Conversational Marketing for the Wine Industry

I just received a shipment of wine from one of my clients, Casa Nuestra. In the package was an unexpected gift: wine clips. I’ve been a wine geek for a long time but never have owned these handy accessories. But I’ve used them over the years at parties as they provide a “3rd hand” for your wine glass so you can hold a plate in one hand and eat with the other. The Casa Nuestra model pictured here easily clips onto any plate and holds the wine stem securely.

What I like about these wine clips is I haven’t seen them at every winery like branded corkscrews, glasses and shirts. And at $5 for four this is a no-brainer when customers are ordering wine. There is also a social aspect to these since they will be primarily used during parties, BBQ’s and other gatherings.

What unique wine accessory do you sell that makes your winery memorable?

Posted via email from The Social Winery

{ 1 comment }

I’ve started to use Posterous, a free blogging service, to make posts on this blog. Some readers might wonder why I’m starting to use this service and not just post directly in Wordpress, so here’s why. The short answer is it’s a lot faster for me to create a post in email than blogging directly inside the Wordpress editor.

What Posterous does is create an easily maintainable blog but can also be used to auto-post to popular social sites like Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. So I think this might be a great option for wineries who want to blog but don’t want to invest the time and effort of maintaining a more full featured blog. All you need to do is signup for a free account (since you are on Facebook, you can sign in with your Facebook login), wire up all your social hubs (places like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and LinkedIn) and start blogging. If you want to use a custom URL you can easily set this up and I would also wire up your Feedburner and Google Analytics accounts so you can track visitors.

Since Posterous is optimized for email posting, you can post to your blog from any computer or your mobile phone. One scenario I would envision for a winery is a winemaker dinner or other event where you have taken a number of photos on your iPhone. At the end of the evening just write a couple of paragraphs in the iPhone mail app and attach a selection of your photos. Send to your special Posterous email address and in a few minutes a very nicely formatted photo gallery will appear in your post and your social hubs are automatically updated at the same time. I’m sure even the most busy winemaker or winery owner can find a few minutes to post via email 2 or 3 times a week. And Posterous just rolled out a new feature that allows groups to share a single account so everyone from the winery can participate on your new blog.

So give Posterous a try. It’s free and easy to setup and use but is also very flexible via all the ways you can post via email (which I found out with yesterday’s post which went to my personal blog and Twitter accounts and not where I originally intended). You can find out about all these advanced features on their FAQ and blog.

And did I mention you can post from your iPhone, Blackberry or another other phone that can send email? Yes, even you have the time to blog.

Posted via email from The Social Winery

{ 1 comment }

Earlier this week Google released a new service on their Android mobile phone platform that immediately got my attention. Called, Google Goggles, the service works with the phone’s camera to search the product or location for more information. One of their use cases was wine (pictured here) where the user takes a picture of the bottle which starts a Google search for the item.

Most wineries have some level of search engine optimization (SEO) now but when this rolls out to more smartphones (like the iPhone) being the first or second link returned turns from nice to have to critical. I’m sure the folks at Google will have a way for you to pay for the first link but having this in the organic results will become more important, too.

A blog is a great way to build up your web SEO if you create compelling content on a regular basis. Having a Twitter presence also helps in the SEO department. More on this once I pick up my Google Phone in January.

Posted via email from The Social Winery

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google to launch mobile phone to challenge iPhone’s dominance (telegraph.co.uk)
• The Google Phone Cometh? (mashable.com)
• Google employees testing new mobile device (sfgate.com)

{ 3 comments }

As I’ve blogged here many times, Wordpress is a great platform to build a winery website. But not every winery needs a large website, especially as they get started. So here is the recipe to start a Wordpress powered website that will cost you $15 a year (actually, it’s only $14.97):

1) Go to Wordpress.com and sign up for a free account. Choose the default option to start a blog.

2) In the Wordpress admin back-end, create a page named, “Home” and another called, “Blog” (you might also want to create a, “Wines” and “Contact” page while you are at it).

3) Put whatever content you have on all these pages. Since Wordpress.com doesn’t allow for added plugins, you will need to use HTML for such things as a contact form. Google Docs has this functionality for free so just paste your code into the contact page using the “HTML” mode (not “Visual”).

4) Go to “Settings > Reading” and select, “Home” for your front page and, “Blog” for your posts page (click the other buttons like the photo in this post if you want, too).

5) Go to, “Appearance” and choose a theme that best matches your brand and then upload a header picture to personalize (if you selected a theme with a header image).

6) Under, “Posts” delete the auto generated post and then create a new post to start your blog.

7) Under, “Settings” click on, “Domains” and enter your desired domain name into the box and click the button. If it’s available, continue with the form and pay your $14.97 to register the domain and set your URL to this custom address.

Sure, you are limited to the themes provided but there are currently 77 and you can edit the CSS so there are a lot of possibilities. And the best thing is when you are ready to go to a self-hosted site all you need to do is export from the, “Tools” menu.

Times are tough but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a nice website or blog. All it takes is a bit of your time and some very inexpensive services (by the way, if you don’t mind the “.wordpress.com” at the end of your site URL you can build this same site for free).

{ 1 comment }