Featured

Social Media Is The Future of Wine Marketing

by Tim Elliott on June 30, 2009

liztbig 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.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

{ 0 comments }

Grow Twitter Followers In 4 Easy Steps

by Tim Elliott on June 7, 2009

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.

My Twitter Account On WednesdayA 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).

My Twitter Account Today, 4 Days LaterCan’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.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

{ 1 comment }

newnewvineemail.jpg

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

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

{ 6 comments }

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

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.

Facebook Social AdBut 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.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

{ 6 comments }

The Most Influential Wine Blogs

February 10, 2009

A few weeks ago, Michael Wangbickler wrote a post over at the Caveman Wine blog about blogger relevance. He listed 5 engagement metrics to look for that would help wineries pick who they should engage in their marketing and PR outreach. Steve Heimoff took this a bit further suggesting that, “…you know it when you [...]

Read the full post →

How To Track Twitter Conversations

September 9, 2008

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown As I start wineries on the social media path, one of the most common questions is how to use Twitter. It’s probably because the micro-blogging service is sort of like a lot of things that came before — blogs, instant messaging, SMS, social networks — but how it’s being used [...]

Read the full post →