Video blogging is another of the social media tools we get questions about.  “Does it really work?” clients ask.  “Can it make a difference to our corporate bottom line?” And so on.

As I am fond of saying, one good example is worth a thousand blog posts. Before reading on, open up a second browser and point it to www.winelibrary.tv.  Once there, be prepared for what Jeff Jarvis (author of What Would Google Do?) calls “a jet engine in your face”. “This blast of personality is Gary Vaynerchuk. He is a 32 year-old merchant who has made more than 800 daily wine-tasting shows online – just him, his glass and a spit bucket,” says Jarvis. These are all simply made, easily uploaded, video blog posts.

In doing so, Gary took his New Jersey-based family liquor business from $4 million in revenues just a few years ago to over $60 million a year today.  I guess that answers the question I started the post with. These regular video blogs that cost next to nothing to create enjoy a daily audience of 80,000.  As Jeff Jarvis points out, this has not only created explosive growth but is also “transforming retail and making it social”.  Gary calls himself the “the social media sommelier”. Social business, he says, is the future of our society.

 How can you make your business social? How can you leverage all these amazing tools we have at our fingertips to engage your customers and prospects?  Please share your comments, thoughts or questions right here.

Huh? How can that be? Well, according to the book What Would Google Do?, in a “google universe” most information is both public and transparent. That means you can save a lot of anxious moments down the road (not to mention revenues) by knowing your worst customers and finding out what they have to say. Imagine a world where customers could not pan your products or services with a few clicks of the mouse. A world where bad product and service reviews could not be easily tracked or discovered. In that world, negative news would spread slowly and stealthily by word of mouth and, by the time you found out about it, it could be too late (and infinitely more expensive) to fix.

What’s the lesson here? Leverage the Web and social media tools to get as much feedback from your customers as possible. Give your worst customers the opportunity to speak up quickly and easily so you can fix their grievances in the same fashion. Here is author Jeff Jarvis’s description of a restaurant run according to Googlethink. Once you read it, ask yourself how it applies to your business. What can you do to find your worst customers/best friends?

“What would a restaurant run according to Googlethink look like—other than being decorated in garish primary colors with a neon sign, big balls for seats, and Fruit Loops and M&Ms on every table?

Imagine instead a restaurant—any restaurant—run on openness and data. Say we pick up the menu and see exactly how many people had ordered each dish. Would that influence our choice? It would help us discover the restaurant’s true specialties (the reason people come here must be the crab cakes) and perhaps make new discoveries (the 400 people who ordered the Hawaiian pizza last month can’t all be wrong??? Can they?).

If a restaurateur were true to Googlethink, she would hunger for more data. Why not survey diners at the end of the meal? That sounds frightening—what if they hate the calamari?—but there’s little to fear. If the squid is bad and the chef can hear her customers say so, she’ll 86 it off the menu and make something better. Everybody wins. She’ll also impress customers with her eagerness to hear their opinions. This beats wandering around the tables, randomly asking how things are (as a diner, I find it awkward and ungracious to complain; it’s like carping about Grandmother’s cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving). Why not just ask the question and give everyone the means to answer? Your worst diner could be your best friend.”