Getting Intentional With Twitter originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Some wineries have guest suites that are typically used for wine club members, out of town employees and other special guests. But for much of the year these rooms sit empty. The guest suites at Michel-Schlumberger are some of the best I have ever seen (and stayed in) and they are using one of them to house Hardy Wallace who has just left his 6 month gig at Murphy-Goode.

This use of a guest suite strikes me as brilliant on a couple levels. First they are bartering for some of Hardy’s time in exchange for an asset they are not fully using anyway. Since they have two suites, they can still use one for other guests. Second, they are getting someone who has spent the past 6 months in the wine social media limelight and has built quite an online following. I think you are about to hear a lot more from Michel-Schlumberger on their blog, Facebook page and Twitter account

More details are in the following video. Kudos to my friends at Michel-Schlumberger for thinking out of the box here. Perhaps we will see this sort of thing from other wineries who have similar assets.

Posted via email from The Social Winery

Barter For Content; A New Trend? originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Wineries, Are You Leading Your Tribe? originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Rick Bakas posted 7 Twitter tips for wineries on his Posterous blog yesterday. They include nearly everything a winery needs to build a thriving Twitter presence:

1. Twitter gives you 140 characters. Try to keep your tweets to 110. Leave room to people to ReTweet your post.
2. Talk with people, not at them.
3. Use the 1 in 9 rule – one out of 9 posts can be promotional, the other eight are conversational with actual people.
4. Use Tweetdeck – one of the best free tools out there. Allows you to set up search columns to monitor any term, including your brand.
5. Use link shortners – bit.ly is probably the most popular. Tweetdeck will auto shorten links for you. Bit.ly links can be monitored and measured.
6. Follow and be followed. Grow your tribe online by following folks you find interesting. Often times, they’ll follow back. That’s the beginning of building trust.
7. Build trust by being consistent with quality content. Spam and promotional marketing violates trust online.

I would add a few more items to his list:

8. Share interesting links to blog posts, articles, videos, photos and reviews. These informational tweets don’t replace the conversational tweets Rick is talking about but will make interesting content from time to time. This can be automated using Google Reader and Twitterfeed as I’ll blog here in a few days.

9. Hold Twitter tastings and Tweetups. You can get a custom setup at Taste Live or just do your own scheduled Twitter tastings (like with your wine club after a shipment with your winemaker). Tools like twtvite make it easy to pull together people at your winery or another venue harnessing the power of your Twitter community.

10. If you have an iPhone, use Tweetie 2 to stay connected when mobile. Yes, TweetDeck for iPhone is free and quite usable but I find Tweetie 2 to be the most elegant tool for Twitter on the iPhone (and soon, the iPad). It’s only $3 so it will not break your budget.

I’ve written a few other posts about using Twitter effectively you might want to check out, too. Twitter is one of the best ways to connect with your fans and customers to drive traffic to your website, blog or Facebook page. By following these tips, you will build followers and increase engagement as Rick has demonstrated in his work at St. Supéry.

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10 Tips for Wineries on Twitter originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Gary Vaynerchuk on Consumer Expectations originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

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

Make Your Winery Memorable With Unique Accessories originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

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

Posterous: The Blog For Wineries Without The Time To Blog originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

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

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Why Wineries Might Want To Look At Their SEO originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

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).

The $15 DIY Starter Winery Website originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here so I thought I would start back with a big story that broke last Friday. As you have no doubt seen elsewhere, Amazon has put their wine program on hold. While I’m disappointed with this turn of events, I’m not that surprised given the state of the economy and the collapse of New Vine Logistics, Amazon’s wine logistics partner.

Coverage in the wine blogosphere has ranged from somewhat optimistic to outraged to, well, depressed. I have a somewhat different view on this since Amazon is really not saying that much outside of the fact that they have discontinued their wine shipping program they had been testing for the past several months. In the email many of us received from Amazon on Friday, they never said they were pulling out of exploring the wine industry, just that they would not be resuming their test program. This leaves the interpretation open to the commentator and most everyone has concluded Amazon is exiting the wine industry.

I disagree with this opinion and think that Amazon has simply pushed the pause button. At some point in the next 18 to 24 months they will again look to establish some sort of wine program because many of their current customers want to buy wine from them. The simultaneous economic meltdown and collapse of their logistics partner just means they can’t figure out how to profitably sell wine within the current environment. A lot can change in the future from IBG’s revitalization of New Vine’s business to changes in legislation that will make wine an easier product for Amazon to sell.

