Not one to remain standing still, Vaynerchuk has opened a media company called VaynerMedia with his younger brother. They are currently representing the NHL and Forbes amongst others.

‘Crust It!’ is written in the same style as Vaynerchuk’s podcast, it is confident and to the point. Vaynerchuk inspires readers to build a personal brand and build a fan club around whatever it is you love the most no matter if you are an entrepreneur or an employee. In this book he talks about his life and development as an entrepreneur and he also tells stories of those people he’s influenced who are, in his words “crushing it”. Vaynerchuk does give some good tips about how to build a personal brand with specific steps, but I still think the biggest value of his book is that it lifts the reader out of a negative mindset and leaves them with the notion that anything is possible if you want it bad enough.

In light of the uproar (which, might I mention, isn’t actually stopping anyone from using FB), I thought it would be a good opportunity to reflect upon the strengths of everyone’s favourite platform. Considering its undeniable successes and insurmountable membership, I am made to wonder: other than offering a tidy space for online networking and communication, FB must be doing something else right. Can small businesses learn from their example? I think so.

FB has always mastered a powerful and vital balance between local and global networks. By indicating to the system where you are from, and unless you play with your privacy settings, you open your profile to be surfed by individuals in your area, encouraging connections among people who share geographic commonality. At the same time, the diversity of the FB community and its thousands of interest-related groups allows users to reach out to potential friends and peers outside their local area. This collapse between communicating with friends about what you had for dinner last night at the same time that you discuss the global trade economy on a group forum, makes for a pretty great one-stop interface. Small businesses can provide a similar benefit to their customers or clients: as a relatively small group of professionals, smaller businesses offer an increasingly intimate and localized experience or product, while simultaneously offering a connection to the larger business community.

While we may hate to admit it, FB has mastered a unique loss-leader: by offering a free social networking service, FB entices thousands of individuals to sign up daily, which in turn makes FB easy and quick money through advertising. A lot of sites use this model, but I think FB demonstrates new initiative: by sharing their analytic data, ads can be tailored to the user and integrated seamlessly into their FB homepage. Many people complain about how manipulative this is. But do businesses really operate differently? By tailoring marketing and advertising campaigns to a target clientele, businesses are able to maximize the returns of their marketing dollars. Who has time to sell to an uninterested audience? Certainly not small businesses, that is for certain. And what consumer has the time to be sold stuff that has nothing to do with their interests? Not me!

What else do you think businesses might learn from Facebook? Aside from, that is, the timeless maxim: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I really wish they hadn’t changed their interface….

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