Ryan A Graves.com

As many of you well know I’m a huge fan of Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibraryTV. Gary is authentic and uses that authenticity to build great businesses. A few weeks ago I reached out to Gary for a spotlight on ActionsTalk, my start-up that features great entrepreneurs and allows them to tell their story to our viewers.  We sent Gary the topic questions as a guide for his spotlight and he filmed this week. During filming and thinking about growing a business he decided to address the topic of small business growth and this video was posted on his personal site garyvaynerchuk.com.

Then Loic Lemeur chimed into the conversation (and referenced a conversation I earlier had with Loic!) with his thoughts on  content, community, and an intense step by step focus.These are the people that I listen to closest when fighting through the trials that come along with building a start-up. Their experiences and opinions are invaluable to my development as an entrepreneur.

Over the last month I have been reading Gary Vaynerchuks ‘101 Wines guaranteed to inspire, delight, and bring thunder to your world’. Yes the book has taught me about 101 wines but most importantly it has begun to teach me how to talk about the wines that I taste. Gary has the ability to draw pictures in my head with the adjectives he uses when describing wine. He talks about the baseball mitt that he grew up with when tasting leather in a dry chard.  He pulls out flavors like, plum or bacon, without even cracking a smile (thus, its not bullshit). Gary’s passion for wine is so obvious in every word of the book that it can’t help but to spill over onto the reader.

This weekend I went to a wine tasting where everyone brings two bottles of wine. The party drinks one of each pair  and everyone votes at the end for which wine was the best. With a little bit of applied knowledge (from a wine class in college) and a little luck my wine won the tasting and I walked out with 11 (should have been 14, but I’m not greedy ) bottles of wine!  (Ryan G TV forthcoming!)

I definitely wouldn’t consider myself any kind of expert on wine yet but ‘101 Wines…’  is a book that gives the reader the tools that they will need to eventually become that expert. With a little wine flowing and a little inspiration from Gary and ‘101 Wines…’  I was able to talk about the wines I was tasting with a descriptive, imaginative tone. Gary’s book is much more about how to experience the wine you are tasting than what wines you are tasting. He encourages the reader to try new wines all the time and build up the experienced pallet that you need in order to pull the taste ‘honey suckle’ off of the tip of your tongue during a tasting.

I first want to encourage any wine taster, drinker, chugger, or alcoholic to go out and pick up Gary’s book (just click the picture) and stop being afraid of the wine world. Take a tight grasp on it and dive right in. The best part is as Gary says, “you should never have to spend more than 10 bucks” for a good bottle of wine.  So start today and start together, have a wine tasting and experience many wines back to back so you can begin to experience the differences. What do they make you think of? How does each make you feel?
Second, I want to urge you to learn more! Study it, taste it, enjoy the great things that come along with the wine world. Don’t be a wine snob thinking that one wine is better than the other, just continue to share and experience the differences between the wines. It will no doubt grow from there!

This weekend I attended my first Jimmy Buffet concert at Alpine Valley, WI.  In the words of my dear mother, “Everyone needs to see Jimmy at least once”. Jimmy Buffet, like no other musician that I’ve ever seen in my life, draws a very diverse fan base. Based on what I saw this weekend, literally anyone can go to a Jimmy Buffet concert and love it. There is no racial divide, no economic divide, no gender divide and definitely no age divide between the Parrot Heads.

As a blogger I obviously follow my audience fairly closely and like to know who enjoys reading or watching the content I create. Also, it may be obvious that I would like that number of people to grow. If that number grows the purpose of my blogging also grows, not to mention it makes me feel good. With that said, I think I, and bloggers like me, have a lot to learn from Jimmy Buffet. His open and all-inclusive style is one worth emulating. Gary Vaynerchuk is another web personality that masters this open and inclusive style.

Studying how Jimmy and people like him create such a following, I’ve come up with 2 main ingredients that feed this diverse following:

The strongest characteristic of Jimmy’s all-inclusive personality seems to be that he is always happy! Inherently people want to be happy, so when a person is happy and fun others are much more likely to be interested in being around or in this case following that person. There isn’t anybody that is sad at a Buffet concert. People are carefree and on the whole in great moods. If you go to a sporting events or other places where there are large crowds you often see fights and angry people. Even with the inevitable over consumption of alcohol, I didn’t see one fight all day. Jimmy is happy, the mood is happy, and people love happy.

Also, Jimmy’s music also reminds people of vacation, it takes them away from the routine of their “normal” lives and people are attracted to that “get away” feeling. Jimmy knows how to help people have fun; he has completely embraced the tropical mood of a vacation into his personality and musical style. He has done a wonderful job at managing his image in this way. People love doing something different than the norm and a Buffet concert is no doubt outside of the norm. Help create the feeling of ‘getting away’ and people are bound to follow.

So as you blog, speak, or create music remember that if you create a place for people to get away and create a happy aura and a happy mood your fans will increase, become more engaged and you’ll find that the impact of what you create will drastically increase.

Yesterday Gary and Kevin were together in Vegas and took an hour or so just to answer questions people had on Seesmic. A few notes on this:

• Seesmic is obviously sweet and is going to last. The big names are buying in.
• Kevin and Gary combined have phenomenal insights into building web companies and communities.
• I’m pissed I caught this late and didn’t ask a question.

I watched most of the question and answers and chose to post this one because of its relevance to start-ups. However, many questions were totally random and I loved that. One question was about how to sneak out of the house!? This question is about how to bring more people to a company as it relates to employees and as it relates to funding. Here is Kevin and Gary’s answer.

These guys are awesome. Look soon for my review of Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book: 101 Wines Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World.