Mark my words; Amazon will change the wine business. They will just not do so in 2009 or 2010 as most of us thought. Once the economic and regulatory situation becomes more favorable, Amazon will un-pause their program and will figure out a way to make money doing so.

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Amazon Pauses Wine Program originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

These are my links for July 21st through August 21st:

• Good Wine that Does Good
• Gallo’s social media strategy: First, do no harm
• How to Manage Twitter
• Why You Won’t Make Money With a Wine Blog
• Divining Markets within Beautiful Chaos
• What has blogging contributed to wine writing?
• UK: Concha y Toro unveils 50cl wine bottles
• Great Bathroom Wine Reading
• Video as an Effective Emotional Branding Medium
• Tech Trends Coming to a Winery near You
• Top 5 Wine Tourism Tips Iberia Can Learn from American Wine Producers
• Metrics for Social Media / Social Business
• Highlights from the 2009 Wine Bloggers Conference
• The 2009 Wine Bloggers Conference: a foundation for raising the collective spirit
• After the Dust Settles …
• The Coming of Age of Wine Blogging
• An analysis of the 2009 Wine Bloggers’ Conference
• Jancis Robinson Talks About Her Career in Wine at IPNC
• The Blob: Will the wine industry co-opt social media for its own purposes?
• How To Pitch a Wine Blogger

Bookmarks for July 21st through August 21st originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

There are many in the wine industry who don’t believe in social media. Many others need more information in order to make up their minds. The rest are trying to figure out how to get started. But when I encounter those who are not on the social media bus, I simply respond with:

“Social media today is where websites were in 1994…”

As a marketer who fought the internet battles of the mid-90’s and then again in the dot-com years, I have developed a philosophical attitude toward such things. Either you get on the bus with us now or you will really want to know how to do social marketing in 2-3 years when that’s how wine is marketed; your choice.

I was reminded why I hold this opinion by a piece today at WineBusiness.com. Dr. Liz Thach of Sonoma State University lays out some very interesting data about how the Millennial generation is taking to wine. Money quote:

More than 65% said their preferred method to make a purchase decision is based on “word of mouth.” So where does the “word” emanate from? In most cases it is with friends in either face to face settings; online social networking forums; or via texting.

So online and mobile marketing is the way wine and everything else will be sold to Millennials who make up the largest block of consumers since the Baby Boomers. This may be the most compelling evidence I’ve seen about why wineries should get into social media. Many of their current and all of their future customers will demand it.

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Social Media Is The Future of Wine Marketing originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

When starting up a client Twitter presence, I start with a seed list of active wine bloggers and enthusiasts. The process is pretty simple, basically logging into the new account and then visiting my Twitter friends page on my company Twitter account and mindlessly click on the follow button. Brute force but it works.

These days there are hundreds of wine enthusiasts on Twitter and this process takes a lot more time than I’d like so I’ve been looking at ways to automate this process. Sure there are applications out there that auto follow based upon keywords but this is not as precise as I’d like it to be and slightly spammy.

A couple months ago, Josh over at Pinotblogger posted a method to use the list of wine Twitter users to automatically follow the entire list. Being someone with pretty decent technical chops, I tried his process but couldn’t make it work. I abandoned this and started to look around for a way to clone one of my existing accounts and then move it over to a second account. This is when I found Friend or Follow and Tweetake, both applications that allow you to backup your Twitter activities in a text file. From there it was an easy search to find Twitterator which loads a plain text file of Twitter users and automatically follows them.

So I put these together and came up with the following process to grow your Twitter followers without much manual effort:

1. Copy the list of wine Twitter people here. Paste this list into a text editor such as Windows Notepad or Mac TextEdit. Make sure you have a plain text file (for example, the default in TextEdit is RTF but can easily be converted into plain text under the “Format” menu).
2. Change your Twitter password. It doesn’t have to be a very secure one as it will be just used for a few minutes.
3. Go to Twitterator, enter your Twitter credentials and paste the list of wine Twitter people from step 1 into the big box. Click submit.  Now sit back and wait for the script to run and in a few minutes you will be following hundreds more people on Twitter. I’ve found that there have been errors of some sort each time I’ve done this but it still seems to work pretty well. Once the script is complete, go back and change your Twitter password back as you’ve just sent it out in the open, a security risk. I haven’t had any problems with someone taking my account over but it is good practice to be safe here since Twitterator does not use any secure authentication.
4. This is sort of extra credit but I thought I would throw this one in. After a few days most of the follow-backs will happen. If you have an existing account with several hundred (or over 2,000 in one of my accounts) you will no doubt miss follow-backs on your end. I’ve found that using the Twitter web interface to be tedious so Friend or Follow helps with this, as well. I like this over similar sites like Tweetake and Tweeptracker as you don’t have to login to get your results. Just enter your username into Friend or Follow and wait for it to grind through your account. At the end you will have three tabs that have people you follow but don’t follow you back, “fans” who follow you but you don’t follow back and “friends” who you follow and also follow you. On each tab there is a “CSV” link to download this data. For me, the most useful tab is “fans” which I download, open in Excel and sort by number of followers. Then I just look at the descriptions to determine if I should follow these people back or not. Even though I keep pretty good tabs on follow backs, I found about 20 I missed doing this on my Acan Media account. Just cut and paste the account names into your text editor and then revisit Twitterator (don’t forget to change your password temporarily).

