Gary Vaynerchuk has captured peoples attention with his ability to have many different approaches to personal branding and business. After primarily using traditional advertising techniques to build his family’s local wine business into a national industry leader, Gary started using social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to promote Wine Library TV, his video blog about wine. His viewers got bigger and bigger until he had reached over 80,000 viewers and this led to offers of a book deal. He had tons of national tv appearances, and of speaking enagements from all over the world. With Gary having both identities as  both business guru and wine guy has made him the “Social Media Sommelier.” His impact on the wine world has been commemorated via his inclusion in the 2009 Decanter Power List, an index of the 50 most influential people in the wine industry.  Recently, Gary was named #18 on Askmen.com Top 49 Influential Men of 2009.

In addition to the Web 2.0 keynote below, Gary’s remarks on personal branding, social media, and business at FOWA, Strategic Profits, and South by Southwest gained praise from established web authorities including Kathy Sierra.  Bloggers and entrepenuers everyone began to admire him as well.  Gary has landed a seven-figure book deal with Harper Studio which was featured in “The Wall Street Journal.”

The job market is absolutely brutal right now in many areas of the country — even worse for recent graduates who have very little job experience. This isn’t helped by the fact that many career sites like LinkedIn place a heavy emphasis on past jobs and workplace connections.  Brazen Careerist is launching a social networking site for young, recent graduates that aims to close this gap and hopefully help provide more career opportunities to the younger generations!

Brazen Careerist launched over a year ago as a blog network, and has since grown to include over 1000 bloggers. Now, the site is also launching its own social network that’s centered around gen y— adults who were born from the late 70’s through the mid 90’s. Unlike LinkedIn, Brazen Careerist is trying to focus on the human side of these potential employees, offering an environment where users can share their thoughts and activities alongside their resumes.

CEO Penelope Trunk says that neither LinkedIn nor Facebook are doing a particularly good job catering to Gen Y, at least in a professional network sense, and that while there are some other sites that have tried to tackle the problem, they’ve done so by trying to cater to employers first and using them to attract a community. In contrast, Trunk says that Brazen Careerist is focusing on building a community of young workers first, and that the employers will come to them.

The site feels like a mix between Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. When you log in, you’re shown your ‘Fan Feed’ — a list of updates from the members on the site that you follow (the site uses a one-way follow system similar to Twitter, so the people you are following aren’t necessarily following you back). Updates consist of status updates, as well as comments you’ve left on blogs in the Brazen Careerist network and any blogs you write yourself.  Brazen Careerist

Your profile, which is what potential employers are likely most interested in, consists of two parts: “Ideas” and “Resume”. The Ideas section is essentially a feed of all of your status updates, comments, and other actions on the site, which gives employers a multi layered view of you as employee that they can’t get from just a resume. For example, employers might check out some blog posts you’ve written to get a taste for your writing style and the way you think.  Or they could check a movie review you’ve written or view posts about marketing in a group that you are a member of.  The Resume section, as you might expect, includes a brief personal note along with your past career highlights.