Wine Guru Gary Vaynerchuk to Lead Social Media Session at BEA

Booksellers and others who use the social media sites Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr but want to use them smarter are invited to come hear author Gary Vaynerchuk (Crush It!, HarperStudio) present "Crush It! Why Now Is the Time for Independent Booksellers to Cash In on Their Passion" at BookExpo America. Vaynerchuk will share his multifaceted approach to personal branding and business, which has grown the family company's wine sales to more than $60 million a year.

"Gary Vaynerchuk knows what it means to be an indie competing with the chains, because that's what he has done in the wine business," said HarperStudio President and Publisher Bob Miller. "His story about how he used social networking to level the playing field -- and win -- will be of enormous practical use to booksellers."

At BEA, Vaynerchuk, who has become a YouTube wine guru, will talk about his philosophy of branding via different channels. After using traditional advertising techniques to build the family business, Vaynerchuk then ramped up sales exponentially by capitalizing on social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to promote Wine Library TV, his (well worth watching) video blog about wine. Viewership increased to more than 80,000 a day, and the company's wine sales topped $60 million a year.

Vaynerchuck will offer his strategy for using free sites to build a brand, which he summed up in his keynote speech at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo in New York, as "hustle," the most important word out there.

Vaynerchuk has been written about in Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the L.A. Times, New York magazine, the Washington Post, and other publications.

All BEA attendees are invited to "Crush It! Why Now Is the Time for Independent Booksellers to Cash In on Their Passion," at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, May 30, in Room 1E14 of the Javits Center. --Karen Schechner