it. But YouTube people go to YouTube to search because some people like myself, learn more from audio and video than they do from written words. Cool. YouTube shorts. If you are smart and you're making a piece of video like Instagram and TikTok, but when you name the video, you think about naming it for people that are searching, not just for a clever naming for the video, Unlike Instagram and TikTok, that YouTube short can live for a very long time. I would argue if I'm selling homes, if I'm selling commercial real estate, if I'm selling YouTube shorts needs to become a major part of the place you go. How many people here are making TikToks or Instagram every day? Raise your hands. Raise it high. Okay, so in general, we have a major problem in this room. But for the people that just raised their hands, just taking the video that you're doing on Instagram and TikTok and then bringing it over to YouTube shorts and just naming it smartly from a search perspective will disproportionately grow the opportunity of your awareness and branding. What's more concerning to me is I don't know if this room is shy or like people didn't raise their hands. But again, going back to the opening rant, we need to out produce a lot more than what the room just did. I will forever struggle with this conversation and I genuinely implore everyone to get a heck a lot more serious about this. What's happening is my biggest fear is that a lot of people here in the next three to five years will regret not taking advantage of this era because the world will move. As a matter of fact, this is a fairly young audience. But how many people Here do Google AdWords listings and run ads on Google for their listings? Please raise your hands. Again, pretty small. Jesus, I'm moving here and going to sell homes. The opportunity is very clear. Google AdWords was a very big tactic that in the mid 2000s, early 2000s that I would speak to in events like this that people were not taking advantage of. It has become much more of a standard practice around the world and a lot of people took advantage of it, but it costs a lot more to do the same thing. The thing that I'm really hyper focused on in this room is letting and forcing and motivating people to get serious about social media content while it's so underpriced on an everyday basis. On an everyday basis, more and more people are coming in and producing and it throws off the supply and demand which makes it harder to go. Four years ago, five years ago, when I was yelling and screaming about TikTok, very few people were doing it, but everyone who did do it would get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views because there was less people producing, but there was a lot of attention. We continue to sit in rooms like this and say, well, I can't sell my luxury homes on TikTok and I continue to get emails every day from people who are selling their luxury homes on TikTok. The amount of people that decide about certain things like this without ever trying it is fascinating to me. To me, this is a very unique time in the history of selling stuff because of the distribution. When I go back for the many in here that don't know my story, I my dad, I was born in the USSR I come to the us My dad was a stock boy in a liquor store and then he eventually owned his own small liquor store. I was very motivated by being the oldest son and wanting to build my dad's business. When I came into my dad's business full time in 1998, the business was doing $3.7 million in revenue. Five years later, the business was doing almost $70 million in revenue. We took no investment, no credit line, no cash infusion. This hyper growth was based on one thing which is what I've been talking to you about for the last 25 minutes, which is the following. The number one way to grow anything when it comes to business is being the best at understanding where the underpriced attention of the world is. I'm going to say it again because I want everybody to understand this. The number one way to grow a major business, top line revenue sales, is to understand where the underpriced attention is. In 1998 for my dad's store, that was email. When I did email marketing in 1998, 1999, 95% of the people on our newsletter opened the email. Today, if you get 30%, you're a genius. In 2000, Google AdWords came out and I bought every wine term on Google AdWords for 5 and 10 cents a click. In 2006 when YouTube came out, I started making videos about wine when nobody was doing it. My career for the last 25 years has been buying or getting free underpriced attention on every single platform that's come out. No question, the only way outside of business development deals behind the scenes that anyone here can 2, 3, 7, 12, 15x their business is by executing an underpriced attention. The second this audience really grasps the concept of underpriced attention is the second that they will grow. The problem is underpriced attention always sits in the stuff of today. And most people when they want to build a business, look at yesterday and as a matter of fact they look at tomorrow. I've had more people ask me about Gary should I list homes on the Metaverse than I've had people figuring out how to make perfect content on YouTube shorts. We are obsessed with tomorrow. We are romantic about yesterday and most everyone does not execute in today. My obsession of this keynote and this Q and A is to get the majority of this room very focused on today. Today the people that are being affected by information to make a decision to consider a purchase is predominantly happening on social media. We continue to underestimate it. We continue to politicize it. We continue to have opinions about it, but the reality is it is the currency attention. I'll give you another one that's very fascinating in this industry, how many people here, by show of hands, this one will surprise me, are producing content every day on LinkedIn. Very nice. Solid for me. LinkedIn for a lot of you is a humongously untapped social network. LinkedIn in the last seven to eight years has evolved to look a lot more like Facebook than look like a place where you go and find people to hire. What's super interesting about LinkedIn is the following. The mentality of when somebody is going through their feed on LinkedIn is very different than when they're going through their link on Instagram. The psychology of who that person is. All of us are a different version of our own selves depending on what stream we're going through. When you're going through Facebook, you're in a friends and family mindset. When you're on TikTok, you're in an entertainment mindset. When you are on