Archive for November, 2008

Gary delivers again with a monster presentation.  Here is the video (pardon the quality, Flip Mino has some trouble with clarity in full zoom):

Gary Vaynerchuk - Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference 2008 from Korey Bachelder on Vimeo.

My notes:

“Like my neighbor told my mother…no season was safe from me ringing her doorbell looking for straight cash.”

Twitter, Ustream.tv, these are tools, phones, walkie talkies, pencils.
All about ROI.
The web is social, companies/products are no longer presenting to the room…they
are working the room.
The big companies/management don’t care…huge opportunity.

Have patience.
Have the chops, know what you are talking about or you are out of the game.
Content is king, marketing is queen (and we all know who runs the household).
Time and effort in to the community.

Gary answers every email he gets, 500-1000 emails per day!
Use search.twitter.com to ego search…get in on the conversation.
Addresses every negative concern head on.
If you are not good, fess up to it.
Soical media gives your company a pulse.

$4.2mm over 8 yrs in advertising for wine library
$17,620 in 2 1/2 yrs to build wine library tv
49 vcs have approached to buy out the company
44 have given a higher value to wine library tv than wine library which includes a $10mm piece of property

Brand value, put yourself out there
Authenticity
Be yourself, you will win

Live within your network
Email people, start building your network
Become part of your community

Put out your content, gatekeepers are gone, no editors or producers.
That is what we believe in….word-of-fucking-mouth
Word of mouth is on steroids

Care about your community more than anything, they are in a position to help you more than ever.
Takes a lot of time, can’t throw money at it
The cost is your heart and your soul and your time…not your checkbook.

80 packages a day from wine producers to promote on winelibrary.tv
64% of wines he didn’t like on the show
98% he carries

Money has been neutralized!

Gary doesn’t like drinking out of cups.
He got a standing ovation!

Here is what my friend Bret had to say about it:

Q&A Session:

Gary Vaynerchuk - Q & A from AZ Entrepreneurship Conference 2008 from Korey Bachelder on Vimeo.

The design process has been a bit more time consuming than I thought.  We have gone through a few different looks and we are close to picking a launch design. I wanted to make sure we nailed it, as design and usability are a big part of a website’s success.  Below are our current design ideas.

Notes concept:

Winter concept:

Politics concept:

Voting Concept:

Finally, finally….starting to see some traffic from search engines.  I am learning to be patient as we build up the community and content.  It hasn’t been easy, but I am encouraged by the traffic that Google is beginning to send us.  It is only a fraction of our total traffic, but I will take it! Eventually it should be around 50% of total traffic.

An upward ticking graph is great to see!

I am so excited to show the first iteration of the new home page design. We hired a top notch designer from San Francisco to work with us on a complete redesign of the site.  You will see these changes over the next 3 weeks.  Our goal is to make the site easier to use, participate and navigate through great usability and design.

Expect a revised logo, layout, voting button, features and blog.

10to1 new home page design