by Tim Elliott on February 10, 2010

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.
by Tim Elliott on May 1, 2009
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.
by Tim Elliott on January 8, 2009
So Gary Vaynerchuk’s Cork’d site gets hacked, TechCrunch writes about it and Gary jumps on Twitter to get some help. Not only does this demonstrate the power of social media, it’s also a virtuoso performance by one of the mediums’ masters. Here’s Gary’s account packed with ideas:
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Viddler video.
[Via GaryVaynerchuk.com]
by Tim Elliott on September 9, 2008
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!