How to Get More Attention

You can't run a great business if you can’t capture people’s attention, says Gary Vaynerchuk. And today, that requires getting very creative.

- NICOLE LAPIN

Everyone wants attention. Few of us know how to get it.

Why? According to attention-getting master Gary Vaynerchuk, it's because most people misunderstand where attention comes from-and that the means of getting it keep changing.

"Social media was once more like email marketing," he says. "You would get as many people to follow you as possible, and when you would post, a percentage of them would see it. Today, one of your clips on TikTok can get 10 million [views], and another might get 4,000. The distribution now happens with algorithms, and that is a massive land grab that I want people to know about." Vaynerchuk has built a massive social following, and a constellation of successful businesses under his company VaynerX, by understanding how the means of attention keep shifting. His new book, Day Trading Attention: How to Actually Build Brand and Sales in the New Social Media World, is a guide to understanding attention-and how to spot and exploit "undervalued" opportunities. Here, he explains how to do that, why he's not afraid of AI, and why attention will never be in short supply.

Are you using AI tools for your own content yet?

We've been slow to, and that's because of the terms of service. A lot of these AI companies were very spooky to me, because if we ingested our content, it wasn't clear if they could use it.

I have unlimited content on the internet, so I know that anyone can take it, ingest it into an AI tool, and think or act like me. But it's one thing if someone went on the internet and took my stuff. If I self-deposit my content into an AI tool, I want to know what's going to happen. Now it seems like AI companies are starting to write terms of services where they say, "You can use our tool, but we have no rights to your information."