Can’t Friend or Follow be used for spamming? Well, yes, it can but I think there are a couple things here that might prevent this. The first is Twitter’s limit of following 2,000 people. Once you reach that level you can not follow anyone else until you get enough follow backs. The second reason is Friend or Follow chokes on large accounts so as tempting as it is to download Gary Vayerchuk’s Twitter followers, it just doesn’t work.

Now that you have followed people interested in wine, concentrate on creating great content. These can be links, events, blog posts, re-tweets or joining the ongoing conversation. Just don’t promote your winery too much to prevent people from un-following you.

Grow Twitter Followers In 4 Easy Steps originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

News broke yesterday afternoon on Twitter that New Vine Logistics was shut down. Locks on doors kind of stuff; most employees out of work. Not a good turn of events for what looked like the company to watch when the economy bounced back and consumers regularly bought wines again over $30 a bottle. They were the logistics partner for Amazon.com after-all; how could this happen?

I’m sure we will see a lot of information come to light in coming days but I was not as surprised about the result here, just the rapid nature of New Vine’s demise without much warning to their customers. If you are a small to medium winery 100% bought into New Vine and had a club shipment this month, you have a serious problem to solve.

But I think that most wineries will weather this storm and find alternative shippers or take this task back in house. For few this will be the death blow as some have postulated. There will be some lasting scars from this turn of events that will effect the future of direct wine shipments that I would like to spend most of this post discussing. But first, triage.

If you are a winery selling a significant amount of wine via New Vine, take a deep breath. The sky is not falling even if it looks that way right now. There are a number of questions that will be answered in the coming days. I would heed Mike Duffy’s advice and send an email to your customers telling them you are waiting to hear about next steps and are working to find alternative vendors (WTN Services even offered a press release today looking to help you out but I’d also call WorldShipNet; many other smaller outfits will call you shortly if they haven’t already). If you have already run credit cards for a club shipment, I would wait until the end of the week before issuing credits. We’ll know a lot more then.

The future of direct wine shipping is not at risk here; this is just a bump in the road. Although there are a lot of moving parts and regulations to deal with, the wine consumer of the future will buy a lot of wine direct. I expect to see a move to online purchasing as Amazon gets going. And, yes, I think they are going to make wine.amazon.com a destination site yet this year. Either they will buy New Vine this week or more likely hire the people they need to do the logistics themselves.

It appears that New Vine fell victim to this economy, their optimism that outran their headlights and Amazon’s due diligence. In a “make or buy” decision, the folks in Seattle chose to make; probably for very good reasons. The direct shipping of wine to consumers is not going away; New Vine appears to be. But we don’t know all the facts yet. Post what you do know in the comments.

Interesting times, these… to say the least.

Update 6/2/09: Many questions answered in a post by Lewis Perdue | DEAD! – New Vine Withers After Amazon Bolts & Investors Pull Plug

New Vine’s Demise & The Future of Direct Shipping originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

I was in California wine country last week and in nearly every meeting Murphy-Goode’s social media experiment, ‘A Really Goode Job‘, came up. Most thought this campaign brilliant from all the online buzz created but I’ve been skeptical from the beginning. On one level, the $100,000+ investment will probably generate double or triple that amount of free publicity so there is an ROI from a traditional PR perspective. But unless they pick exactly the right person I don’t think this campaign will generate much buzz after the winner starts work in August.

When I first heard about this promotion a couple weeks ago I immediately went to see if the winery had secured the key social outposts and was somewhat surprised to see they didn’t seem to have a Twitter account. So I created one and did a bit of customization so whoever gets this job won’t have to deal with a squatter (like here and here). To take this account over, just contact and convince me you are really from Murphy-Goode.

