REthink Wine Blog

One of the primary effects of Web 2.0 on the wine industry and direct-to-consumer in general has been a gradual shift in the marketing mix from one that was more focused on traditional push marketing methods to one that places more of the emphasis on pull marketing.  If you think of push marketing as involving the more traditional methods of targeting the right demographic through paid advertising and email, pull marketing is aimed more at encouraging consumers to actively seek you out.  By nature, the focus with pull marketing is more on building your brand through blogs, user-generated reviews and syndication of your content.    It only goes to follow that consumers who have arrived at your site by way of positive reviews on an influential wine blog or after discovering your content on a favorite foodie site, will be more receptive to your push marketing efforts (permission based marketing as an example). 

But the sheer number of wine blogs, forums, and social media sites in and of itself presents a whole new challenge.  How do you monitor what is being said about your winery?   There are many benefits to be gained by listening to the conversation:  1) if you have a tasting room, you already understand the benefits of interacting with your customers on a daily basis.  Social media presents an opportunity for online interaction.  2) You’ll gain insights which can be used to increase the effectiveness of your traditional marketing methods, and 3) those same insights will allow you to improve your customer service.

One of the wine industry’s most effective marketing tools has always been recommendations – by friends and acquaintances, sommeliers, waiters, and more recently extending into the realm of wine bloggers.  Positive word of mouth, especially when coming from more influential sources, can have a tremendous impact on sales.  So how do you monitor 1) what’s being said, 2) who’s saying it, and 3) who’s listening to the conversation?  Depending on exactly what you’re looking for, there are a number of resources available.

 

• Google and Yahoo! Alerts provide real time email updates of relevant search results based on keywords you choose.
• Search blogs for mention of your company and set up an RSS feed via Google Blog Search.
• In a similar vein, track comments that are posted on blogs via co.mments.
• BlogPulse Conversation Tracker helps you to follow the entire conversation, showing not only the original post, but other bloggers referencing it in their own posts. And BlogPulse trends helps you monitor whether a specific keyword is experiencing an increase in mentions or not.
• Technorati is probably one of the best tools available for tracking social media sites. Set up an RSS feed for blog posts mentioning your company name.
• See if anyone is using your company name as a tag by using Keotag.
• Track posts on forums using Boardtracker.
• For a complete picture of brand perception and awareness, you might consider a paid subscription service that monitors all channels and presents the information in an easily actionable format such as Andiamo Systems.

Finally, what should you monitor?  Everything related to your wines, your winery, your winemaker and owners, and possibly the industry in general.  You may also want to watch select competitors to get a feeling for how they’re navigating the social media waters.

 

This entry was posted by Sheri Hebbeln on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 11:02 am and is filed under E-commerce, Wine Industry Trends, Resources and Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.