WINE AND SOCIAL MEDIA: A GOOD PAIRING?

“The first rule is, there are no rules…”

Wine journalist Jamie Goode of wineanorak.com gave a presentation earlier this year at a London wine conference that included the advice, “Social media is not magic, nor is it just a fad.”

Though they can’t solve all your problems, Twitter and Facebook are here to stay (at least for the foreseeable future), and wine producers, importers and vendors can use these tools to add some personality to an otherwise often intimidating…and dare I say, stuffy…business.

Yet Goode’s presentation also highlighted something that can be difficult for businesses investing time and money on maintaining a Facebook site or building up a following on Twitter. “It resists measurement,” Goode says. And: “You can’t do social media well under the pressure of achieving results.” Okay, but we’re bound to ask next: isn’t “achieving results” the purpose of any marketing strategy?

The strange thing about social media, though, is that it’s not just a marketing strategy, nor is it just branding. Social media, as it functions in the business world (and, arguably, in the personal world), is some sort of branding-marketing-communications-outreach hybrid for which we don’t yet have rules (weirdly quoting “Fightclub,” Goode also tells us, “The first rule is, there are no rules). That makes people very excited and very nervous at the same time.

In wine, more than most other industries, traditional tastemakers such as famous critics (Robert Parker, etc) and established news sources (Wine Spectator, the New York Times food and drink page) have long dominated opinion. But social media evens the playing field; all of a sudden, anyone can have their say—and people just might listen.

According to a 2010 study by Seattle social media marketing firm Lift9, there are over 7,000 wine tweets a day and over 1,300 wine-focused blogs. In addition, 700,000 people watch wine-related videos each month, though most are of the humorous variety, like “Borat’s Guide to Wine Tasting.” So there are a lot of folks out there looking to learn about wine and share their own experiences. What does this mean for wine producers, importers, and vendors?

In one sense, it’s an advertiser’s dream: self-selecting consumers receive targeted information that leads them to your company’s website, your company’s news, and your company’s products. And for those who believe in the power of branding, social media is the ideal way to turn your brand or store into an online entity that communicates with its costumers, press and others in the field in a way that reflects its own “personality” and ethos. As Goode says: “People get a more rounded view of who you are.”

But in the wine industry, this all plays out a little differently. The most important wine-buying sector—baby boomers—isn’t the same sector that’s spending all their time on Twitter and Facebook (namely, college students and twenty-somethings). But establishing a presence in social media now will not only lure in a new generation of wine lovers, but it will also make it easier later on as the platforms become more crowded and those for whom Facebook is more natural than face-to-face age, and presumably, start buying wine.

Founder of UK supper club “The Underground Restaurant,” Kerstin Rodgers, (also known as Ms. MarmiteLover and named one of London’s 1000 most influential people this year by the Evening Standard), encourages social media users to expand outside their own industry. “Don’t just talk to people in the same business as you,” she says. “Make your tweets varied and cultivate people who are geographically local to you.”

One drawback—a drawback I don’t necessarily see people discussing in their articles hailing social media as the future of all communication—is social media’s constant demand and rather addictive nature. At what cost to their marketing and communications employees are wineries “building a virtual buzz?” Rodgers also writes: “The best blog posts are often written at 2am in your pyjamas.” For those of us who’d rather be sleeping at two a.m. in our pajamas, this 24-hour schedule of around-the-world updates can be difficult to keep up with.

If you leave the office at five p.m. and don’t tweet until the next morning at 9:30 after settling in at work, you’re certainly missing some important conversations and updates. (Those in Napa Valley may feel especially behind when the workday in France is long gone by the time they arrive!) But if you do bring your work home with you, social media style, you’ll end up feeling like you’re never finished. There’s always one more person to tweet at, one more post to “like”… Building an online presence is time-consuming, but it shouldn’t be life-consuming.

The main point of all this: businesses like rules, and social media doesn’t quite have them—yet. It’s better to have personality on Twitter and Facebook, but too much personality can make those in charge of your “brand” very nervous. In the wine world, the main audience isn’t as “plugged in” as in many industries—but that doesn’t mean social media is unimportant. Remember Twitter isn’t just a marketing tool, so don’t use it that way. Finally: once you do “plug in,” remember to unplug every once in a while, too. Maybe leave the two a.m. blog posts to those who are doing that for a living. You can comment and re-tweet it in the morning.

Written by Erin Becker, Research and Innovation for Andes Wines, graduated with a degree in literature and creative writing from the University of North Carolina, where she was also co-founder and editor-in-chief of Campus BluePrint magazine and co-founder of an Arts and Cultural Policy think tank.

Andes Wines
andes@andeswines.com
(56) 2-3702997
twitter: @andeswines.com