Video of the Week for Friday 11/16

But first allow me to mention that we have Mr. Livingston Taylor with us for back-to-back nights at The Barns tonight and tomorrow. Similar to his brother James, Livingston exudes a warm charm and eloquence in his music and stage persona that seems so common in the Taylor family. Livingston has had a very successful career, producing such recognizable tunes as “I Will Be in Love with You,” “First Time Love,” and “Get out of Bed.”

You may not know that in addition to his successful recording and performance endeavors, Taylor has used his gift to spur arts education initiatves across all age groups, adapting his song, “Pajama,” into a children’s book with the help of his wife; teaching performing arts at Berklee College of Music; and as the host of This Week’s Music, a nationally broadcast television show. Come check him out TONIGHT and TOMORROW.

Now onto the video of the week...

My video of the week is a video blog entry from a wine connoisseur named Gary Vaynerchuk. This guy is nuts, but it doesn't matter, because he also may be a genius. He operates an online wine store at the url http://www.winelibrary.com/, and has managed to double the traffic to his site and vastly increase his wine sales through a simple video blog that he posts five days a week, Monday-Friday. I saw him speak on a panel at a conference recently and he threw out this statistic. Prior to starting the video blog, he was spending $3 million a year in traditional advertising costs (billboards, print ads, online ads, etc), but stopped all of that on a dime, dropped $5k into creating his video blog, and is now more successful than ever. He has between 40,000 and 60,000 people accessing his video blog each week, which goes to show you the power of new media technologies and how free word of mouth advertising can often be the best method to put your product or message in front of a mass audience.

Here's Gary with a little Thanksgiving wine for you to enjoy during Turkey day.



And just a random friendly reminder to GO GREEN with Wolf Trap. Try to be more cognizant of turning out your lights, enabling the sleep function on your computer, or making the extra effort to recycle a bottle when it may be easier to put it in the trash.

To quote David Schwimmer from the popular NBC show Thirty Rock:

David Schwimmer - "Hey did you leave your computer on all night?"
Tina Fey - "Yeah it just takes a really long time to reboot in the morning."
David Schwimmer - "Oh. You know what else takes a really long time? BUILDING A NEW EARTH!"

There's some food for thought for the weekend.

Graham