Hanging with Gary Vaynerchuk
I’ve got to be honest, I’m not a fan of Jersey. I live in PA about a mile from the river and it’s a line I do not cross.
But Jersey does have a few redeeming qualities, such as Bruce Springsteen, cheap gas, and Gary Vaynerchuk. With that in mind, last night I went to a Tweet Up at Wine Library.
It was called a Tweet Up, but pretty much everyone there went to meet one person: @garyvee. And he brought the thunder. I’ve seen Gary’s many awesome videos and I’ve seen lots of his fantastic keynote speeches, but last night I got 3 hours of Q&A with a small group of maybe 20 people.
Arriving at Wine Library. This place is huge.
I got there a bit early and browsed Wine Library for a bit. Coming from Pennsylvania I’m used to wine stores run by the state…they’re all small and carry the exact same pathetic selection. Wine Library was a sweet surprise.
Those of us who were there for the Tweet Up gathered on the second floor and began introducing ourselves and chatting. A guy named Chris came up and said he recognized me from Awesomeology and enjoyed the show. That was pretty cool. Nice guy, too.
I happened to look over in the corner and saw a guy setting up a camera. I don’t watch many episodes of Wine Library TV (not a huge wine guy) but I immediately recognized Mott, who made an appearence in an episode I’ve seen. I went up to introduce myself and asked if Gary was planning to shoot an episode. Mott said that he probably would, so he was getting the camera ready.
Link It Up, Mott
A wine tasting station was set up where we were all able to sample 4 different wines. I was really hoping the wine would taste like fruit roll ups or socks or chocolate or something, but it turns out that my palette sucks. They all tasted like old grapes to me. Good grapes, though.
At some point, Gary appeared in the middle of the crowd and worked the room a bit while we all continued to chat. Ten minutes or so later, we somehow ended up in a back room where the premium wines were kept. And I do mean premium…there was a $12,000 bottle of wine in there.
Me and Garyvee
Gary started talking a bit about the wine industry, but we were a bunch of Twatters so the conversation quickly shifted to social media…past present and future.
After about an hour and a half we all transitioned upstairs (I think someone wanted to see the camera that they shoot WLTV with), and we wound up in Gary’s office/Jets shrine, which is where WLTV episodes are shot. He’s done quite a few GV.com’s from there as well. GV ripped open a box of WLTV wristbands and offered them to his guests (“take a bunch if you want”).
GV’s desk, familiar to you if you’ve seen the Howard Stern video.
The Jets spit bucket is flipping disgusting.
The conversation continued up there for another hour before we said goodbye.
Gary holding court
At one point, Gary mentioned Qik, so I pulled out the iPhone and made a quick Qik video
As I mentioned, I don’t really watch WLTV but I have seen all of the GV.com videos so a lot of what was said was familiar to me. Here are some things that I didn’t know:
- He’s been watching back some of his recent keynotes to try to figure out why the hell he curses so much during them, especially since he doesn’t curse at all during WLTV or in real life. The best he can come up with is that it’s because he’s a huge Richard Pryor fan and it’s a subconsious thing when he’s walking around on a big stage with a large crowd.
- A few months into doing WLTV, Gary was offered $30k per episode to bring it to a cable network (with 8 episodes guaranteed). He turned down a guaranteed $240k because he’d be giving up control of the show. That takes balls.
- Wine Library has three Macs on the 2nd floor for their customers to use to find wines. They block Twitter :-(
- Gary thinks that Twitter’s growing so fast that it will be impossible for people to keep up with in its current form. The hard part will be filtering all of that noise to show you what’s important to you. He thinks the next big play is in “social search” and he’s paying a lot of attention to stuff like Mr. Tweet.
- Probably the most surprising thing to me was, in a time where everyone seems to be spending less and less time on Facebook and more and more on Twitter, Gary sounds like he’s headed in the other direction.
Three freaking hours with Gary Vaynerchuk. Do you know how much companies pay for that time? I mean, I don’t, but I’m sure it’s way more than the two bottles of wine I bought on the way out.
And yes, I went the wrong way on the way home. Three times, despite the navigaton system. Dirty Jersey strikes again!
