What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [83]
Vaynerchuk told me he wasn’t becoming an internet star just to sell wine. He was building something bigger. He was investing in “brand Gary Vaynerchuk.” That is why he chose to make his wine shows daily: “Content, baby, indexing in search.” Everybody needs vin de Googlejus. The more of him there is online, the more he will be found. He is his own ad. The most important factors in retail success used to be location, location, location. Now they are links, Google, Googlejuice. I searched Google for “wine” and Vaynerchuk’s store came up on the first page behind only one other retailer, Wine.com, which spent countless millions to build its brand and online positioning. I searched for “wine TV” and Vaynerchuk’s show came up first, dominating the listings (where is the Food Network?). In this giant industry, that is nothing short of incredible. He built his brand and market position not with marketing dollars (though his is the only video blog I’ve ever seen advertised on a highway billboard in New Jersey). He built it with personality, enthusiasm, and relationships in the internet connection machine.
Vaynerchuk is on a mission. “I want to change the way people think about wine and change the way people do business,” he told me. On Cramer’s Mad Money, Vaynerchuk mocked wine and liquor conglomerates for doing nothing socially, acting like monolithic Coke and not like viral brands such as Vitamin Water and Red Bull, which grew by turning customers into advertisers. Vaynerchuk’s message: “Social business is the future of our society.”
I told Vaynerchuk there were more things I wanted from his store to make it truly Googley. As I shop, I’d love to draw on the wisdom of his enthusiastic crowd and have them recommend wines to me. Wine, as Vaynerchuk says, is always about trying something new. On my latest visit, I came across a Gavi di Gavi. I couldn’t recall what Vaynerchuk had said about the variety on his show. I asked a clerk, who told me it was fruity but dry and recommended it. That was helpful. But I don’t know this guy and his palate. I’d prefer to have taken out my iPhone and punched in stock numbers to get Vaynerchuk’s and his Vayniaks’ reviews. Judging their taste by seeing the other wines they like, I would have been in a better position to decide whether to spend that $18. If I’m in a competitor’s store that doesn’t have a wine the Vayniaks like, I’m now motivated to buy it through Vaynerchuk’s growing mail-order business. His customers are his clerks. A store creates value in the knowledge of its customers; that is an unseen asset. It needs to find ways to capture, share, and exploit that value.
After I check out, I’d like a printout of the wines I bought with notes on each so I could choose an appropriate bottle for dinner and share the information with my guests. I’d like a record of my purchases to go online under my account at the wine community Vaynerchuk bought, Cork’d (at Corkd.com) so I could read others’ tasting notes and add my own. Vaynerchuk agreed but said that when he first tried giving people cards that tracked their purchases, they assumed they’d be used only to give deeper discounts, not to build content and community. It didn’t work then, but might now. Online, I’ve learned that sometimes an idea doesn’t work just because it’s tried too soon.
I would love it if the customers could tell Vaynerchuk what to buy. As with the chef in the kitchen, he’s still the boss in the cellar. But I’d like to see whether there’s a critical mass of Vayniacs who’d say, “Enough with the shiraz already” or “merlot is the new pinot.” Perhaps we’d ask him to hunt for a wine: a good Austrian dessert wine for less than $20. He could turn around and ask whether enough of us would be willing to buy that wine to make it worth his