I received this email a few days ago:
I know who Gary Vaynerchuk is. He’s the CRUSHING IT! guy. He’s done more stuff in his life and made more money than I will on either account. Along the way, he’s gained some huge fans. He’s also said some stuff that is was incredibly cringe-worthy and, to me, things that came across as wildly disingenuous. He makes me cringe in the same way I cringe at Corey Feldman. It’s Trump-like in that how did you get so far but are seemingly so dim?
I feel like I would get it more if, for example, I knew him in real life and he was a real charmer. Or if I had some email correspondences with him and I could feel his business savvy oozing out of it. But based on the email above, well, I just don’t get it.
WARNING: I’m doing a bit of bridge-burning here I suppose. By way of general advice, this is a bad idea. But I’m rather fed-up with bad email so I’m calling it out.
Allow me to translate bit by bit.
It’s Gary Vaynerchuk and I’m interested in your brand.
I have literally no idea who I’m emailing. I used to tell people that personally interacting with people was part of the secret of my success, but now I just send out impersonal mass-emails.
We at VaynerMedia.com do $125 million dollars in annual revenue managing digital marketing campaigns for some of the biggest companies in the world.
I’m flexing. I want you to be super impressed and feel honored even to be reading this email. My Lamborghini is red and my penis 12 inches soft.
We’re expanding our services by offering search engine optimization or backlinks for entrepreneurs and corporations which has had huge social media success.
I’m hoping you don’t read this too closely. I just said a bunch of buzzwords and you should bask in them. Please don’t think about the fact that SEO is… for… websites, and not social media? And that backlinks is a part of SEO not an “or” thing.
I’d like to ask to pay you by sending an email out to promote it at $5 per every contact email address you can send out.
I’m trying to get you on the hook for something here, but don’t try to understand what it is. I’m sort of making it sound like I’ll pay you $5 for every single email address on a newsletter mailing list, but there is no way I’m actually going to do that. Like I know some people have multi-million user emails lists, and there is no way in hell I’m cutting a 10 million dollar check for a 2 million user email. Even though it sorta sounds like I will, just wait for this next paragraph that makes more clear that I will not.
I’d be sharing the campaign results with my 15 million plus social media followers which means your business gets exposure across all of my social media channels which means more exposure for you.
Exposure! You little dingleberries listen to me. Cough up your email lists, I’m gonna put those emails in my motherfucking CRM and email them myself. Then I’m gonna make a fake chart about how good it did and email you that back and tell you that you did dun good, child.
😂
OK sorry sorry—I got off the rails there. I literally have no idea what he’s trying to do here. I’m not going to find out, because I don’t like any part of what I read. But I don’t actually know if it’s actually nefarious, just accidental poor communication, or what. Although I would say buying email addresses of people and sending them shit they didn’t opt into is nefarious territory. Which actually makes some sense. That’s certainly one path to getting rich.