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.

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.

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 see it,” when it comes to relevant wine blogs.

This discussion came to mind when I read Tom Wark’s post this morning about the new poll VinTank is conducting with wine bloggers. The Caveman also weighed in with his anticipation that the issue of blogger relevance might be solved making his job easier as a wine PR professional.

The only problem is that I don’t think blogger relevance will be answered by this study no matter what the final white paper states. That’s because nearly every wine blog is influential.

But before you go immediately to the comments and tell me I’m wrong, hear me out. I’ve come to this conclusion after searching for wine information for nearly 5 years now and have noticed that wine blogs in general are presented on the first several pages of results for a specific wine. Yes, most of the listings are for place like Wine-Searcher, WineZap and, increasingly, Snooth, but the high value content is from wine blogs. Any wine blog.

But that doesn’t mean there is not a hierarchy in wine blogs. A couple of lists are available that show you the wine blogs with the best SEO, traffic or both and this does make their reviews float toward the top of search. But it doesn’t change the fact that a good review on most any wine blog can help a winery sell more wine. It’s because most of the visitors to wine blogs find themselves there via search engines like Google (if they used a niche search tool like Able Grape, that would be another story).

So I share Tom and Michael’s enthusiasm for the VinTank report on social media. But my expectation is not the magic wine blog decoder ring but more data to support the fact that wine blogs are something wineries should seek out and engage.

Disclosure: Besides my social media consulting, I am a wine blogger and podcaster and have taken VinTank’s poll.

The Most Influential Wine Blogs originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

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 is not like anything that came before. Since Twitter has a bare-bones feature set, there is not an easy way to track ongoing conversations in the standard web interface.

But Twitter’s secret sauce is it’s API which gives outside developers access into the service and provides a way for new and interesting applications to be built. One of the most useful of these applications is Quotably which adds discussion threads to Twitter conversations. So when you come into the middle of a conversation and can’t figure out that is going on, just put the Twitter address into Quotably and these threads will be generated.

But organization can also be a good tool to understand Twitter discussions. Enter TweetDeck, another Twitter API application that gives the user the tools to organize all those tweets into something that makes sense. For example, you could have a column for wine bloggers, another for customers and a third for real world friends. I also recommend you add the replies view as this is probably the easiest way to interact with a Twitter conversation.

Another good tool is the search feature now built into Twitter. This began life as a 3rd party application called Summize but was recently acquired and integrated into Twitter. The ability to search by keyword (winery name or variety, for example) makes it easy to find people posting about your wines or winery. Another search tool is Monitter which gives you the ability to organize keywords into columns the way TweetDeck organizes Twitter friends. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds from Monitter which provides another good way to listen to what people are saying about your wine brand.

Whatever tools used, remember that we are just making up the rules of Twitter right now. So experiment and have some fun!

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How To Track Twitter Conversations originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

In the future, I think most wineries will not submit their wines to the critics at the Wine Spectator, Wine Advocate and other wine publications. And this will not be due to the chance of getting a bad score but because those scores don’t influence their consumers. Sure, some wine collectors follow scores and make their buying decisions based in part from them but most wine consumers could care less about scores.

In today’s market scores are only important within the trade where distributors use these as sales tools when convincing restaurants and retailers to carry a wine. Since smaller producers don’t receive as much support from distributors these days, they are increasingly turning to consumer direct marketing in their sales efforts. As wineries strive to connect directly with customers online, more will choose to sample wine bloggers.

The latest winery to go down this path is Sonoma’s Rodney Strong Vineyards with a pre-release sampling of their new Rockaway Cabernet to a few wine bloggers, myself included. I think this effort will get some attention in the wine industry not because this is something new — wineries such as Stormhoek and Twisted Oak have been doing this for years — but because they chose to sample bloggers before established wine critics and the wine is an allocated, mailing list only offering.