Since the campaign started, the winery has promoted their search via this Twitter account that has developed quite a following in the three weeks it’s been open. If I were running this promotion, all the key social accounts would be secured before announcement in order to better manage the brand on the social web. All you need to do is put ‘MurphyGoode’ and ‘MurphyGoodeWine’ into KnowEm and then get the accounts at places like Twitter, Friendfeed, Delicious, Vimeo and YouTube even if you don’t ever use them.

What’s interesting about this campaign is the diversity of applicants. Everything from wine and food bloggers to social media strategists to the clueless and truly scary. Their offer of $10,000 a month for a 6 month contact would probably find plenty of applicants in good economic times but now the flood of applicants will be in the several hundred if not a thousand. Sifting through these to narrow down the list for the next stage of the competition will take some time and Murphy-Goode has extended the deadline for this and presumably to get every last ounce of publicity. But for this campaign to rise above PR stunt status, the winery will have to choose their winner very carefully. If I were judging this competition I would have just one question: who will customers find interesting and want to follow?

From a results perspective their website has gone from 500 visitors to over 50,000 in just a few weeks. Murphy-Goode has gone from nowhere in the social marketing space to a winery being written about in Mashable and the New York Times. All very impressive that will make this campaign a topic of conversation within the wine industry for a long time whatever the outcome.

Will ‘A Really Goode Job’ be another social media success story or a shameless marketing stunt? Time will tell but the early results look promising.

UPDATE 5/22/09: After watching the following video my outlook on this campaign has dropped considerably. Looks like the smart money is on ’shameless marketing stunt’ now… super over produced for the social web, folks. Where’s the authenticity? Edited together stock footage with your winemaker cut in at the end, a viral video does not make. At least in my book.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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A Really Goode Job? originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Like the proverbial shoemaker, I tend to get around to setting up some social services for my company later than I really should. I tend to road-test new services on my wine blog or personal accounts before recommending them to clients. And often it’s weeks or months later before I add them here.

Case in point is the Facebook page I just published for Acan Media mostly to demonstrate some cool new tools from a company called Involver. Since Facebook is part of an outpost strategy, my page is setup to aggregate the links I publish on Twitter and my blog posts. Involver has a nice RSS app that takes your blog feed and republishes it to the “News” tab on your Facebook page (I wish they would let you rename this to “Blog” but that might be a future enhancement). Previously I had been recommending the Simplaris Blogcast app which worked about 70% of the time in my experience. The Involver app seems very solid and stable in my early testing here and auto updates on a frequent basis.

What I like most about the Involver toolset is the ability to brand all of them with a banner making your Facebook page an extension of your blog or website. You can check out how this looks on all the Involver apps on my page (currently you have to use the same banner across all apps). But the real value of Involver is the ability for visitors to share your content easier with their Facebook friends and subscribe to your feed or follow you on Twitter.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg as Involver has another 7 tools including a coupon app I will be experimenting with in the next few weeks. So if you are looking to increase your visitor engagement on Facebook, give Involver a try. And fan me up, too, when you have a chance

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Increasing Engagement On Facebook originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

As I write this post I am preparing to update my woefully out of date list of wineries on Facebook. Since I started this list, I have tried to follow every winery Facebook page so I get a lot of email everyday. And what I mostly see is not pretty; in fact most of it is simply Spam. But since I have opted in to getting these messages, the more correct term would be Bacn.

Whatever you call it, a constant stream of messages will not keep your fans following you for very long as Joel Vincent demonstrated this week. And he’s right, show your audience value and they will continue to follow you. So here are some tips for wineries to use Facebook more effectively:

Send One Mass Message A Month: Think of Facebook as an extention of your email marketing efforts. The more you send, the lower the results tend to be. In fact, extensive email marketing will hurt sales as it becomes too intrusive. So put together a newsletter-like digest message with upcoming events, new releases, winemaker notes and whatever else fans might be interested in. Just sent this no more than once a month (quarterly would probably be sufficent for most wineries).

Target Your Fan Updates: Facebook has a powerful, but apparently overlooked, feature that allows you to send messages to people in specific geographic areas. So instead of sending all fans that event invite, just filter on those fans closest to the winery. To use this feature, click on the “Target this update” box and choose the location of the receipants. You can also get fancy with gender and age which might be useful if your event is targeting a specific demographic group.

Give Fans A Reason To Visit Your Facebook Page: But the most effective way to prevent Facebook bacn is to very sparingly use the update feature. If you produce engaging content regularly it is not difficult to aggregate this content on your Facebook page. I’ll be blogging next time on how to set up your page using a new tool called Involver.

