background, phones ring, but Vaynerchuk insists that his videos are shot in one take.
As refreshingly unself-conscious as he is wildly effusive, Vaynerchuk is a maniac, but one who tells the truth as he sees it.In fact, he claims to have panned 70 percent of the wines sold in his store. I can’t say we always agree on his assessments, nor do I always understand his colorful descriptions. I don’t get his significance, but it is clear to everyone at the store that Vaynerchuk is an American original, even if he was born in Babruysk, Belarus.
Vaynerchuk has become a phenomenon, having appeared on
Ellen
and
The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien
. As Eric Asimov reported in the
New York Times
, “in the guise of educating the host’s palate to wine terms like sweaty, mineral, and earthy, he sniffed Mr. O’Brien’s armpit and persuaded him to chew an old sock, lick a rock, and eat dirt (topped with shredded cigar tobacco and cherries).” Articles have followed in the
Wall Street Journal, GQ
, and
Slate
, where Vaynerchuk was described as the “first wine guru of the YouTube era.”
Despite his tens of thousands of website viewers and Facebook friends and nearly a million Twitter followers, Gary claims that the webcasts did little to help Internet sales of wine, which rose only 3 percent. However, phone sales shot up 40 percent in the first year. Vaynerchuk wasn’t selling wine, he was selling himself. His strength wasn’t so much his Facebook savvy or his Twitter patter as his ability to use those tools to build trust and human relationships. Built up through new media, that trust then sold wine through one-hundred-year-old telephone lines.
At the time, we were oblivious to such subtleties. We equated “Internet” with “money machine.” Build a website, I assumed, and they will come. Hence we focused on slapping up a pretty website as soon and as inexpensively as we could. I bought an e-commerce software package from a Russian company and hired a chain-smoking Frenchman (a reclusive customer) to configure it. I will spare you, dear reader, the results of this misguidedUnited Nations’ experiment in digital design. Suffice it to say that it would have been a lot easier to pay a little more and actually have face-to-face meetings with our web developers. Yet after nine months, the website was complete. We even got a few online sales that first year.
We probably should have been blogging, but I was intimidated. As someone besieged by semiexperts in many media, I felt that a daily blog had to have something important to say every day. It had to be smart, and it had to be regular. To take on that platform, I needed more time. Partly, I have to admit, I was not keen on broadcasting my big nose and receding hairline. And given her volatile history, providing Janet with such a soapbox would have made me nervous. For the moment, we were content to watch and learn more about how the wine world really worked.
What we came to realize is that no tweet, Facebook post, e-mail push, or any other clever marketing trick can undo the damage of a cold drizzle. Conversely, a sunny day is every bees-to-honey cliché. For our wine sales, the weather is mightier than the Internet.
In aiming for the big fish, not only did we fail to identify this new generation of influencers and connoisseurs, we also neglected to realize that this high-stakes game of collectible wine sales meant lower margins on larger cash outlays. Unlike most of us, ultracollectors tend to look for very specific wines: the right producer from a particular vineyard in the most desirable vintage. Often finance types, they’re used to scanning screens and making decisions that are based on tiny numeric variations. An insular group with established relationships, they also seemed to create their own markets, bidding one supplier against anotherfor the best price. Something we could buy at $100, we would see selling for $110. If we waited ten years, we probably could
As refreshingly unself-conscious as he is wildly effusive, Vaynerchuk is a maniac, but one who tells the truth as he sees it.In fact, he claims to have panned 70 percent of the wines sold in his store. I can’t say we always agree on his assessments, nor do I always understand his colorful descriptions. I don’t get his significance, but it is clear to everyone at the store that Vaynerchuk is an American original, even if he was born in Babruysk, Belarus.
Vaynerchuk has become a phenomenon, having appeared on
Ellen
and
The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien
. As Eric Asimov reported in the
New York Times
, “in the guise of educating the host’s palate to wine terms like sweaty, mineral, and earthy, he sniffed Mr. O’Brien’s armpit and persuaded him to chew an old sock, lick a rock, and eat dirt (topped with shredded cigar tobacco and cherries).” Articles have followed in the
Wall Street Journal, GQ
, and
Slate
, where Vaynerchuk was described as the “first wine guru of the YouTube era.”
Despite his tens of thousands of website viewers and Facebook friends and nearly a million Twitter followers, Gary claims that the webcasts did little to help Internet sales of wine, which rose only 3 percent. However, phone sales shot up 40 percent in the first year. Vaynerchuk wasn’t selling wine, he was selling himself. His strength wasn’t so much his Facebook savvy or his Twitter patter as his ability to use those tools to build trust and human relationships. Built up through new media, that trust then sold wine through one-hundred-year-old telephone lines.
At the time, we were oblivious to such subtleties. We equated “Internet” with “money machine.” Build a website, I assumed, and they will come. Hence we focused on slapping up a pretty website as soon and as inexpensively as we could. I bought an e-commerce software package from a Russian company and hired a chain-smoking Frenchman (a reclusive customer) to configure it. I will spare you, dear reader, the results of this misguidedUnited Nations’ experiment in digital design. Suffice it to say that it would have been a lot easier to pay a little more and actually have face-to-face meetings with our web developers. Yet after nine months, the website was complete. We even got a few online sales that first year.
We probably should have been blogging, but I was intimidated. As someone besieged by semiexperts in many media, I felt that a daily blog had to have something important to say every day. It had to be smart, and it had to be regular. To take on that platform, I needed more time. Partly, I have to admit, I was not keen on broadcasting my big nose and receding hairline. And given her volatile history, providing Janet with such a soapbox would have made me nervous. For the moment, we were content to watch and learn more about how the wine world really worked.
What we came to realize is that no tweet, Facebook post, e-mail push, or any other clever marketing trick can undo the damage of a cold drizzle. Conversely, a sunny day is every bees-to-honey cliché. For our wine sales, the weather is mightier than the Internet.
In aiming for the big fish, not only did we fail to identify this new generation of influencers and connoisseurs, we also neglected to realize that this high-stakes game of collectible wine sales meant lower margins on larger cash outlays. Unlike most of us, ultracollectors tend to look for very specific wines: the right producer from a particular vineyard in the most desirable vintage. Often finance types, they’re used to scanning screens and making decisions that are based on tiny numeric variations. An insular group with established relationships, they also seemed to create their own markets, bidding one supplier against anotherfor the best price. Something we could buy at $100, we would see selling for $110. If we waited ten years, we probably could
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