REthink Wine Blog

Is there a statute of limitations for how long you can talk about the New Year and its attendant resolutions? If there is, if January 17th is too far in, then I am calling for absolution on this pox against self-improvement.

I happen to love the freshness of New Year’s and the opportunity to do some navel-gazing analysis to improve life-love-work. Done correctly, you monitor your resolutions until they become a part of your life.

With that in mind, I suggest to everybody that you pick one single thing to improve upon in your work life—an idea—that can make a difference in your business, no matter your role.

Where to find inspiration?

Everybody loves a good business book—the one with some insight that taps that far away repository in your brain matter that then sends a synapse firing against your memory bank of experiences that creates a new idea. It has been said that there are no new ideas—just ideas that can be manipulated within a different context or ideas that are new to us based on some sort of new understanding. Books help to feed that fire and add to our repository.

Recent business books, full of ideas that have captured the mainstream zeitgeist include “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell, “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson and “Made to Stick” by Chip and Dan Heath.

But, let’s be honest, reading books takes time, and most of us have, at best, an hour a day for leisure reading—which makes getting through a book, or several books to spark an idea something of a bit of work, and that presumes that we’re choosing non-fiction books and not a bit of escapist fiction.

There are numerous services that offer, for a reasonable fee, business book distillation summaries—a Cliffs Note version of the book—the essential truths and ideas without all of the interminable anecdotes that fill up 225 pages of a 250 page tome. Clearly, this sort of option lets you glean the ideas, quickly, retaining the good stuff and not engaging in the non-productive activity. Google “Business Book Summaries” for multiple options for this type of service

However, the business book summary isn’t the point of this post, the point is to actually highlight a web site with Powerpoint presentation summaries (called Manifestos) from leading authors and guru’s that is FREE and also QUICK TO READ.

ChangeThis, found here, is a web site that features distilled Powerpoint presentations of some of the best leading academic and business thinkers in the world. Gladwell is here. So too is Chris Anderson—they are all presenting ideas, all presenting ideas in short form, for easy consumption.

The January email newsletter highlighting new content for the month includes content from noted marketer Seth Godin and the CEO of Stonyfield Farms, Gary Hirshberg, who has a current best seller called “Stirring it Up” a book about his leadership with Stonyfield Farms, the world’s leading organic yogurt producer.

Hirshberg has many good ideas—including his ChangeThis manifesto that posits that only economic self-interest will create the massive change that is required for environmental conservation. Think about that for a second—capitalism is the key to environmental conservation.

As January gives way to February, let’s not let the resolutions and the freshness of self-improvement give way to another year of status quo. Feed your brain with ideas and implement a single good, game-changing idea in your work.

ChangeThis Manifestos are a good place to start.

Wine online darling Gary Vaynerchuk from WinelibraryTV continues to grab the wine world by its shirt lapels and give a good, healthy shake.

You may recall that Vaynerchuk spoke at the Wine Industry and Technology Symposium (WITS) in July where he was quoted as saying (in reference to the wine industry’s use of technology in marketing):

“Ninety-nine percent of the people in the wine business are really blowing it,” said Gary Vaynerchuk, director of operations for the WineLibrary, a Springfield, N.J. wine store with a popular interactive Web site. (Quote excerpted from the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat)

I wrote a blog post on this site shortly thereafter that can be found here.

Gary continues to not only lead the charge in creating a brand online for himself and his business by proxy, but he also continues to give advice, good advice, to folks interested in growing their business, any business.

Vaynerchuk did an audio interview with an Internet-based business coach and he provided some additional insights that are not just applicable to technology marketing, but marketing in general. You can find the audio portion of the interview here and a transcript of the interview here.

A couple of the nuggets that I gleaned are:

* Vaynerchuk on putting content out on the web: “If you put out great content, you will be found.”

* Vaynerchuk on leveraging your expertise: “So, if you are the best guy in your law firm in contracts, instead of waiting eight to ten years to become a partner, start (using technology) about what you know. Give away that content for free. It will come back to you in spades 800 times over.”

* Vaynerchuk on tapping your passion: “So you may be good at three or four things, but please site down and analyze where you feel you’re most passionate about, even if that is the most competitive genre, do it because that is where you’re going to win when you really believe it, when it goes through your blood, you’re going to wine every time because even if you’re not seeing the mythical success, your heart and soul is going to be happy. That is going to push through to the point when you will start seeing success.

