REthink Wine Blog

Over the last year, Social Networking websites like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Orkut etc. have become a major news item. Microsoft’s recent move on Facebook only highlights how quickly the cards have been reshuffled. So why are social networks the latest animal to dominate the online jungle’s food chain? And why should wineries care? Well, first of all it’s about inevitability. Here is a statistic to ponder: ‘One in 20 Web Visits Go to Social-Networking Sites’. That is HUGE.

See the recent evolution of MySpace and Facebook in terms of reach:

More and more people visit a social network; that’s why so much money is being thrown around. If you want to be seen, you must go where the eyes are (why else are advertisers and their financial backers happily spilling millions?). If you want to use the web to promote your wine brand, you cannot avoid social networks. If you want to attract new visitors to your website, your brand and URL need to be on this major online thoroughfare.

If you accept the need to join the bandwagon, be smart about it. Participation is free, sure, but the cost is in time spent. Simply setting up a facebook profile will not cut it. You need to be active. You can’t be on all of them. You should decide which one is best for your brand and who within your company will be most active or prolific in participating on your chosen social network(s). It is better to be highly active on one network than be inactive on many.

Consider a social network as branding vehicle and an opportunity to interact with your existing customers and potential customers. See it as an extension of your tasting room where conversations are held and relationships built. Again, you should participate, but only if you can do it reasonably well. It takes a bit of time every day to be active, so carefully consider the resources and staff you will put in and the return on effort you expect (if you have tech savvy tasting room staff, use them).

If you do not have the resources to be active, but still want to put your wine in fronts of the thousands of wine lovers that surf social networks, there are other ways. Wine social networks or wine related applications are other vehicles to get your brand out there (like WineBeagles on Facebook, or Snooth’s facebook app ). Let wine “social net-entrepreneurs” work for you. They want your content, it just needs to be shared.

Here at IBG we understand that participation in social networks is not a question, it is an obligation. The challenge remains being smart about it, performing good Social Media Optimization. We want to use syndication technology and smart partnerships to help our winery clients capture new sales and traffic. We will partner with wine web-entrepreneurs and help them fill their platform/applications with wine content. For example, this will enable Facebook wine applications to promote wine awareness on behalf of our clients.

It remains to be seen if social networks will become a major vehicle for eCommerce. Notwithstanding, wineries need to get on board if they want to create an edge for themselves, or simply keep the one they have. Exposure is key and, right now, social networks are where it is happening.

When you are lucky enough to work in an environment that meshes technology and wine, and have had the good fortune of being handed a modicum of wine knowledge, you find yourself being asked a lot of questions about wine by tech-savvy folks. What’s “bret”? “Wait a minute, there’s Pinot Noir in Champagne!?” For whatever reason, wine has a tendency to intimidate, so sharing wine factoids is cool and helpful. Likewise, technology language, geek-speak, can sound foreign to wine folks. To further evangelize Inertia’s creed, I thought I should share with our winery friends some of the basic terminology of online marketing.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization
This is the dark art of getting your website to return higher rankings on search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN…) for searches on keywords that are directly related to your website/business. These are the free, ‘organic’ results on the left of a Google page. There is no silver bullet for this, experts can help, but ultimately it is a reflection of how relevant the WorldWideWeb thinks your website is for the searched subject. When you type ‘Napa’ on Google, you will see that the Valley is second to auto parts… sorry folks.

SEM: Search Engine Marketing
This is how Google makes billions of dollars in exchange for providing us with an indispensable free service. When you type in search terms in any search engine, somebody pays to have a relevant ad displayed next to the ‘organic’ search results. These are the sponsored links on the right and top of a Google page. When you type in ‘Napa Valley Cab’ on Google, you’ll see that KLWine and Napa’s finest taxi and limo service paid good money to be displayed. It is an awesome money-making service Google provides called ‘AdWords’ that allows advertisers to bid money on search terms and have their ad shown in relevance to what they paid and how relevant their site is.

CPM: Cost Per Mille
aka CPI: Cost Per Impression or CPT: Cost Per Thousand
By web standards, this is the granddaddy of advertising business models. This is online advertising that works just like ads do on TV or in print. You pay for how many times your ad is shown. Say you want to run an ad on a particular page of an online publication and that the CPM for that page is $6. If that page is viewed 5,000 times, you will pay $30. Sounds great for publishers, but it offers no guarantee to the advertisers that the ad is driving traffic or sales. This is good for brand building, getting mind share. General Motors doesn’t expect you to buy a car online or visit its websites, it just doesn’t want you to forget it makes cool cars.

PPC: Pay Per Click
aka CPC: Cost Per Click
This is a method of advertising where the publisher of an ad, text or visual, gets paid every time that ad gets clicked on. If you run an ad for your winery on a blog with a CPC of $0.05 and the ad gets clicked on 100 times, you paid $5 for 100 hits on your website. However, this does not mean 100 new visitors to your site or 100 new sales.
This is the business model that dominates the online world today. It makes the publishers sell ad spaces relevant to its own traffic (otherwise, no clicks, no money) and it gives advertisers a return on what they spend (one click is one potential conversion/sale).