Please Don’t Send Bacn On Facebook! originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

There is a good post on Mashable today about social media that struck a cord with me. All too often when “social media” is mentioned in the wine industry, most think all they have to do is start a blog, claim their Twitter account and setup a Facebook page. While all of these things are part of a social media plan, they are just tactics to produce one thing: conversation.

Back 5 years ago, Stormhoek leveraged the conversation they nurtured in the tech blogosphere to change how people chose wine to take home for dinner. This led to increased sales and solidified the brand to withstand a near-death experience a couple years back. Although I don’t have any updated numbers, I think they still sell a fair amount of wine in the UK.

Blogging didn’t sell Stormhoek wine; the conversation started on their blog and other places spread awareness, their sampling programs got wine into people’s mouths and the rest took care of itself. They never really blogged about the wine but about getting like-minded people together to share some time accompanied by Stormhoek wine.

To those who think the Stormhoek story is old, dated and can’t be replicated today, just look at Le Beast. Same playbook, just updated. I think we’ll see that this approach still works if the social marketing is executed creatively.

Watch this space as I will be blogging about another case study I’m working on right now.

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Social Media Is About Conversation originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Image via CrunchBase

As a winery engages in conversational marketing one of the first places they setup shop is on Facebook. The social network provides wineries with a destination to foster community and engage customers directly. It also acts as an extension of a permission email campaign making things like events very easy to send to friends of the winery.

But Facebook also presents a winery with a decision of which type of presence, on a Page or a Group. Both offer similar features so it’s probably best to start with what makes them different. Facebook Pages present a winery to anyone on the internet, registered to Facebook or not. It’s content is also indexed into search engines like any other webpage. Facebook Groups, like personal profiles, require the visitor to join before they are able to view the content and participate. This feature alone is enough for many to just choose Pages but Groups also has a major advantage over Pages; bulk invites. This feature allows anyone in the group to pass group invites along to their network of friends giving the winery viral marketing benefits.

But two other features really make Facebook Pages compelling for wineries: visitor metrics and social ads. While Groups only gives the winery a count of membership, Pages goes on step further with page views and other visitor statistics. Additionally, targeted social ads can be launched on Facebook pointing them back to your Page (wine is no longer prohibited in their advertising guidelines).

Therefore I always recommend Facebook Pages over Groups to wineries if they are not doing both. Groups can still be used for hosting forum-like discussions (with wine club members, for example)  while a Page is used to promote the brand generally. But if you are choosing only one, Pages is the best choice.

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Facebook Pages or Groups; Which Should A Winery Choose? originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Earlier this week, Tom Wark announced the finalists for the American Wine Blog Awards.

They are:

BEST WRITING ON A WINE BLOG
IN VINO VERITAS
THE POUR
DR.VINO
VINOGRAPHY

BEST GRAPHICS & PRESENTATION ON A WINE BLOG
THE GOOD GRAPE
HOSEMASTER OF WINE
CHATEAU PETROGASM
WILMA’S WINE WORLD

BEST SINGLE-SUBJECT WINE BLOG
BESOTTED RAMBLINGS
LENNDEVOURS
GOOD WINE UNDER $20
NAPA VALLEY WINE BLOG

BEST WINERY BLOG
MICHEL-SCHLUMBERGER BENCHLAND BLOG
TABLAS CREEK VINEYARD BLOG
DRY CREEK VINEYARD’S WILMA’S WINE WORLD
BEDROCK WINE CO. BLOG

BEST BUSINESS/INDUSTRY WINE BLOG
WINERY WEBSITE REPORT
WINECAST
THE WINE COLLECTOR
RETHINK WINE BLOG

BEST WINE REVIEWS ON A BLOG
BIGGER THAN YOUR HEAD
GOOD WINE UNDER $20
WICKER PARKER
VINOGRAPHY

BEST OVERALL WINE BLOG
VINOGRAPHY
DR. VINO
THE POUR
LENNDEVOURS

It’s great to see client Michel-Schlumberger recognized in the Best Winery Blog category. When we started to work together last July, we brainstormed the concept of having most of the winery staff blog. I’m not sure why it took until 2008 for such a format to be tried but you can’t argue with their success and commitment to interesting posts on nearly a daily basis.

I was also surprised that my wine blog and podcast, Winecast, was nominated in the Best Business/Industry Wine Blog category. Although I do blog about the wine business there from time-to-time, I wouldn’t consider it a wine industry blog (that’s what I hope to develop here this year). But it’s an honor to be a finalist.

Voting is open from now until March 4th. I would expect to be posting the final results about this time next week.

Congratulations to all the finalists.

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American Wine Blog Awards Finalists Announced originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.