This morning, I was fortunate to meet Gary Vaynerchuk, star of WineLibraryTV (and, interestingly, a top-20-to-30-most-followed-person-on-twitter.) Gary is a web video rock-star and his insights on personal branding and Web 2.0 marketing opportunities are seemingly endless. This video is just 3 minutes long; you can imagine how many tips he packed into the hour he spent with us.

Gary publishes WineLibraryTV, Monday to Friday, to an audience of more than 80,000 people and he’s rather convincing when he says that you could do it too! And before you start with “… but Real Estate is LOCAL”, Gary reminded us that so is the retail wine trade. His family’s store is licensed in NJ and couldn’t sell us a bottle of wine yet Gary’s in Seattle on tour to promote his newly published book (101 wines) and I get the feeling that he’s just getting started expanding his brand. Most of all though, Gary’s an incredibly nice guy – and his advice was personally motivating. Thank you, Gary!

And many thanks to Steve and Rodney from Reachd for putting together today’s training and celebrity appearance at Zillow. Rodney Bartlett demystified video-blogging and Steve Jagger put a Flip camera in each of our hands. Now, there’s really no excuse, for me, or for Ardell Della Loggia, not to start publishing some web video. If you’re thinking about getting into web video and looking for inspiration, check out the filming-while-driving antics of BC real estate agent and course attendee today, Ian Watt. Ian’s most popular and controversial post to date is pasted below: Handing out keys to strangers, why would I do that?


A few footnotes on WineLibraryTV:

– WineLibraryTV isn’t edited (for the most part.) Gary works with a camera-man to produce, publish and distribute WineLibraryTV shows but he puts most of his personal effort into social media marketing.

– Gary recommends insists on using Tubemogul for distributing your videos to multiple sites.

– WineLibraryTV took a bet on the (then lesser-known) video player, viddler. Now, Gary consults to the startup and has equity in it. Reminds me of something Lockhart Steele said; “blogging is a great way to make things happen indirectly.”