Selling Wine the Web 2.0 Way

That's one of my favorite lines of all time. I'd rather have social equity than private equity. The ways a person can communicate have exploded. The biggest socialite in the world, how many people could she have possibly told to watch my show 10 years ago? Now you've got tens of thousands following on Twitter, blogs read by hundreds of thousands of people, texting, StumbledUpon, Pownce, Jaiku, video blog sites. Word of mouth is on steroids. If a million friends like what you do, they're going to absolutely build your brand or your business to a totally different degree than what has ever been done before. Look at personal brands like Oprah -- there is substantial business to be done by having brand equity and leveraging social media right now.

Why do you call this the golden age of personal branding?

There's going to be a lot of people defined and built through the Web and through these tools. Look at Perez Hilton -- he's the gossip guy, right? He's taken it. Where are the movie critics? Where is the sports center? Where is the financial show? There is wide-open space for a lot of genres to be built. I still don't think we've had our first celebrity chef built through the web. Where's the chef who's got the skills and personality to set up a camera, tape a show five days a week, interact with a community, build a brand and then the Food Network is knocking at the door? That is going to happen. Now it's a gold rush. Eventually it's not going to happen quite as easily.

You've gotten consulting gigs at places like Facebook and Google. What do you tell audiences about social media?

This is not stopping. This is going to be part of society. People need to embrace it, understand it, figure out how to leverage it, and recognize they're no longer in control of their message. The people now decide what the message is. That's very disheartening and scary for many people. Many brands want to control every aspect of what goes on in their world. That is no longer possible.

Big brands can no longer control their image with PR.

Those days are over, my friend. You need to figure out how to be more transparent. You know what's great about this? The good is going to win and the bad is going to lose. How great is that?

Why do you warn people against trying to be the next Facebook?

That's such a warning sign to me. So many people see something successful and want to recreate it. If you take all that energy and focus on doing something your own way, something you're passionate about, you're always going to win. To really build a business you have to work super duper hard. You've got to have obnoxious passion for what you do. If you're not passionate, you're dead.