* The Interviewer on setting lofty goals: “you have to have high ideals. You have to have something that you’re shooting for that’s absolutely spectacular. What you have to realize is that’s the ideal, that’s not the goal. When you achieve a certain level of success, the people that are super successful don’t compare where they get to–to their ideal. The ideal is just where they’re focused towards. To be happy and to be excited about what you’re accomplishing, you have to look backwards to where you were. As long as you make that leap and you look backwards to feel good about yourself then you can keep that excitement going. If you’re always comparing where you are to the perfect (ideal) then it’s very hard to stay excited …

The frenetic interview wraps up with Vaynerchuk’ “Five Steps to Mastering Social Media.” If you replace the “social media” with “online marketing” or just “marketing” the same values hold true. They are:

1) Make sure you want to engage/learn it.

2) Now that you know you want it, spend every living second that you possible can on it.

3) Put your toe in the pool. Get involved.

4) Humble yourself. If you’re the best basketball player in the world, you’re playing hockey now. Put on your skates.

5) Know what you want to accomplish.

As we head into the biggest selling month of the year for wine thoughts naturally turn to 2008 and the unconquered horizon that a fresh start presents. Read the Vaynerchuk interview or simply just ponder the excerpts here and consider what you can do in the new year to accelerate your marketing success!

Pretty much any content syndicated on the web can be broken down in to an RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed. Once content is in this format, it can be fed into a software program such as an aggregator that can recognize changes as they happen and react to give updates directly to the reader. Why use RSS feeds you ask? Just to start… see a few reasons below.

The concept of the RSS feed is basically to provide a code that will allow potential customers to view your site without actually having to visit it. This is most commonly used for blogs and news feeds. RSS feeds enable a person to log on and in one place check all the major headlines, blog feeds, and even which of their favorite wineries have released a new wine online! Is this a good idea you ask? Won’t this encourage people to NOT visit my website? NOT AT ALL. In fact, this will do the opposite. As soon as you update your content, it can be fed via RSS feed to other websites online as well as to any aggregators that are constantly being updated with your product information or news. This will in turn drive customers back to your site if they see a product or event they may be interested in. The idea is that if you constantly provide RSS readers updates from your site, they will see that your site is regularly being refreshed with new content. If browsers see a new wine that they are interested in, they will link back to your site to view, and hopefully purchase this product.

Another way that RSS feeds can be beneficial is for links to news and events. Just as in the case of a news website or a blog, if your winery website has a lot of updated information an RSS feed can stream all of this in to other sites. In the wine business these are websites such as localwineevents.com or winebusiness.com. The idea is that by enabling an RSS feed you can save a lot of time because you don’t have to manually update all of these sites yourself. RSS feeds can also send updated recipes to pair with your wines to your favorite food websites or vice versa. You can learn a lot by learning how to use these feeds to keep sending out updated information about your own winery as well as bringing in information about other wines. All of this will eventually help spread your online content across many sites without even having to bring people to your own website, yet.

Remember, the most important thing is to make sure that the RSS feed you are syndicating is an extension of your site. Make sure it contains all pertinent information about your winery. Having a variety of information will guarantee that your content stays fresh and people will continue to link back to your website and online wine store based on this RSS content.

There is so much information on the web (too much?) that some kind of filtering tool is needed. RSS is a huge success because it is such a tool, helping users condense information. Think of an RSS feed as the executive summary of what’s new on a website.

If this may all sound a bit overwhelming, just take it slowly. Before starting to use RSS as a method to share your information – as a ‘publisher’ - you should try using RSS as a reader to discover its full benefits and better understand how you can later use it as a marketing tool. One easy method to learn how to use an RSS aggregator is by setting up all of your favorite blogs and news websites to feed in to your Google account so that when you log in you can see all the top relevant articles of the day. This will help your understand why these feeds can be beneficial to syndicate content in to one place.

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.

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.

Some people like to know what time it is. Others want to know how and why the watch works. If you want to know how the watch works in regards to the Internet and the use of technology for your DIRECT sales, read on.

