by Tim Elliott on April 16, 2008
As the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto asserted almost a decade ago, “…all markets are conversations.” The idea of conversational marketing is not something that new particularly for those of us who worked in 
business-to-business where the personal relationship with the customer is so important to success.
But in today’s networked world the term “conversational marketing” has come to mean the use of social media to engage directly with customers online. At it’s most basic it is responding to comments on blogs, forums and social networks such as Facebook. But it can also be used as a customer support tool and a new way to collect market research information.
Although this is an evolving area, there are several examples of wineries using conversational marketing techniques to build their brand, connect directly with customers and sell wine:
by Tim Elliott on April 10, 2008
I thought a good place to start the discussion about wine and social media would be to define the term. If you are like me, you will probably Google phrases like this and 98 times out of 100, the top result will be to Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia website. And that is often a good place to start as most times a well written definition awaits.
But this time I’m not sure if most winery owners or marketers would completely grasp the term on first reading as the page assumes a context with internet technology. Placing all the examples and other bits aside, however, there is a sentence that defines social media about half way down:
…social media depends on interactions between people as the discussion and integration of words builds shared-meaning, using technology as a conduit.
Jargon aside, this boils down to people using internet technology such as blogs, wikis and social networks to share information about themselves, products and/or ideas. It’s a two-way conversation that forms a connection and makes social media “sticky” when compared to the more traditional approach of market outreach.
In wine terms, think of social media as your online tasting room. It’s a place people can come and offer feedback on your wines without actually being at the winery. Josh at Pinotblogger calls it his “porch” which is a good way to look at it. So it’s not about blogs, podcasts, wiki’s, Facebook, Twitter or any number of other technologies and social networks a winery can put into their marketing plan. It’s about the interaction with customers, fans and future friends.
I read a lot of blogs about social media and about wine. Each day I will tag the stories I think are worth your time to check out and post them here in digest form. As we go along, I will also post definitions to terms covered in these links. But if you would like to hear about a subject sometime sooner, just post a comment here.
Illustration by Steve Borsch from Connecting The Dots
