Gary Vaynerchuk rocks Portland’s new media scene

Yesterday afternoon, I caught wind of a talk going on at Weiden + Kennedy by Gary Vaynerchuk, founder of tv.winelibrary.com and new media guru. He was in town to promote his new book, andLegion of Talk persuaded him to give this free  talk as well. About 150 technorati and entrepreneurials turned out to hear him in the 90-minute session, co-sponsored by Weiden + Kennedy and Strands. Legion of Tech’s goal is to bring the speakers of the TED conference to the masses whenever and wherever possible. Portland’s a great place to do it.

Here are some of the best points from last night. For background on GaryVee, see twitter.com/garyvee or check out http://tv.winelibrary.com.

If you are not 100% fulfilled and energized at work, you are making a huge mistake in where you spend your time. This is the age to do what you love.

If you really, really, really do what you love, you will have the energy to put in the 18-20 hours a day that success requires.

Email is over. No one under 25 uses email anymore. Messaging has fractalized to Twitter, Facebook, texting, IM, Pownce, LinkedIn.

Social media is brand new to the masses. Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn are just getting going. When Oprah gets on Twitter, then you will know it’s hit bigtime. Until then, it’s in growth stage and we are early adopters.

Want advertisers for your podcast or other content? Google a search on your topic’s keywords, look in the right sidebar, and those are the advertisers you can approach for sponsorship. They’re already buying ads for your audience. It’s an easy sell.

Word of mouth is out of control in today’s market. It used to be that a well-connected professional could perhaps tell 50 qualified people about your product or service. The Web, Twitter, etc can multiply and target word-of-mouth referrals by 100. 

Be Authentic. If you come out in the biggest, most authentic, way you possibly can, you can’t lose. Always be honest about who you are and what you do.

Don’t be afraid of who’s better. Don’t be afraid of who’s bigger. Don’t be afraid of who else is in your space. MySpace was already there. Facebook didn’t care. Yahoo! was already doing search. Google didn’t care.

Don’t chase the business models or money trail when finding your space. Chase yourself. Find what you really love. Only then will you have the passion to put in the 18 hours a day it will take to own your space. (Basecamp was built after hours on raw energy and passion).

Be the Media. Stop consuming content. Start producing it. If you’re sitting home watching “Lost” on DVR, you need to shut it off and figure out your game plan, or you are wasting your time. (Don’t read. Write.)

Be a RAT – Real. Authentic. Transparent.

The Secret Sauce:  Caring about people. The most important question in business is “how can I help?” Focus on providing a truly valuable service to your customer and you will win. Period. 

GaryVee’s 80/20 blend: Inject 80% of the energy into every relationship you have. The 20% you get in return will be sweeter than wine. Why is Zappos beating the rest of the market right now? Because they actually give a shit, and it shows.

Today’s Gold Rush is about the personal brand. You need to own your area of expertise and make sure everyone knows about it. No longer are the brands the companies. Now the corporate brands exist by following the personal brands around. Scoble. Oprah. Kobe. Godin. Calacanis. Kawasaki. Vaynerchuk.   

Thanks GaryVee. And thanks to Twitter, @billder and @turoczy for the hookup.

Backpack grows into a good small-business intranet

We’ve been using Backpack from 37signals for personal organization and page-sharing with small groups since last year, but we’ve kept most multi-user projects in Basecamp because it’s the more robust system for lots of users.

However, Basecamp is often too cumbersome for simpler projects, or projects with fewer than four or five users.  So 37signals just rolled out a major upgrade to Backpack and changed its pricing plans to make it more of a group tool, rather than an individual tool.

Read their blog about the philosophy behind the switch. It’s clear that Backpack is moving into the project management space that Basecamp has clearly owned for so long, but Backpack does have more of the small-business intranet features, as they state.

We’re going to try it out with a couple of group projects and see how it works. It does feel like 37signals products are creating more overlap with one another, between Basecamp, Backpack and Highrise, but they are all cool, and we have yet to be disappointed with their simplicity of design and clarity of purpose. 

Bee lets you WordPress offline using Adobe AIR

Here’s an interesting thing we ran across today on the Adobe Labs site. Bee is a new offline blog editor compatible with WordPress that lets you access and sync with your blog from offline. More below:Bee is a desktop blog editor built on AIR in HTML/JavaScript. Bee integrates WordPress blogging platform and Flickr photo sharing support and offers simple unified workflows for photo blogging. This application integrates a number of javascript frameworks and libraries including Prototype, script.aculo.us, Spry, TinyMCE, and Walter Zorn’s Tooltips for Javascript.