Social Nation: How to Harness the Power of Social Media to Attract Customers, Motivate Employees, and Grow Your Business

Chapter 4. PRINCIPLE 1: DEVELOP YOUR SOCIAL SKILLS

	My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.
	--Bishop Desmond Tutu

Staring into the camera, Gary Vaynerchuk is enunciating each syllable he speaks with intense precision, all the while gesturing enthusiastically with his hands. He's a bit mesmerizing to watch, what with his incredibly expressive face and the fact that he spits every so often due to his exacting pronunciation. Vaynerchuk is talking about wine. Only he's talking about it in a more passionate way than you've ever heard almost anyone talk about wine.

He's taken out the pompous nonsense and all the snootiness associated with oenophiles and is just talking like a regular guy from New Jersey, which he is, or was. Every few minutes he finds a way to make a reference to the New York Jets, his other passion, and has already told his viewers about his just-born nephew, Max.

A wine guru, with an encyclopedic knowledge of wines, Vaynerchuk, at 34, is an on online and offline sensation. He has a weekday Webcast called "The Thunder Show," which draws as many as 90,000 viewers. He also has more than 847,000 followers on Twitter and more than 36,500 fans on Facebook.

Vaynerchuk started out working in his father's liquor store when he was just a kid. He hated it. After college, he convinced his father to let him take the business online, and in 2006 he started Wine Library TV.

CONNECTING WITH PEOPLE

Vaynerchuk connects people to wine to build his own Wine Nation. ...