Last week many readers of this blog went to the Wine Industry and Technology Symposium (WITS) and received a cathartic, technology-centric kick in the pants. Gary Vaynerchuk, a keynote speaker, noted in his remarks, (highlighted from the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat):

The wine industry is missing a huge opportunity to forge deeper relationships with consumers using new technologies such as Web videos and wine blogs.

That was the blunt message delivered to wine industry executives in Napa on Tuesday by a young, outspoken New Jersey wine retailer who said the industry needs to embrace change or die.

“Ninety-nine percent of the people in the wine business are really blowing it,” said Gary Vaynerchuk, director of operations for the WineLibrary, a Springfield, N.J. wine store with a popular interactive Web site.

Citing blogs specifically as a customer acquisition tool, Gary Vaynerchuk, as noted in a recent Inertia blog post, is something of an Internet sensation with his video blog and Josh Hermsmeyer, owner of Capozzi Family Winery and the blog Pinotblogger.com is building his wine business before releasing a single bottle of vino. Hermsmeyer gave a presentation on the power of blogging for wineries at WITS. His presentation is posted at his site, found here.

The best $2.10 you can buy if you’re interested in getting a high-level understanding of all of this Internet/community/blogging stuff is a series of 95 theses written in 1999 and posted on the Internet before being born in book form in 2000. The Seminal book, “The Cluetrain Manifesto” is as good of a primer as any that I can think of to help somebody make sense of some of the large, seismic dynamics that are taking place in the Internet space, a space you are presumably participating in or considering by developing, executing and continuing to enhance your DIRECT business. The preface of the books is:

The Cluetrain Manifesto is a set of 95 theses organised and put forward as a manifesto, or call to action, for all businesses operating within what is suggested to be a newly-connected marketplace. The ideas put forward within the manifesto aim to examine the impact of the Internet on both markets (consumers) and organisations. In addition, as both consumers and organisations are able to utilise the Internet and Intranets to establish a previously unavailable level of communication both within and between these two groups, the manifesto suggests that the changes that will be required from organisations as they respond to the new marketplace environment.

Some of the “theses” of the book are downright Nostradamus-like. When the book first came out, it was heralded and then dismissed as a part of the collateral damage that occurred with the downturn in the economy. Now, these simple maxims, some seven years later, couldn’t be more on target, correct and downright visionary, especially since they were released in the pre-blog era. A couple of examples:

* The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

* Companies that don’t realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.

* Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.

Go to Amazon.com, search for “Cluetrain Manifesto” and buy the book used for a couple of bucks. For $2.10 you can barely buy a cup of coffee and I guarantee this book will have a more lasting impact than a Venti with cream and four sugars.

I just got punked by Google. I followed a link to google gulp and read intently about the line of soft drinks that Google is marketing. Then it hit me - the whole thing is a hoax. A elaborate (and hysterical) joke perpetrated by the folks at google. Why did they do this? Why spend time and effort designing a promotion for a product that will never exist? I’m guessing they did it for fun.

Usually I talk about user-focused content: making sure that what’s on your website is meaningful and useful to the site’s visitors. But google’s hoax made me think about what would happen if I turned that idea on it’s head. A hoax is useful to nobody. In this case it was probably just a way for some coders to get their kicks. Strangely though, this hoax and others like it strengthen Google’s brand by solidifying the personality of the company and its product.

So how about generating some Author Focused Content? Something on your site that is just for you. When was the last time you had fun coming up with content for you web site? Have you ever published something on your winery’s site just for kicks? If the answer is no then your site may not say as much about you and your product as it could. The beauty of the web is that it allows you to publish content and then edit it. Content editing tools like our own ReThink Engine make this easy. This means that you can say whatever you want on your site and then change or delete it later.

Give it a try. Add a paragraph to one of your site’s pages that has nothing to do with marketing your wine. Say something about your business that really means something to you without worrying about whether it’s going to sell your product. I know, everything on your site is meaningful to you. But does it make you laugh? Or excite you? Or make you feel something other than a vague sense of pride? If you want to let your customers get to know you try forgetting about them for a little while.

Stay tuned for my next post: “that’s enough of that - now get back to focusing on users“.

