Mark Blevis

If you’re not familiar with WineLibrary.tv, you need to know something. Gary Vaynerchuk is wildly passionate about what he does. I’m talking truly stratospheric passion. He’s harnessed that passion to his energy and drive to turn his family’s wine business from a $4 million to a $50 million dollar business. And, he continues to build that business everyday using social media as his main platform.

There’s no denying you need some form of passion to achieve any degree of success. In fact, I’d agree that passion serves as the foundation of success. It’s after this that Gary and I diverge in our thinking about the formula that’s led to his success as he describes in his easy-to-read and very insightful and entertaining book CrushIt!

Gary spends a lot of his time pushing the need to create lots of content. He notes that content is king in all forms: text due to it’s power when indexed by search engines, audio because almost anyone can speak without needing to be seen, video since it’s amazingly popular these days, and live streaming because it’s an oft overlooked way to engage with your audience. Gary suggests tools to use for each of these delivery mechanisms and then urges his reader to get out there and start producing content everyday.

I believe that content is one-third of an important equation for audience engagement, a dependency of media success. The other two-thirds are:

• Context: the elements that determine the meaning of the content. Context can be the descriptions that support all forms of media, the ambient sound of an audio recording and the visuals that create the setting of the video. Without context, the content is just words that anyone can read.
• Delivery: the way in which the message is delivered by the speaker or the media. Gary makes no apologies for his delivery which he describes the way most people describe a used car salesman. His style is certainly unconventional for the world of wine. Yet his delivery works because it’s a strong contribution to the equation, and while it may seem obnoxious to some, there is an authentic and relatable charm to Gary’s style.

There’s a catch to this equation; it’s not a sum of its elements. The audience engagement (AE) equation is a product of content (C), context (X) and delivery (D):

AE=CXD

If any of C, X or D have a zero value, then AE will be zero. Meaningful audience engagement depends on a positive value–even a decimal value–for each of the three elements.

“We” use this equation everyday without actually substituting the elements with numerical values. This is the equation that determines which actor made us connect with their character and the story, which news anchor we trust to tell us what’s going on in the world and which author writes the books we always want to read. And, for each of those scenarios, a casting director, producer or editor made a similar decision to select the best candidate for their needs.

It’s also the same equation that has made WineLibrary.tv a huge success, landing Gary lucrative speaking engagements, appearances on CNN and ABC news (among many others), the Ellen Degeneres Show and Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and countless appearances in newspapers and magazines.

CrushIt! is a great read. Gary did a fantastic job weaving his own personal story with the story of his family, WineLibrary.tv and how to cash in on your passion.