PODCAST LATEST: Gary Vee, Matt Navarra, Professor Emily Bell and advertising’s Jon Bond on The Media Mix

The verdict on Threads among the experts and advice for creators trying to build an audience.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Gary Vaynerchuck, the relentless marketing consultant extraordinaire, already has close to a million followers on Threads. What’s he posting? Uplifting messages about being nice. 

Gary Vee is a social media superstar who already has 10 million followers on Instagram alone. We met at Cannes Lions ahead of the Threads launch and talked about how to build and engage an audience on social platforms. 

We also discussed the growth of the decentralized internet and how it might change the nature of social - and whether creators who built big audiences can ultimately port them around as some platforms decay and others burst into being.

“The thought of building a social network on top of the blockchain where nobody owns it is a profound thought,” Vee told me.  Threads is working on making itself available on the same decentralized protocol as another social web service Mastodon. (More on that on the podcast.) I also asked him how creators can improve their audiences? “You do it well by trying to make content for the audience, not trying to make content for yourself. It’s that simple.” 

I also spoke to Matt Navarra, who produces the Geek Out newsletter for social media managers. He’s already bullish about Threads and told me that he hopes it can replace Twitter. “The biggest thing for me on Twitter is visibility to journalists and people seeing my tweets and then using them in content.” 

He’s keen to leave Twitter because of Elon Musk’s changes and hopes Threads will be a replacement. While Navarra has high hopes for the new META launch, he did add that it doesn’t yet feel “very real time.” Navarra likened Twitter to the city office while Threads is more like the beach clubhouse. Navarra shared on the podcast, “This is the first time in ages I’ve changed my iPhone home screen and moved a new app onto that first page.” 

Meanwhile Emily Bell, a Professor at the Columbia Journalism School, told The Media Mix that META’s launch of a new social media network could improve its position with regulators which have been eyeing its advertising practices and its domination of social.  Is plurality of ownership the standard that regulators should apply, Bell wonders, or the ability to launch a good new product to create consumer options that are not built and run out of China.  “Musk’s Twitter has played into Meta’s hands,” she believes.  

Bell notes that in the UK, government regulators look at whether media owners are, “fit and proper,” and wonders if it's time to apply these questions to the owners of such huge powerful global communications channels. (Threads is available in the UK, but not in the EU.)

Ad executive Jon Bond is no stranger to social media. He founded ad agency Kirshenbaum, Bond and Partners which was once at the forefront of “guerilla marketing,”  helping products and services go viral in the days before Facebook existed.  The interview was recorded last month and Bond suggested Twitter should focus on helping brands talk about their new offerings given Twitter’s emphasis on what’s happening in the moment. For now, Twitter has some serious issues in winning back brands and keeping its power users but it looks like most users have their feet in both camps for the moment. 

Click the link below for this week’s newsy podcast for more thoughts on where social media is headed next. Drop me a line with your thoughts about Threads on Substack or send me an email to TheMediaMixUS@gmail.com