Sampling programs are effective in gaining awareness of a new brand quickly or exposing an existing brand to new consumers who increasingly are turning to the internet for their information. Google “Rockaway Cabernet 2005” today and you’ll get two full pages of positive reviews from several leading wine bloggers. If they had chosen to sample established wine critics, they would have no coverage in place 2 weeks before the wines’ general release. And because both Wine Spectator and Wine Advocate are behind subscription logins, search engines will not pickup their reviews when posted weeks or months later.

Not only does Rodney Strong get immediate coverage before the release of this $75 wine, they also are inviting a discussion about the wine directly with their perspective customers. I think this is a trend we’ll see other well known and boutique producers follow once they see the results here.

More information about Rockaway can be found here and my review, with links to the other bloggers involved, here.

Photo by Joe Roberts, the 1 Wine Dude

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Rockaway and The Future of Wine Marketing originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

I attended an event last week in San Francisco supporting client Israeli Wine Direct. About 250 people were there for conversation, some good food and wine. Nothing too unusual there except that the attendees were mostly women bloggers attending BlogHer and the host was author, blogger and venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki.

I think this is the future of wine marketing.

Presenting wine in social situations is a direct extension of the winery tasting room but with the addition of user generated media like blogs, word of mouth travels far more than it did in the past. And if your wine is good and has an interesting or surprising story, people will blog about it.

If you are lucky, this social gesture will make your wine a social object.

Drawing by Hugh MacLeod from gapingvoid.com

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

Last week we completed our discussion of plugins and we are nearly ready to start to create great content and launch our WordPress website. But there is one major consideration left to deal with; look and feel.

Luckily, there are plenty of free themes available for download that can be further modified to meet your needs. The best place to start is at the WordPress themes directory.

Another alternative is to start with blank theme templates and match the look and feel to an existing website. While this requires some knowledge of CSS, it is not too difficult once you understand how to change elements. I use a Mac application called CSSEdit to work with the existing website CSS file and TextEdit to edit the blank template file. You can check out my handiwork at the new Israeli Wine Direct blog.

The last option is to purchase a commercial theme. There are many sources for these but the only two I’ve worked with are Brian Gardner Media and Solostream. Both offer great looking themes with extended features for $50-80. Brian also has several very nice free themes like my current favorite “Revolution Blog.” Once you have your theme in place, you are ready to create your page and blog content.

Next week I’ll cover categories and tags which determines your site’s taxonomy.

Related Links

Part 1 of this series

Part 2 of this series

Part 3 of this series

Build A Website With WordPress, Part 4 originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

There is no formula to building community with social media, it’s all about creating content that educates and entertains your audience. And doing it on a predictable basis. It’s really that simple although there are some other things you can also do to increase your audience.

I was reminded of this point listening to an interview with Gary Vaynerchuk this week posted as a series of clips here and in it’s entirety here. I encourage everyone searching for the social media silver bullet to listen to this as Gary really outlines in detail his “secrets.”

It boils down to working hard and creating value for your audience.

For those pressed for time, listen to this clip. Great stuff.

Illustration by Elise Bauer

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Creating Great Content Builds Community originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Over the holiday weekend I was thinking about which blogs to recommend clients read daily from the long list of wine (84 feeds) and social media (75 feeds) blogs that I read. It was pretty tough to get these down to a selection most winery owners would actually read on a daily basis, which I somewhat arbitrarily picked as 10 blogs. To make it even easier to read, I also put together an aggregated feed here that you can bookmark for easy scanning each day.

So here are my picks for the 10 blogs every winery owner (and really anyone else in the industry) should read daily:

FERMENTATION – Tom Wark’s provocative wine business blog is the best in the genre. Required reading for everyone in the wine industry.

Vinography – Alder Yarrow’s wine blog is the first sustained effort in wine blogging but also the best.

Pinotblogger – Josh Hermsmeyer started documenting his winery start-up two years ago and has developed a large following for his innovative marketing ideas presented on his blog.

Good Grape – Jeff Lefevere’s view of the wine business, news and reviews.

Tablas Creek Blog – Voted the best winery blog this year, it is a great example of how any winery can tell their story and engage their customers online.