The web is long past the days of animations of skulls on fire and cute dogs running across the screen. In the last year, the percentage of total US internet users using broadband grew from 20% to 60%. We’re well into the information age, and we have quite a few options of how content is served to us:

1. Streaming Video - YouTube, Google Videos
2. Streaming Music - Pandora, Launch.com
3. Streaming Text - Info tickers, RSS, sports scores

I’d love to see more wineries using these new types of media to interact with their customers. Some ideas for interactive content:

1. Process of winemaking: I’m a tech geek, so I have no idea how wine gets made. I’d love to see a winery put up a video of the whole wine-making process - from seed-planting to bottling. That’s an instant connection I’d make with their wine.
2. Virtual Winery Tour: Being an online consumer, I’d love to see how beautiful the winery is. That would give me an added incentive to visit them when I’m in the area.
3. Wine Music: Early last year, Mercedes decided to release a monthly compilation of songs that inspired Mercedes drivers. This compilation now evokes strong memories for Mercedes owners and gives them a way of relive their passion when they hear these songs. Wineries can also use this tactic, providing wine enthusiasts with sounds worth drinking to.
4. Tasting Room Webcam: A bit voyeuristic, but nonetheless, wouldn’t it be great to show people what they’re missing?
5. Viral Videos: They’re everywhere. Usually having nothing to do with the product, but with clever product placement, these are the videos you just can’t get out of your head and have manic email-forwarding syndrome.

Here’s are two wine making videos that I found on YouTube and Google Video:

It’s all about making that special connection with your customer. Why not use the advances in web technologies to help you do that?

a) the consumer recognizes the label and remembers that they had enjoyed that wine somewhere or with someone, or

b) they find the label appealing to begin with.

Both of these scenarios have a great deal to do with design. In the first place, an interesting packaging/label treatment can work wonders for your brand integrity. It can shift your price point, attract a different demographic, and it should certainly reflect the way your website looks.

I would always encourage clients to design their sites with the colors and dominant characteristics of their bottle labels and overall identity. While this ideal of brand consistency is viewed by many in the wine industry as “corporate”, I must insist there is nothing wrong with a sleek, well carried out identity for a winery.

Clients continue to ask for a site that does not look corporate, and I do not blame them for that. What they mean by this is: “Don’t make my special, one-of-a-kind-winery look like a national macro-brewery with 238 locations.” Once I understood what wineries were asking of designers, I could then begin to understand where they were coming from. However, I do think the miscommunication occurs in the client’s definition of corporate. If by corporate, you mean:

a) a clean, overall feel to the site with a sophistication that separates you from the competition,

b) an attractive consistent color palette,

c) one or two fonts tastefully used,

d) a consideration given to negative space and layout,

e) and photos that are shot by something other than a 3.0 megapixel point and shoot in midday sunlight,

Then you are misinformed about the meaning of the word corporate, or at least what it has come to mean in the world of design. To me, “corporate” means a lack of connection with the customer base, a site that is too big and disconnected to navigate, and usually bland or uninspired color schemes or page layouts. It does mean, however that the brand, no matter how bland, is carried across uniformly. What can we learn from this?

Combine consistency with good visual ideas. A myriad of beautiful wine brands with a ton of potential (graphically speaking, in this case) exist out there. More often than not, their site does not carry the ideas their bottle label puts forth (and the inverse case often occurs as well). If it does keep it consistent and is still not visually effective, it may be time to re-design your bottle label. You have to spend money to make money, folks.

Refrain from putting bad or low res personal pictures up on your winery sites. If you must, put these amateur photos in a special sub-section of the site dubbed “Wine Journal” or some other moniker that suggests a homemade spin on photography. In this case, the photos become a great sense of your humanity, the people behind the brand. People like to know the people but want to see you presented with quality.

At the same time: avoid using photos not taken by a professional for your web banners, your splash images on your homepage, or any other main area of the site. Using these types of images in high traffic areas of your site can confuse the consumer and make them lose confidence in your brand quality. If you aren’t going to spend the money to hire a photographer, then they may not spend the money on your Zin. People relate quality of your images to quality of your brand. If you do not have high res images, we or other services can help provide great stock photos for you.

We work in an market where Quality is the law of the land, more-so than most other industries. We measure our success in dollars per milliliter. Don’t dilute your wine brand; use top notch images to present your caliber.

Sean Harold
Senior Graphic Designer
Inertia Beverage Group
sean@inertiabev.com

paul@inertiabev.com.

—Paul Mabray - CEO