The Hype Handbook

But as I drew closer to the front door, I experienced a strange shift in my thinking. In my mind's eye, I saw that line of fans snaking around the building and through the front door, every one of them there to see us. And we had made that happen despite a lead singer with a non-existent range and songs that everyone agreed would never get on the radio. For the first time, it occurred to me that whatever success we had achieved was in spite of musical talent. I remembered how in our earliest days we drummed up attention by posting flyers all over town that read, Dave Matthews Must Die. Sorry Dave. How we built a following for us by walking the streets and taking the stage dressed as a nun. How we got press coverage by positioning ourselves as, The Party Band for the Coming Apocalypse. Excitement began to well up in me for the first time in months. Maybe my real talent wasn't music or even writing. Maybe I had more in common with the early rock managers who behaved more like outlaws than business people than I did with the bands they represented. Thinking back on it, I had always been enamored of those legendary promoters pouring over their stories in my younger days so I could apply the lessons I learned. There was Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren who got England so agitated about the group that MPs brought it up in Parliament. There was Andrew Luge Oldham who came up with the saying, Would you let your daughter go with a rolling stone? There was Shep Gordon who turned the members of the original Alice Cooper band into superstars by arranging for a truck to accidentally break down in the middle of London's Piccadilly Circus during rush hour while carrying a massive billboard of Alice himself naked but for a boa constrictor draped over his nether regions. Now facing failure, I once again thought back to this cavalcade of miscreants and what they represented. There have always been people who operate on the fringes of respectable society. Rock bands and their managers, of course, but also medicine showmen and circus hucksters and mentalists, cult leaders and spiritual gurus, propagandists and political agitators. Since the standard wisdom about letting good work speak for itself, hustling hard, and implementing sales funnels wasn't doing me any good, I began to wonder whether there was anything in the strategies and techniques of these more unconventional operators that I could apply to my latest endeavor without losing my soul in the process. The Student Becomes a Master It was at this point that I got a little obsessed. I read every biography I could find of history's most notoriously shameless self-promoters. Then I moved on to obscure sociology texts, books about crowd psychology, and esoteric tomes from past centuries. Next I uncovered the modern-day equivalents of these masters and interviewed them, observed them in their natural habitat. Then I decided to conduct an experiment. One of the strategies I saw these characters using time and again in my research was what I now call picking fights and making enemies. In short, they identify a person or a status quo idea and position themselves and their ideas in opposition to it. I had become convinced the tactic was effective. And I already had the perfect target. For those of you who aren't familiar with Gary Vaynerchuk, he's an internet marketer who made his name by preaching the gospel of hustle. In his books, videos, and talks, he constantly tells aspiring entrepreneurs that the only way to succeed is to spend the majority of every day talking about yourself online. For example, he talks about his habit of shooting tweets from the toilet at three in the morning as a healthy lifestyle choice. His point of view had struck me as misguided for a long time, especially after I tried to put it into practice for myself and failed miserably. Now I finally screwed up the courage to say something about it. In an article I wrote on the subject, I publicly wondered why the only person who really seemed to be getting rich from the Vaynerchuk approach was Vaynerchuk himself. I posed the possibility that his advice was best suited for bolstering his own career rather than helping his followers bolster theirs. I presented the idea that a better strategy would be to stop paying attention to what he says to do and start modeling the mass psychology tactics he actually uses to turn young people into slavish acolytes. My finger hovered over the mouse for a full 30 seconds before I clicked publish. Within an hour of posting the article, Gary Vaynerchuk himself recorded a video chewing me out by name. Vaynerchuk's horde of worshipful fans immediately began to berate me, calling me lazy, stupid, and jealous. I got extremely nervous. I'd really done it now. I'd pissed off one of the biggest figures in the digital marketing space, and now I was paying the price. This was obviously my biggest blunder yet in the midst of a sea of whoppers. But later that night, I took a wayward look at my phone and saw something that blew me away. Over a period of 20 minutes, I gained 100 new Twitter followers. I opened my email. My inbox was full of messages from people...