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When it comes to marketing in the 21st century, I can’t emphasize how big storytelling is/and will continue to be.

So far this year, I’ve been to Napa about 10 times. Aside from posting pretty pictures I never felt compelled to do much else.

That is until I met the folks at Hendry winery.

Today I hung out with George Hendry at his winery. I say hung out because that’s what it felt like. It was a two hour wine tasting where not only did we taste wine but he told the story of how he turned from being an engineer to making wine and how he goes about the winemaking and for that matter the wine tasting process.

It wasn’t particularly fancy. He doesn’t run the biggest winery. But he does run a successful niche winery. He yields a solid 5 star review on Yelp (which is how we found him) and he just focuses on his passion and spreads his story.

This is successful marketing at its truest form folks. And this is the type of thing that compels someone to sit down at the end of a wine tasting and blast out a blog entry on a tiny iPhone.

Some people say I have a knack for marketing. I always cringe when I hear that because I hate typical marketing. I just love storytelling and so does George and so do the most successful brands like Apple and Zappos.

Check out our new Happiness Feed. Real-Time status on how we’re delivering happiness to @toutapp customers.

Putting in the time and effort required to really understand the market is what can separate the big successes from those that find themselves floundering into the deadpool.

— http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/14/vcs-at-work-the-anatomy-of-a-killer-startup/

Which sites do you keep pinned in Chrome?

I have: GCal, Gmail, Tout and Basecamp.

I saw this photo in a recent article about New York City. It was titled “Never-before-seen photos from 100 years ago tell vivid story of gritty New York City”

As I went through the pictures, most of which show a faintly familiar cityscape, I thought to myself. Wow, how exciting it must’ve been  for them. At that time (1936), people just kept looking around and saw massive amounts of “building” taking place. Building bridges, building skyscrapers, roads, infrastructure. It must’ve felt so full of energy.

In a way, they were lucky. They could feel, touch, and hear all the hustle and bustle of progress happening.

Today, I like to think that the same amount of progress is happening. Except, you can’t necessarily feel or touch or hear it. It’s just bits flying through our iPhones and our air and our minds. Its all invisible.

Invisible progress. But with the same amount of energy, ambition, and might.

blog subscribe buttons: so old school!

If you take everyone that used @ToutApp today, sum up all the time they spent on the site TODAY (so far), you get: 

The Nokia 8800 is still one of the most beautiful phones I’ve ever owned.

People who try to copy my approach usually fail. They typically give up within a few months. Why? Because they’re not really copying my approach. My approach wasn’t to copy someone else’s approach, so if they copy my approach, then that wasn’t actually my approach. Get it?

— Steve Pavlina, on how to deal with copycat competition.

Old is new again.