BuzzMachine

My Guardian column this week about wine wizard Gary Vaynerchuk:

Before you read this, do me a favour and go to WineLibraryTV.com Be prepared for a jet engine in your face. That blast of personality is Gary Vaynerchuk, a 32-year-old merchant who has made more than 450 daily wine-tasting shows online - just him, his glass and a spit bucket.

The show, with its audience of 80,000 a day, has transformed Vaynerchuk into a cultural phenomenon. He has appeared on two of the biggest TV talk shows in the US and in the Wall Street Journal and Time. His book, Gary Vaynerchuk’s 101 Wines, comes out next week and the day he announced this on his internet show, his fans immediately pushed it to No 36 on Amazon’s bestseller list. He has a Hollywood agent. He makes motivational speeches. And he has only just begun. Gary Vaynerchuk is on his way to becoming the online Oprah.

This isn’t as simple as using online video to sell wine, though the family store is now a $60m-a-year enterprise. Vaynerchuk is also transforming retail and making it social. He has realised that a store should be a community and so he uses every tool available online - a social wine rating site called Corkd.com, his videos, his appearances on other popular online shows such as Diggnation, his ubiquitous presence on Facebook, and answering countless emails every day - to make and connect with as many fans as possible.

One day, a few weeks ago, Vaynerchuk announced on his online show that he’d throw an event for his video friends at his store in New Jersey. More than 300 people showed up. He calls himself “the social media sommelier”. “Social business,” he says, “is the future of our society.”

Vaynerchuk is on a mission. “I want to change the way that people think about wine and change the way that people do business … This is how I will be remembered.” His secret is generosity and passion. Now that may sound like a line. But I’ve witnessed Vaynerchuk in action. I’ve bought my wine at his store for a few years and watched his sales people eager to help customers find a better, cheaper bottle. I watched him at the South by Southwest conference, where he gathered instant parties via Twitter, having strangers - now friends - sample from the seven cases of wine he had shipped down. I do think this guy’s for real. Authenticity, Vaynerchuk argues, is a necessity in the transparent, social, web 2.0 world. “You’re not going to be able to have multiple personalities,” he says. “Your personal brand is now completely exposed to the world, 24/7. Everyone is media now.” This leads him to a grand conclusion: “So now good is going to win.”

See, he does sound like Oprah. And he acts like her as he constructs his empire. He says he is building - as he calls it - “brand Gary Vaynerchuk”. Online, he issues opinions, not only about wine but about life, like this: “I’d rather have a million friends right now than a million dollars. Your social equity is far greater than your financial equity.”

He even has an inspiring personal story: he came to the US from Russia at age three, a young entrepreneur who made a $1,000 a week selling baseball cards at the mall. When he had to work in the family store as a kid, cleaning shelves, he hated it until he realised that wine was as collectable as baseball cards. And now he has used his expertise, passion and personality - and the power that online gives anyone to speak to the world and make friends anywhere - to turn himself into a star.

As I left the office where he tapes his show, he handed me a copy of his book. Then he went to a “meet and greet” with a fan who just wanted to be near force Vaynerchuk. All this is possible with just a dream and a webcam.

The amazing Gary Veynerchuk, the most digitally savvy retailer anywhere, has now parleyed his wine vlog into a wine book.

: LATER: Further testimony to the power of Gary’s vlog: The book is ranked 101 (yes, that’s kismet) on Amazon.

Newsday’s Ellis Hennican writes today about a notion for reviving the still-and-forever-flagging Sears: turn it into an annuity membership with which you get a lifetime string of and repair of updated TVs, lawnmowers, whatever. This is not unlike Interface Inc.’s program of leasing carpeting. In essence, this is the cable-box model the old telephone model: they own the device and rent it to us. — and that’s the problem with it, since those programs were and are ripoffs. But in this case, there’s no monopoly. So the real question is, do we trust Sears to survive.

I like this discussion of reinventing companies and industries in the digital age. Here’s my proposal for the social airline. I’ll write one soon about retail.

I just got the pitch from Staples for their new ink replacement program: You mail in your empty cartridge and they mail a new one back; you pay what you’d pay if you went to the store. It’s Netflix for ink. It’s a small step to having your printer tell Staples through the internet that you just ran out of juice. And that’s not a big step from RFID tags on other merchandise sending in an order. Not to take this too far (as if I haven’t already), but there’s another reason not to go to stores. I’ve been saying for years that retail will become, more and more, a showroom and not always the point of purchase. Oh, of course, most retail will remain mostly instant gratification. But here we talked about looking at books in a store but then ordering them online (that’s what I do already). I wish I could go to a car showroom and not be accosted by the guy who’s going to make the commission (and the only reason the automakers don’t sell direct is regulation). Retailers might take less inventory risk but will also need to be compensated differently: manufacturers pay them for display space, perhaps. OK, I went too far. But we’ll keep seeing these small changes in retail that add up.