Producing content regularly on Twitter and Facebook is essential to driving growth and engagement. And there are plenty of tools to help automate the process of announcing new posts or sharing interesting links. One of my favorites is Twitterfeed, a free service that easily lets you publish any RSS feed content automatically to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and several other services.

Setup is easy, just enter your RSS feed in the first step and then choose the service you would like to pipe the feed content into. There are controls in the advanced section to set polling frequency, add a prefix, hashtag, or control the number of entries send each time. If you post to Facebook, Twitterfeed can be used to update personal profiles or Facebook Pages making this an easy way to pipe blog posts into that social network. Another interesting use case is posting your Google Reader shared items via the RSS feed found on your Reader public profile page.

Once setup, you don’t have to worry about posting feed updates manually anymore. If you have a creative use case for Twitterfeed, post them up in the comments.

Automate Posting To Twitter & Facebook With Twitterfeed originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

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When signing up for a Facebook Page, you are confronted with a decision that seems fairly obvious: which classification best fits your business? And while it seems to make little difference on the surface, choosing a classification poorly can effect your results on the social network. So let’s review your choices and explore the best selection for wineries.

To start the process of building your Facebook Page just click on the “Create a Page” link in the footer (note: you can now create a Facebook Page without a personal profile if you prefer). You will immediately see six choices shown in the image to the right. The top three are the ones wineries should consider but I recommend the one on the far right titled, “Brand or Product.” This is due to two reasons. First, wineries sell products and build brands. Second, there is a “Wine/Spirits” category in the listing for only that option that will help people find you in search. Yes, wineries are also “places” but Facebook Places pages can easily be combined into any Facebook Page regardless of classification (more on that next week).

I’m sure many wineries might be wondering if they can change their classification but unfortunately this is not possible right now. Since many Facebook Pages were created when only one classification was available (“Company, Organization, or Institution”) I expect this to change. And when it does, I’ll be sure to write about it here. In the meantime, choose Brand or Product.”

Which Facebook Page Classification Is Best For Wineries? originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

A new report by ExactTarget states that Twitter followers are more likely to recommend a brand and twice as likely to buy than Facebook fans. This is exactly the oposite of my experience with Twitter and Facebook in the wine industry so I took a closer look at the story. And near the end you see the caveat that Twitter users are more representative of influencers and Facebook users are more mainstream consumers. This makes sense to me given the better engagement I’ve seen for Facebook pages than Twitter presences but it is likely to change as the new Twitter website is rolled out (more on that here soon).

Wineries: Any examples of how Twitter has produced more engagement or sales than Facebook?

via eMarketer

Posted via email from The Social Winery

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Are Twitter Followers More Likely To Buy? originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

There's an interesting post over at eMarketer today about how Twitter followers and Facebook fans are more likely to buy than those who are not connected with a brand on social networks. Not surprisingly, the most popular reason to friend up a brand is for discounts and promotions but the research also showed that almost 40% were customers and supporters who liked the brand.

Hundreds of wineries are on Twitter and Facebook today and many are using these connections to make sales. But I haven't seen a lot of promotions on either social network lately from wine brands looking to increase their followers and fans. I think this is a big opportunity so I'm going to take a closer look at what wineries are doing along these lines and post an update later in the week.

Posted via email from The Social Winery

Turning Fans and Followers Into Buyers originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

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.

[singlepic id=3 w=320 h=240 float=center]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.

[singlepic id=2 w=320 h=240 mode=web20 float=center]

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.

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.