Gary Vaynerchuk – No, this is not Gary’s Wine Library TV video podcast but his personal blog with short videos on various topics mostly social media related.

ShipCompliant Blog – Compliance is a hot topic and this blog provides an up-to-the-minute view on the subject.

Chris Brogan – One of the top social media bloggers, I’ve aggregated just his articles on the subject including his excellent Social Media 100 series here.

Web Strategy by Jeremiah – Jeremiah Owyang is another leading voice in social media and I’ve aggregated his thoughts on the subject here.

How to Change the World – Author, venture capitalist and entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki’s thoughts on business are insightful, often humorous and inspiring.

There are many more great blogs I could recommend but these should get most winery owners started. If you want to read these in an RSS reader, just download and import this OPML file to subscribe to them all at once.

10 Blogs Every Winery Owner Should Read originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.

I don’t know of any person more controversial in the American wine trade than Wine Library TV’s Gary Vaynerchuk. Well, perhaps Robert Parker raises more hackles but when I talk with winery owners about social media Gary always comes up. And there seems to be few Vayniacs in the trade. Most wine industry people in the U.S. view him with a mixture of respect for what he has accomplished and fear that they will have to be like Gary to sell wine to younger audiences.

But I see Gary as a case study of how social media can change your business and have put together some lessons we can learn from his success:

Be Yourself – Wine Library TV works because of the honesty and passion of the host. While some might not care for Gary’s schtick, at some level what he projects is the essence of what makes him tick (perhaps turned up to “11″).

Some winery owners I have spoken with think they have to be like Gary to connect with younger customers. Not true; just be yourself, find your niche and an audience will find you. And while I think video is a great medium for wineries to tell their story, I don’t think everyone needs to start a daily video podcast. Explore blogging, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and other social media tools and find what works for you. Just be authentic and transparent.

Produce Content Consistently – If there’s one thing Gary does right, it’s setting an expectation of daily podcasts and delivering on that promise. This consistency builds an audience over time. So if you are blogging, podcasting or Twittering, just pick a schedule and stick to it. Don’t be sporadic.

Master All Social Media – There are a number of social networks and Web 2.0 sites that can be used in an integrated outreach campaign. Gary uses them all to drive traffic back to his podcast site and his online wine store. Since many of these sites can be linked and posting automated, it’s not much work once you get the accounts set-up. And like blogging, many of these services are search engine friendly so your website will be found more often on Google and Yahoo!

Don’t Pass Up Free PR – Gary speaks at tech events and to audiences inside companies like Google. This spreads the word outside of the wine business and attracts more viewers to his podcast. It’s also consistent with his wine education mission. This leads to appearances on mainstream media like Conan, Ellen and most recently The Big Idea on CNBC. All this free publicity creates a viral, virtuous cycle which leads to more people following Gary and eventually more sales in his wine store. At worst, it builds his brand.

Understand What’s Coming Next - Staying on top of trends in the wine business is important but by the time everyone talks and writes about the trend it’s too late to take full competitive advantage. For example, the wineries who got into consumer direct sales 5 years ago are the one’s who have benefited most from this trend today. Keep looking for the next big trend. The best place for this is in the wine blogosphere and social networking sites like the OpenWine Consortium.

Invest In Talent & Customers – When the going gets tough in the wine business, the first things to go are the most expensive expense items. Unfortunately, these tend to be things like marketing people and demand generation campaigns which can actually be the things a winery needs to do in a tough sales environment.

I also think that investments in customers are critical. So instead of pouring at yet another trade tasting, consider a BBQ at the winery with members of your wine club. Even investments of your time connecting with customers online can pay off well in the long run.

I know that not every winery can follow Gary’s model but even if you take away just one idea from this post it will likley make a difference in your business by this time next year. I’d also suggest you check out Gary’s full interview from yesterday on CNBC and follow Gary’s personal blog for more ideas. This will help you stay ahead of the curve and make you more comfortable participating in social media.

What Wineries Can Learn From Gary Vaynerchuk originally appeared on Acan Media. Licensed under Creative Commons.