Outside the venue was dark,
the food inside was delicious and,
oh yeah, the wine was good too.
Last Friday, P.S. I Love You held their 4th annual Dark & Delicious event in Alameda. Now, I have nothing against Alameda, but it’s not exactly the easiest place to get around. In fairness, this comedy of errors is mostly my own fault, but the fact that this was the first time I’ve been to this event and the first time I’ve driven in this area of the bay, didn’t help matters. I left my map on my desk, went the wrong way and ended up driving 15 miles out of my way to get back. Add to that a very scattered evening where I found out at the last minute that I was attending alone, was stuck in Friday traffic running on empty in both the gas tank and my stomach, and I quickly became grumpy.
After arriving nearly an hour late, hungry and not too happy, I almost ended up wandering around in the dark. And damn, was it ever dark—no street lights anywhere. Could they have found a more secluded place for 500 people to locate in the dark? Just sayin’. A single lone placard flashed in front of my headlights for a second to say that I had arrived at the right place. That and the two hundred other cars in area. I parked, but only after a bit of wandering, did I discover that the entrance was three-quarters of the way from where I parked around this warehouse that the Rock Wall Wine Company calls home. More wandering in the dark. I could have walked one-quarter of the way in the opposite direction, except that it was blocked. Of course. At least the seclusion allowed them to crank up the music. And hey, if you didn’t mind 80’s and 90’s R&B, it was great!
read more…
Part 4
This is the fourth in a series of six articles on questions you should ask when developing a social media strategy for your winery. This article is about control, and how you will deal with your brand’s perception. If this is the first article you found, you may want to start at the beginning with the first article on goals.
Developing Your Winery’s Social Media Strategy: Control
How will you maintain control of your brand?
Within the realm of social media most actions are irrelevant or out of your control. That’s the yellow sphere in the graphic below. This includes who tries your wines, what they write about them and who will read it.
Then there are those things about your brand that you can control, represented by the red sphere. This is a relatively small portion which includes the wine itself, your packaging and visual design and presenting a consistent message about your wines and your brand. This where a tool such as OwnIT and Cruvee can help. They can help you manage how your wine is represented online.
And then there is that green area—your sphere of influence. While you can’t control anyone in the blogosphere, you certainly can influence people. This sphere of influence is greater than your sphere of control, but is smaller than that which we cannot control. (It kind of reminds of the serenity prayer: grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…) It is here that you can have the greatest impact on your social media success. But that leads to another question…
Part 3
This is the third in a series of six articles on questions you should ask when developing a social media strategy for your winery. This article is about which tools to use. You may want to start at the beginning with the first article on goals.
Developing Your Winery’s Social Media Strategy: Communities
Where should you be in the social media universe?
Take a look at this fairly comprehensive infographic on all the social platforms for conversation. Kind of overwhelming, isn’t it? So how do you know where to begin? Well, let’s start with a simple question: what communities are your audience using? It would only make sense to become part of the same communities as your customers, but you want to be sure it’s worth your efforts.
Here’s another infographic—though somewhat dated—that gives you an idea of some of the major players in the social media arena and how many users they have. What this doesn’t tell you is who is using these platforms and where. After all, joining Qzone.qq.com won’t do you much good unless you can read Chinese and are planning to sell to the Chinese market. For most wineries, I think it’s safe to agree that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and your own blog are great starting points. There are other communities, such as the Wine Consortium, Wine 2.0, CellarTracker, Snooth, Cork’d and others, but I think I’ll save that for another post.
