Wine Social Networks
Posted by Paul Mabray on July 25th, 2007Wine 2.0 is alive and breathing and with it comes a plethora of companies working to build social networks around wine. All of these companies do one thing great - bring awareness of wines to more consumers. Moreover, the service they provide helps consumers make buying decisions based on peer reviews. With so many brands and so little information or ability to test every one,we hope all these new communities thrive as they help consumers help each other bridge the gap to buy more wines (both on and offline). Additionally, if you are a winery in limited distribution or have winery only products - where are they going to go? To your website to buy the product. Wineries should support these communities strongly and even encourage your customers to comment on your wines at their favorite social network site.
There are so many of these companies launching that I only have time to name a few (if I left your company out, please comment):
www.snooth.com
www.corkd.com
www.tastevine.com
www.winelog.net
www.bottlenotes.com
www.calwineries.com
www.americanwinery.com
www.cellartracker.com
How will these communities help wineries succeed?
- More brand awareness. Any consumer can put your wine up to review and the entire web can find it in multiple places. In fact, Gary V. at Corkd.com has done an incredible job and when you Google a particular wine, Corkd’s reviews tend to come up through his powerful SEO efforts usually in the top 10 and sometimes in the top 3.
- The power of recommendation has been STRIPPED from the traditional rating magazines and now is firmly placed in the hands of consumers. No longer are you dependent on one single reviewer, but the masses in aggregate will judge your product.
- Helping customers find your wine through powerful search (snooth.com), or through keywords (like food pairings), or through similar taste profiles (tastevine, bottlenotes).
- Interconnecting consumers who share similar tastes and organizing micro (and sometimes macro) audiences that communicate through word of mouth about your products.
- Community content to help consumers understand wine (winelog) and learn more so they try more after being educated.
- And much, much more (plus things we haven’t even thought about yet that will emerge as these tools become stronger and more prevalent through other larger social networks like facebook, myspace, flickr, and more)
My recommendation to you as wineries is engage with all of these. Pick your favorite and support it strongly. Use both your advertising dollars and recommend your customers to use it to rate your wines. Tell them make friends with other people who also like your wines. Give away your content to them en masse. Yes, give it away - all your tasting notes, all your recipe matches, jpg’s of your labels, all your wine information - just give it to them. Become part of the community (but disclose that you are ITB - In the business). Use it as a tool to communicate one on one with people that like your wine. They are right there. Right in front of you. That is what is great about these communities, you have visibility into the people that rate your wine. This is the 101 of direct sales - finding your audience and communicating with them. You now have incredible visibility to who likes or dislikes your wine and a vehicle to communicate with them. Use it to convince the naysayers differently. If they hate tempranillo from CA and you make a great one (www.paradorcellars.com makes a killer one), engage with them and work to convince them. You may wine an advocate who will shout your name from the top of buildings.
Direct sales for wineries have their window now to engage and own the channel. You just have to turn your attention to it and it is yours for the taking.
July 25th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
BTW - I would have written about more benefits but my blog was getting too long and wordy. I’d love to see comments from the social network guys.
July 25th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Paul - You’ve done a good job here. However, every winery I speak to already seems to understand the benefit that these Wine 2.0 sites can and will provide. Namely, wines with better, more complete data get found more, and wines with images and reviews get clicked on more. And…more clicks = more sales.
Any reluctance to partner seems to stem from the fact that there’s a fixed amount of work to be done for each and every site they want to work with. And with 100+ of us out there, thats more time than they can spare.
So, I circle back to my favorite, and only recurring, topic : data. If there was one data standard (one XML schema), wineries could format their data to that, and then everyone who wanted it could add it to their site.
Its not our place to set the standard, but in the spirit of Web 2.0, we’ll give out our schema - several hundred companies use it already. Either email me for it, or, once we build a merchant section on our site, it’ll be freely available there.
Baby steps people…
July 25th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
Thanks Philip.
I don’t fully agree about wineries understanding - if that was so, wineries would be doing a better job engaging with your community and more. Some do, but all need to pay attention. All of these sites are getting to be a very key part of the consumer direct ecosphere as well as wine bloggers.
One note to all Inertia wineries - all of your sites are built upon XML and RSS to help us partner with companies like snooth and more so that you can share your information. Moreover, Andrea Johnston works hard set up the partnerships for all our winery partners so you get full benefit of what Philip is talking about without having to do ANY additional work except make sure you put good information on your website.
July 25th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
Well, you’re not going to get any argument from me on clean data. As data becomes syndicated more and more throughout the web, any errors get harder to fix. Entering sloppy data, then correcting it at the source, can take months to filter through the web, as although some sites like us are only one step removed, other people take data from our site, and so on.
Clean data is something the wineries can control, and as tens and hundreds of people come to rely on it, making sure its accurate becomes a powerful marketing tool.
July 26th, 2007 at 12:14 am
Hi Paul. I’ve been a believer for a long time that the true power of social networks is allowing vendors, in this case wineries, to connect with consumers. That has always been the basis of OpenBottles, my wine social network. Instead of focusing solely on the wine, we created a community that engages the wineries as well. Wine reviews and recommendations are only half the experience. Tasting at wineries with friends and other people is the other half. We’ve done a lot to try to bring that out as well.
In addition, we’ve been actively recruiting wineries to participate in our community. We built a special winery toolkit that allows wineries to establish a presence in our community and to deliver their message in a much more effective manner. To date, we have nearly 50 wineries participating. This success will accelerate as we add more features to the toolkit that expand how wineries interact with our members.
Also, about the clean data point - I could not agree more. The biggest challenge is keeping the data clean. We all know that wine labels are difficult to read for most people, and that missing one piece of information can completely throw off the ability to identify a particular wine. To address this issue, we built a comprehensive QA process to clean and correct all wines. We also allow the wineries to add their wines directly, which minimizes the risk of bad data. We currently have over 23,000 unique and complete wines in our database, and that number will grow exponentially. Clean data is key to drawing maximum value from reviews.
July 30th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
Hey Paul,
Thanks for the note. We’re confident in our community fueled algorithm and as we discover new ways to understand peoples’ tastes we can, of course, help them discover their own. We look at what we’re doing as a slight step beyond 2.0… 2.5 maybe lol.
Anyhow, we love wine as a starter because it’s not only a social liquid, but it serves as a solid baseline to compare tastes. It’s not too complicated like rating food or recipes, but complex enough to generalize a connection between two people and then expand that into all tastes… it will be a much larger jump to sound (music) or experiences (travel), but this new type of environment can create such value in users lives by helping them enjoy their choices more frequently in life and by helping them meet people with similar taste profiles.
This is why we love wine… it is not just the wine industry that is coming together… wine is one of the most universally consumed products around the world and it can be used to help conflicting cultures see a commonality in themselves and start to come together. Excuse our idealism, but the future excites us. Cheers to all of the wine social networks out there that are contributing to a positive cause.
August 2nd, 2007 at 9:24 am
www.bottletalk.com
August 2nd, 2007 at 10:13 am
www.buyersvine.com
August 6th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
Even better - do some research and find where they are ALREADY talking about your wine. When you get there you will find a ready and appreciative audience.
I’ll leave the details as an exercise for the student…