UPDATE with Video Link! Guy Kawasaki Talks About Marketing and Entrepreneurship

Guy Kawasaki rocked the house!

He was congenial, funny, approachable, and whip smart. The man oozed charisma.

Guy Kawasaki is an entrepreneur, a venture capitalist, author of eight books, and a blogger. But first and foremost, he considers himself a marketer and referred to himself as an ‘Evangelist’, an evangelist for the product he represents at any given time.

Guy possesses that sixth sense about marketing and social media. We agreed with (and use many of) the approaches he outlined below. We also learned a few new things… some we had expressly decided not to do. We plan to incorporate these methods into our approach.

Guy on Marketing:

Guy: ‘You can’t represent crap because crap won’t sell. I was lucky and represented a great product.’ (He’s referring to his start at Apple, selling Macintosh.)

Interviewer: ‘What should entrepreneurs know to stay relevant?’

Guy: ‘Understand social media: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, HootSuite.’

Guy prays to the Twitter God.

He considers his feed as a news feed and retweets or reposts all types of stories, anything he finds interesting. He promises not to tell you when his ‘cat rolls over’.

Guy: ‘My top three tips for Twitter…

1. Tweetdeck.’ (He likes this for the Global filter (blocking). He searches for @GuyKawasaki and @AllTop, but doesn’t want to see comments from rude people.) ‘Don’t take crap. Develop a thick skin. If you’re not pissing some people off, you’re not using it correctly.’

2. ‘Always respond to DMs and @s.’ (He responds to most. Guy did respond to one of my four @s – the one from @MktgSquirrel. The other three were from another account, and he didn’t respond to any of those.)

3. ‘The Twitter fascists will hate this. I repeat tweets 4 times, once every eight hours. I get a few folks who say I’m spamming them. This is an opt-in service. And what are you doing still on Twitter eight hours later?’

Mind you, this is taken slightly out of context. You had to be there – the room erupted in laughter.

His key to Twitter: ‘Get more followers. Do it with interesting tweets.’ He was quick to add he got his 250k+ followers ‘one at a time’ and not by being added to the recommended followers list.

Guy on Entrepreneurship:

Interviewer: ‘What are your five tips to success?’

Guy: ‘Numbers one to five are Be lucky. All entrepreneurs I’ve seen had an element of luck to their success.’

(pause, mostly silence from the audience)

Guy: ‘I know. That’s not actionable, huh? Good thing they didn’t charge you for this event!’

Again, the audience laughed.

Guy: ‘This is a great time to start a business. It’s cheap or free. My tips to be an entrepreneur:

1. Tools: Software, use open source. PHP, MySQL, WordPress.

2. Marketing: Social media, suck up to bloggers.

3. Commercial Real Estate: Cheap or unnecessary.

4. Talent: Easy to get in a down economy, outsource.

5. Build prototype.

‘After you’re growing faster than you can keep up with, go to a venture capitalist. As a venture capitalist, I’m looking for people who want to build a product they want to use.’

‘Entrepreneurship is a parallel existence – not serial. You will simultaneously be building all aspects of the business, not one before the next, as in a perfect world.’

That’s pretty much the interview in a nutshell (pun intended). I am expecting to receive a link to the entire 2 hour presentation. I will post it here as soon as I get it.

Tweet ya later,

Evangelist Squirrel

UPDATE: Here’s the link: Guy Kawasaki Talks About Marketing and Entrepreneurship. It’s just over an hour in length.