Thanks for stopping by again and adding some valuable info to the discussion. I believe I own you an apology for calling you out on twitter. Sorry for that misunderstanding. You’ve certainly made up for my first impression of you with all the responses to my posts. Much appreciated.

One of the issues with SM that many fail to look at is measuring the results of any campaign. Companies who don’t take the time and/or don’t use the proper tools to measure the effectiveness of their social media presence won’t know what works, what doesn’t work, nor how to leverage the most effective platforms. In vying for the Murphy-Goode job, I wanted to know how my actions translated into results in the form of new followers and votes on my video. I think these numbers show a clear correlation.

In the short length of time I had to organize my MG campaign, I was only able to utilize a few of the social media platforms currently available, along with good old-fashioned meet and greet, to help improve my standing as well as generate more buzz about the Murphy-Goode winery. There are lots of available platforms to help promote wine, along with tools to make your own platform if you can’t find the right niche, many that I didn’t have time to investigate. The fact that there are even more companies creating the tools to leverage SM says that all this excitement about this technology will not be a flash-in-the-pan. Exciting to be sure and I’m glad that we can be part of it.

If I didn’t have a prior commitment for this evening, I would have really enjoyed attending the WTIA event. Have fun tonight and be sure to share any new discoveries.

Cheers,
Eric

Nice post.

Everyone is working to figure out the social media space from large global agencies like WPP Group to small wine makers who “get it”. We all know Gary Vaynerchuk has killed it in the wine space working a good “hook” with his tasting rocks, Skittles, etc. and the naturally social – wine space.

For our little experiment with the Seattle Wine Awards, we signed up about 30 new winery Twitter accounts, added 568 followers, with 450+ Tweets using our official hash tag #seawineawards all in about four weeks. We did appreciate that you made it down to the event and added a fine blog post.

I have been to a ton of these social media events, but see a big hole in the analytics space. The whole game is to understand what works and what does not work – then you may optimize and create strong relationships.

The exception was Chris Brogan’s Inbound Marketing Summit http://www.inboundmarketing.com in S.F. this spring. They had a ton of companies like Radian6 , etc. presenting. These are good companies but their wares are out of the reach of small companies. There are effective ways to create almost an entire social media platform with out paying for the big guy’s fees if you have a little RSS knowledge and time.

We will see more at tomorrow night’s WTIA Social Media Event. Hope to see you there and good luck with the Goode wine competition. I see that they have created a huge buzz for a little bit of cash. Smart marketing.

Best, Tim Reha

Seattle Wine Awards

Even for me, the results of this social media campaign have been truly surprising and enlightening.