In yesterday’s post, Do You Tweet For a Living I mentioned a social media success story about a family wine business growing from $4 million in sales to $50 million plus. The story is about social media expert Gary Vaynerchuk. In 2006 he started getting some attention for his wine brand WineLibrary, by commenting on wine blogs. Then in 2007 he used the best cocktail party out there to make connections, Twitter.

Vaynerchuk would spend over 10 hours a day on Twitter starting with searches on merlot, chardonnay, and zinfandel to find conversations and then answer questions and provide context. He now has 860,791 followers on his Twitter profile @garyvee and his wine business’s Twitter profile @WineLibrary has 13,245 followers. In addition to all his activity on Twitter, Vaynerchuk is a video blogger and his WineLibraryTV has over 100,000 viewers a day.

Everything he’s done to use social media successfully comes down to one thing, he listens. In a video recently posted on AMEX Open Forum he talks about traditional media pushing their message. He actually doesn’t like the term social “media” because of the implication of traditional media used to push a message. Instead with social media it’s now what he calls the “humanization of business” which is the ROI of caring about your customer. If you’re not getting in the conversation about your brand then as Vaynerchuk says, “you do not know how to play”.