The first-ever North American Wine Bloggers Conference will take place October 24-26, 2008 in Sonoma County, California. The goal of the conference is to gather wine bloggers from throughout North America and beyond to meet, learn, and share.
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Over the weekend, Tom Wark sent out an email to wine bloggers encouraging them to join the OpenWine Consortium. He compared the new social network to Facebook but wine industry focused. As one of the first members of OpenWine, I concur with Tom that everyone in the wine industry should join but they should also consider Facebook for customer outreach.
Facebook is one of the hottest social networks today because it presents a new way for people to use the web to share information about themselves. It has rapidly grown to over 69 million members since it started as a college and high school social network in 2004. The addition of Facebook applications in 2007 made the platform more compelling for commercial uses and targeted advertising is now being rolled out.
Wineries can use Facebook as a way to communicate with their customers by creating a profile and page. In fact, several wineries are already doing this as I’ve linked on my wiki (please add your profile if I missed it). Since the promotion of alcohol is not currently permitted on Facebook advertising is not viable. But as a free communication service, Facebook works for wineries because your customers are probably already members.
Think of OpenWine Consortium as the wine industry network and Facebook as your customer network. Both fit into a winery’s marketing plan particularly if Millennials are a target segment. And when you join, don’t forget to friend me:
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