As a successful entrepreneur and expert in wine industry, Gary Vaynerchuck started his career as a director of operations at his dad’s wine retail shop. It was only a small mom-and-pop wine shop before Gary rebranded it and transformed it into one of the very successful wine companies in the U.S.
It all started out with his great passion in wine as Gary grew up in the family who is directly involved in the wine industry. Although his parents only allowed him to taste the wine when he had reached the legal drinking age, Gary trained his palate to distinguish the nuances in wine by tasting the very basic elements that give wines their unique qualities. He literally tasted the dirt, grass and rocks. This unique exercise was also demonstrated in his appearance in the Connan O’Brien Show years after he gains the fame in the industry.
From a traditional wine retail shop, Gary has taken his dad’s family business into the next stage of business operation by introducing online wine shop in 1996. The company’s annual revenue was at $ 4 million at that time. Gary continued to find his own niche. The customers liked him because he was not only a down-to-earth wine lover but also could give recommendations using his ‘real’ approach. Gary realized that there was a business opportunity from his expertise. He then set up a small wine club to attract more people to come and hang out in the shop, taste the wine and talk about sports after work.
As more and more customers were attracted to visit the wine club and listened to his recommendation, Gary started to think about a new way to reach out to more people. He was constrained by the limited space in his dad’s little store. The major turning point in his life was about to come. He created a video blog called Winelibrary TV (http://tv.winelibrary.com) in 2006, it’s. Since then, he has recorded a 20-minute long video on a selected wine topic and uploaded into his site every day. Sometimes he even invites guest speaker to be the co-host in his video. In order to generate more traffic to his website, he also diligently makes comments on other people’s popular wine blogs, participates in online wine forums and embeds his own website address in his signature. He also replies to comments that his fans’ wrote in his website. His effort was paid off. In 2008, the annual revenue of his dad’s family business went up to $ 45 million.
There is an important lesson learn that we can take from this article. The use of social media which involves audio visual approach has a tremendous impact to the audiences. Blogs allow people to have interactive approach with the blogs’ owner, but video blogs (vlogging) are one step ahead of the normal blogs. It does not only provide interactive approach but also gives additional ‘personal human touch’ as the vlogging’s author physically appears on someone’s personal laptop screen and speaks to the audiences anytime anywhere. The audiences feel more connected with the author. It strengthened the trust between the seller (vlogging’s owner) and buyer (audiences) and eventually enhanced the brand equity of the product offered by the author. As we can see from the Gary Vaynerchuck’s story, his Winelibrary TV website attracts about 80,000 people every day. Coupled with other social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, Gary has achieved his target in reaching out to more people with his wine knowledge. He is no longer constrained by his dad’s little store. This is the key success to the increase of the company’s annual revenue.
Although the idea of posting video on the blog is not new, but there are some other things that makes Gary is so successful in running his business using social media platform. His consistency in uploading new video very frequently, focus on his niche, and selecting the appropriate keywords for his video title in order to get high ranking for the search engine result, have complemented his success in bringing more traffic into his site. The website also provides email subscription option which allows visitors to get updated news, RSS feed feature, iTunes podcast, links to facebook fan page, twitter and other interactive features that are very informative. Despite his flawless video blog content, there is still a room for improvement. For those people who sign up for an account, Winelibrary TV should also ask for their profile and preference on a certain topic so that Winelibrary TV could recommend a relevant video titles based on the history of topics visited and users’ preference whenever they log into the site on their next visit. Youtube is a good example of vlogging site, which has features such as personalized recommendation links and video categories. Another successful vlogging site is Rocketboom.com, which covers and creates a wide range of information and commentary from top news stories to contemporary internet culture.
Gary has proven to all of us that using video blog as a marketing strategy has a huge impact to his business. However, there is one important thing to note that it can be a double-edged sword if we don’t fully master the topic covered in the video.
Other that vlogging, recently we have also seen more and more businesses are offered through other social media platform such as facebook. Leveraging on online connections, people are promoting the products through facebook. Payment is done through bank transfer, Paypal and even cash payment when the products are delivered. This is the easiest and cheapest way to start small business. This business model is popular among the homemakers.
As a summary, using social media as a business platform is indeed proven to be beneficial to business owners. However, business owners must also be prepared to work extra hours because the number of customers is unlimited. As people only meet in the online world, building and maintaining trust is one of the key elements in order to be successful in it.
References:
Social Media as Your New Business Platform, written by Juliette Powell
Tv.Winelibrary.com
Winelibrary.com
Rocketboom.com