CPA: Cost Per Action or Cost Per Acquisition
This is an advertising model where the advertiser pays only if an action takes place. The advertiser defines what matters to him: a survey being completed or a bottle of wine being sold. He also defines how much he is ready to pay for that action. That cost can be a fixed sum like paying a website $5 for a newsletter sign-up. The CPA can also be a set commission on the sale of a bottle of wine, “a piece of the action”, whereby you give X% of that order amount to the referring website.
For an advertiser this is the ideal form of advertising, you pay exactly for what you wanted and only that.

Affiliate Marketing
This is the name for the industry built around the CPA model. To reconcile demanding advertisers with a multitude of heterogeneously targeted publishers struggling for ad dollars, third parties (LinkShare, Commission Junction…) or large retailers (Amazon) have organized affiliate networks, grouping publishers, to sell advertisers or merchants a relevant space to push their products or services. Instead of going to each individual publisher and figuring out if they are right for you, you trust an affiliate marketer who selects the publishers for you and you pay only for what you get in return.

SMO: Social Media Optimization
This is a fairly new concept that arose with Web 2.0 and its bevy of social networks. Rohit Bhargava coined the term and gives 5 rules for conducting SMO. It is another dark art way of generating more traffic/sales/exposure by using social media, online communities and community websites. Using RSS feeds, “Digg this” buttons, Youtube, Facebook pages, etc… are among the many ways to practice SMO.
For wine, SMO would be a way of getting your winery’s website and your wines listed on as many wine blogs and wine social networks and wine-related websites as possible. These include Snooth, Cork’d, TasteVine, Winelog, Calwineries, Openbottles, Vinorati, Bottlenotes, BoutiqueWineCellar, etc…

As you can imagine, which business model is chosen largely depends on the bargaining strength of the publisher and the advertisers, as well as the type of products or services that is being promoted. When it comes to selling more wine online, directly from the winery to the consumer, leveraging wine social network into an affiliate-type network is a very compelling argument. SMO is a concept Inertia strongly believes in. We will soon be putting it into action with the firm intent of driving new traffic and sales to our winery clients. Stay tuned.

Hopefully, this little introduction will make online marketing seem less esoteric. If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line in the comments section or email me at pascal.davis@inertiabev.com

Cheers!

You’ve heard it before: “On the Internet, content is king”. Okay - so what does that mean? A website’s success is closely dependent on the amount and quality of its content. Yes - that’s true, but it’s not the whole story. The message here is that content is the first weapon you compete with in the age of web 2.0.

The comforting thing about this is that you control your content. This is empowering because it means that you are now less dependent on what a loud few have to say about you – you have the opportunity to contribute, knowingly or not, to any discussion on your brand. Your online content will greatly influence how your brand is represented online.

In today’s over-saturated wine market, getting shelf space and editorial coverage is quite the challenge. The race is on to gain more exposure and acquire new direct customers. As Inertia is proving to its clients, technology is enabling new ways for wineries to sell more direct and increase the exposure of their brand. How you set-up up your content /data / product information is crucial in this race – one could argue that it is almost as important as the bottle containing your wine.

Let me borrow a brilliant analogy from Ben Chinn. Let’s say your website is like the wine bottles that you lovingly produce. Your website’s content is like the actual wine in that bottle. The website’s design is the bottle, the label, the closure, etc. The care you put in setting up your content should mirror the care you put into making your wine. Just as bottling is a crucial part of your production process, properly creating and setting up your product information and online content is vital to your sales and marketing efforts. No matter how good your wine is, if the bottle is ugly, many will shun it. The same goes for your content; if it is lame, short and hard to sort out, few will look at it and be interested in your wine. Just as winemakers display maniacal care when bottling, the same care is needed when you create and set-up your content.

For your content to reign, it must be:
1. Complete. More is better when it comes to wine. You do not know in advance what will make consumers tick, so give them as much as possible. Lay on information on brix at harvest, let them know the pH of your wines, dare to say you used Hungarian oak.
2. Accurate. Don’t recycle information just to fill out fields, be honest or risk being found out. If you are releasing a 2-year old vintage, don’t say it aged 36 months in oak.
3. Searchable. This is the crucial factor in allowing your content to be propagated to all. For anyone to search detailed information on wine, your wine information must be categorized. This means that you must use all available data fields built in your database. Don’t’ bundle up all the information in one place, make sure that each bit of information is categorized so it can be searched. If you have a single vineyard designate and a field for that bit of data, use it: it will show up in searches for all wines from that vineyard.
Your content needs to be ‘clean’ to leverage the power of the Internet.

Okay, great! Now your content is good and ready, but how do you get it out there for all to use and see? Search engines will help and allow people looking exactly for your information to find you. But what about the others potential customers that are not using search engines to get their wine information? Spreading the word about your wines then depends on the technology used to propagate your content and who picks it up.

The most effective method to make your content available to all is RSS. Since a video is worth a thousand words, check this one out if you are unfamiliar with RSS:

http://www.videojug.com/film/rss-in-plain-english

Via RSS, content comes to the user - instead of having the user come to the content. For example, if your content has been picked up by a wine community website, your next best customer might be the wine enthusiast that checked out what new wines were listed on that site. At IBG we have built an aggregate RSS feed that will allow us to disseminate our clients’ content to the growing number of wine community sites and databases.

Okay, great! Your content is clean and you have a way to share it – who do you share it with? Well, that will be the subject of my next blog post.