“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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• Twittering for wine: How to run a million dollar ad campaign for $60 K (dailyfinance.com)

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.

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

When I first heard about this promotion a couple weeks ago I immediately went to see if the winery had secured the key social outposts and was somewhat surprised to see they didn’t seem to have a Twitter account. So I created one and did a bit of customization so whoever gets this job won’t have to deal with a squatter (like here and here). To take this account over, just contact and convince me you are really from Murphy-Goode.

Since the campaign started, the winery has promoted their search via this Twitter account that has developed quite a following in the three weeks it’s been open. If I were running this promotion, all the key social accounts would be secured before announcement in order to better manage the brand on the social web. All you need to do is put ‘MurphyGoode’ and ‘MurphyGoodeWine’ into KnowEm and then get the accounts at places like Twitter, Friendfeed, Delicious, Vimeo and YouTube even if you don’t ever use them.

What’s interesting about this campaign is the diversity of applicants. Everything from wine and food bloggers to social media strategists to the clueless and truly scary. Their offer of $10,000 a month for a 6 month contact would probably find plenty of applicants in good economic times but now the flood of applicants will be in the several hundred if not a thousand. Sifting through these to narrow down the list for the next stage of the competition will take some time and Murphy-Goode has extended the deadline for this and presumably to get every last ounce of publicity. But for this campaign to rise above PR stunt status, the winery will have to choose their winner very carefully. If I were judging this competition I would have just one question: who will customers find interesting and want to follow?

From a results perspective their website has gone from 500 visitors to over 50,000 in just a few weeks. Murphy-Goode has gone from nowhere in the social marketing space to a winery being written about in Mashable and the New York Times. All very impressive that will make this campaign a topic of conversation within the wine industry for a long time whatever the outcome.

Will ‘A Really Goode Job’ be another social media success story or a shameless marketing stunt? Time will tell but the early results look promising.

UPDATE 5/22/09: After watching the following video my outlook on this campaign has dropped considerably. Looks like the smart money is on ’shameless marketing stunt’ now… super over produced for the social web, folks. Where’s the authenticity? Edited together stock footage with your winemaker cut in at the end, a viral video does not make. At least in my book.

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• Best Social Media Job Attracts a Singer, a Viking and a Mud Wrestler (mashable.com)

Case in point is the Facebook page I just published for Acan Media mostly to demonstrate some cool new tools from a company called Involver. Since Facebook is part of an outpost strategy, my page is setup to aggregate the links I publish on Twitter and my blog posts. Involver has a nice RSS app that takes your blog feed and republishes it to the “News” tab on your Facebook page (I wish they would let you rename this to “Blog” but that might be a future enhancement). Previously I had been recommending the Simplaris Blogcast app which worked about 70% of the time in my experience. The Involver app seems very solid and stable in my early testing here and auto updates on a frequent basis.

What I like most about the Involver toolset is the ability to brand all of them with a banner making your Facebook page an extension of your blog or website. You can check out how this looks on all the Involver apps on my page (currently you have to use the same banner across all apps). But the real value of Involver is the ability for visitors to share your content easier with their Facebook friends and subscribe to your feed or follow you on Twitter.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg as Involver has another 7 tools including a coupon app I will be experimenting with in the next few weeks. So if you are looking to increase your visitor engagement on Facebook, give Involver a try. And fan me up, too, when you have a chance

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• Five Things You Can Do With This New Facebook RSS App (readwriteweb.com)

Whatever you call it, a constant stream of messages will not keep your fans following you for very long as Joel Vincent demonstrated this week. And he’s right, show your audience value and they will continue to follow you. So here are some tips for wineries to use Facebook more effectively:

Send One Mass Message A Month: Think of Facebook as an extention of your email marketing efforts. The more you send, the lower the results tend to be. In fact, extensive email marketing will hurt sales as it becomes too intrusive. So put together a newsletter-like digest message with upcoming events, new releases, winemaker notes and whatever else fans might be interested in. Just sent this no more than once a month (quarterly would probably be sufficent for most wineries).

Target Your Fan Updates: Facebook has a powerful, but apparently overlooked, feature that allows you to send messages to people in specific geographic areas. So instead of sending all fans that event invite, just filter on those fans closest to the winery. To use this feature, click on the “Target this update” box and choose the location of the receipants. You can also get fancy with gender and age which might be useful if your event is targeting a specific demographic group.

Give Fans A Reason To Visit Your Facebook Page: But the most effective way to prevent Facebook bacn is to very sparingly use the update feature. If you produce engaging content regularly it is not difficult to aggregate this content on your Facebook page. I’ll be blogging next time on how to set up your page using a new tool called Involver.

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.

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• The New Social Engagement: A Visit to Zappos (mashable.com)

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 to woo marketers with revamped ‘fan pages’ (news.cnet.com)
• Facebook Pages Will Replace Traditional Landing Pages (allfacebook.com)

They are:

BEST WRITING ON A WINE BLOG
IN VINO VERITAS
THE POUR
DR.VINO
VINOGRAPHY

BEST GRAPHICS & PRESENTATION ON A WINE BLOG
THE GOOD GRAPE
HOSEMASTER OF WINE
CHATEAU PETROGASM
WILMA’S WINE WORLD

BEST SINGLE-SUBJECT WINE BLOG
BESOTTED RAMBLINGS
LENNDEVOURS
GOOD WINE UNDER $20
NAPA VALLEY WINE BLOG

BEST WINERY BLOG
MICHEL-SCHLUMBERGER BENCHLAND BLOG
TABLAS CREEK VINEYARD BLOG
DRY CREEK VINEYARD’S WILMA’S WINE WORLD
BEDROCK WINE CO. BLOG

BEST BUSINESS/INDUSTRY WINE BLOG
WINERY WEBSITE REPORT
WINECAST
THE WINE COLLECTOR
RETHINK WINE BLOG

BEST WINE REVIEWS ON A BLOG
BIGGER THAN YOUR HEAD
GOOD WINE UNDER $20
WICKER PARKER
VINOGRAPHY

BEST OVERALL WINE BLOG
VINOGRAPHY
DR. VINO
THE POUR
LENNDEVOURS

It’s great to see client Michel-Schlumberger recognized in the Best Winery Blog category. When we started to work together last July, we brainstormed the concept of having most of the winery staff blog. I’m not sure why it took until 2008 for such a format to be tried but you can’t argue with their success and commitment to interesting posts on nearly a daily basis.

I was also surprised that my wine blog and podcast, Winecast, was nominated in the Best Business/Industry Wine Blog category. Although I do blog about the wine business there from time-to-time, I wouldn’t consider it a wine industry blog (that’s what I hope to develop here this year). But it’s an honor to be a finalist.

Voting is open from now until March 4th. I would expect to be posting the final results about this time next week.

Congratulations to all the finalists.

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• We Are A “Best Winery Blog” Finalist (benchlandblog.com)

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.