LinkedIn, you are in a business mindset. I find that this audience making a commitment to videos, listings, pictures, audio in LinkedIn would be very surprised where they find themselves. Look, I come here, I talk in this setting. I'm looking at the crowd right now and trying to process what are people thinking. And the only thing that happens in my mind is what sentence can I say to get people to start making. The reason I start now with the macro is I've learned in the last decade it has to do with insecurity, it has to do with judgment on oneself. I get it. And it's very challenging. I don't think it's easy to just. I come in and say, stop being insecure. And tomorrow you're like, I'm not insecure. But I think it starts with understanding. That's why you're not posting. Number two, I focus on the tactics. Here's a very important part for everyone if they're going to be successful at this game. A lot of people here do not want to make video. They don't feel comfortable, which is fine. My preference is you do video outperforms every other medium. It's the way the world works. However, if you are not comfortable on video, please be self aware and find your own medium. For many of you, writing, which is more this than this, is very acceptable. A photo and writing on a post is very acceptable. Audio is something very few people are doing. Literally taking your phone, hitting record on the record and talking what you would do on video. But you don't have to be visual. For a lot of people. It means you don't have to get your lighting right, your makeup right, your outfit right. You could just literally do it as you're thinking it through in the car, the office, or in bed. But recording your thoughts on why this is a great listing and all the things you would say to a human being in an open house and putting it on recording and then just uploading the recording with a still picture is remarkably, remarkably right. Before I go into Q and A, I want to talk to you about a framework for the people here that are ready to make the jump into what I'm talking about, which is the concept of pack, platforms and culture. If there's anything I want you to write down or embed into your brain, it's the concept of this pack, platforms and culture. The number one way to be successful in making content on social platforms is through the strategic framework of something called pack. What does it mean? Let's break it down. Platforms. If you do not know how the platforms are acting, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, then you're not going to be successful. I'll give you an example. Every one of you has your listings listed on a website. If you were to take a screenshot of that listing on your mobile device, go to Instagram and TikTok and put that image behind a green screen and record yourself talking with the listing behind you. I'm sure at this point, all of you that consume TikTok and Instagram have seen a green screen. Raise your hand if you know what I'm talking about when I say green screen. Beautiful. If you are to screenshot your listing, put it on a green screen and you talk about why you're fond of this listing, that video will get 5 to 10 times times more views than if you just do a selfie video inside the listing. Because of the platform creative strategy of green screens, working as a creative format, this is very important. This is where people take social media way too lightly. There is an extraordinary amount of strategy that goes into making content. This is very, very important. This is why I encourage all of you to get very serious about the concept of pack. If you understand how the platforms work and what's over indexing, it's going to make you more successful at what you're doing. Green screening, your listing is going to be more successful than just videoing it. Then there's culture. If you understand the brands, the artists, the music, the food, the popular culture of Your society, the things that are trending in culture in UAE and in that video against green screen, you reference culture, you make a point to make it relevant to the audience. You will see a major impact on that video consumption. The tactics of Pack are incredibly important and one of the most significant reasons why certain people win and others don't. Another thing that's very important. You don't have to share anything you don't want to share. This is a very big deal of this conversation. One of the reasons people don't post in a room like this is because they think there's rules on posting. I, for example, post almost more than every human being on earth, yet I don't share my personal life at all. It's not what I'm interested in sharing, it's not what I use it for. I've met many of you through the years who don't post because you're like, I don't want to post my kids, you don't have to post your kids. I don't want to post my personal life, you don't have to post your personal life. You see certain people that do and you believe that that is the requirement to be successful. It is not you. The best thing about these platforms is you're in control. You post what you want to post. You do not need to compromise your moral compass, your privacy or anything else. You can use this as a business platform like I do and have for the last 20 years. Please understand that truth, my friends. And I'm going to be ready for Q and A in a little bit. So please be ready because I want to go way more into the details of this. My friends, I genuinely need you to get value from making the commitment of your biggest asset which time to coming to this conference, hell or high water. I desperately need to figure out how to get this group to start posting a lot more content. It's really just the punchline of this whole thing. The simplicity of this truth is profound. Getting to a place where by the show of hands that I've seen back there and up here, being so low is something that we have to work through. Often the reason people don't take this journey is they're embarrassed that they don't know the most simple things. Good news, most of this room does not know the most simple things. You are very much not alone. But the reality is there is nothing else you can do. You can switch firms, you can team up with people, you can make relationships. There is nothing you can do that will grow your business, impact your financial system more than making an obnoxious all in full mental and financial commitment to producing as much content on social networks as humanly possible. The faster you do it, the quicker your business is going to be impacted. You need to start now because there's really no reason not to grow. Thank you.