Wine Guru Gary Vaynerchuk Discusses Making the Most with Social Media
Very few online store owners would pass on the chance to be featured on Conan O'Brien, Ellen Degeneres, or in the New York Times. Gary Vaynerchuk, the founder of winelibrary.com, enjoys visibility on all three.
Gary didn't start off with such notoriety however. He promoted his online wine store through his online TV show winelibrary.tv. By educating people about his product, he could gain their trust and therefore their business. He promoted the show and his store through tools like Twitter and Facebook as well. With a lot of hard work and dedication, Gary gained a following around the world and is considered an expert both in his field of wine as well as the use of social media in business.
Curious as to how you can make millions doing the same thing? Gary just wrote a book entitled Crush It! Why NOW is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion. We interviewed him for Practical Ecommerce on how other retailers in different spaces can duplicate his success.
MICHELLE: You seem omnipresent in social media spheres like Twitter, winelibrary.tv, tech and wine conferences, and on TV shows like Conan O'Brien. For an online store owner juggling many roles at once, what advice do you have to make managing social media marketing manageable?
GARY: You have to want it. I say this all the time, there is no easy way to go about it. You have to work hard and hustle... I think people forget that there are more than 8 hours in the day!
MICHELLE: You are the primary face of your show and site, but there were a lot of people involved in building your store. If a store owner is as passionate about what they sell as you are about wine and wants to engage people via social media, what sort of roles should they look at hiring so they too can be an internet rock star in their field?
GARY: I think the role of Social Media Director, or as I like to call it, "Chief Listener," is going to be a popular job description in the coming months. I say "Listener", because it's just as important and probably more important to be out there listening to what people are saying about your brand and reacting as it is to pump out good content. When there is an ongoing conversation about your brand or product or service, good or bad, and you aren't a part of that conversation, that's a huge blown opportunity.
MICHELLE: It can be hard to build a following and justifying the time involved when first entering the social media space. What advice do you have for people having a hard time sticking with it?
GARY: Be patient and stay at it. This doesn't happen overnight. I was doing Wine Library TV for 6 months every day before anyone cared. This is a sweat equity game. If you keep hustling and doing it right, it will pay off!
MICHELLE: There aren't a lot of case studies on the effectiveness of social media. In such a tight economy, how can the person in marketing convince the person in charge of finance and CEO that it's worth the time and money?
GARY: This is something I've been doing a lot lately with my brother AJ in our new company VaynerMedia. I go in there and yell and scream and tell people they have no idea what they're doing. That's just my approach, it probably wouldn't work for everyone.
MICHELLE: You educate people about wine through winelibrary.tv, have an "Ask Gary" Facebook app allowing people to ask you wine questions, and answer thousands of emails about wine. With so many wine publications being walled gardens, you are the go-to guy for wine questions online. How do you plan to scale this as you grow?
GARY: I am the king of unscalability, it is definitely something I have to work on!
MICHELLE: I find a lot of merchants know about the offline communities in their niche, but not necessarily potential online communities. Where do you suggest they start?
GARY: Two great tools to use. One is search.twitter.com, which in many ways is the most important site on the internet today. You can search for any term, whether it's the name of your product or brand, or just the category like pizza or tattoos or hardware. In the advanced search settings you can even search within a specified geographic area. You'll find people in your niche pretty quickly. The second great tool is Google blog search. Search the right buzzwords and you can very quickly identify niche communities and become part of the conversation. But remember when joining the conversation that you are there to talk and forge relationships, so don't be all "salesy"!
MICHELLE: Aside from your own efforts, what are some companies doing some interesting things with social media that people might not know about?
GARY: Zappos, Threadless, Comcast, Dell
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