Gary Vaynerchuk, who made videos about wine at Wine Library TV and now at the Daily Grape, has a really cool idea about how to add value to his wine videos, and to help his viewers keep track of (and buy) wine they’re interesting in trying.
Here’s what Gary wants to do (from episode #1 of the Daily Grape):
- Create mobile app-based video (and have a web-based version too)
- Make his videos shorter
- Make the content entertaining and usable
- Created a mobile app (Daily Grape in the iTunes app store) that goes along with the videos
Gary noticed that he mentions a lot of wine, and some of his viewers forget about the wine after they’re done watching the video. So why not make an app to solve that problem?
Here’s how Gary’s app works:
- sign up for a free account through the Daily Grape app.
- Then, watch one of Gary’s videos
- If you like the sound of a wine Gary mentions, you can click through to the video details, and add the wine to your wish list.
- Then you have a handy list when you’re at a restaurant or a wine store.
- You can also comment on the wines found on the app.
Cool idea, huh? Believe it or not, I think this could work for libraries, too. More wine for everybody! No, just kidding.
We have books, don’t we? My library has a collection of almost 500,000 books/videos/etc. Do you think our patrons can remember all those titles?
Right – probably not. But that’s why some of the newer ILS’s include things like wish lists, tags, and comments. I’ve seen some library catalogs that let you take those wish lists and turn them into RSS feeds, which gives your patrons the ability to embed their lists wherever they want.
That’s cool. But what if library staff did the same thing? Why not keep a running list of staff picks that can be discovered in the catalog and on the website. And on the library’s blog sidebar (since it’s embeddable). And in Facebook (with a little coding added in).
In fact, my library is already providing some of that, in the form of blog posts with links to good books that happen to be in our collection.
So – just a slightly different, slightly more purposeful way to think about content created by library staff. Be a bit purposeful, like Gary Vaynerchuk – direct your customer to good content, help them check stuff out – and provide them with ways to remember the books they want to read.
Do you do that? If so – how do you do it?
I was just at 
**warning** the first part of this video is very quiet, and the last part is LOUD – don’t scare your office-mates!
