Joel’s Blog

This week was the Wine Industry Technology Symposium (WITS) and last week was Inertia Beverage Group's DTC Symposium.  At both venues I gave a talk about social media (the term that has been hijacked by Web2.0) and why the wine industry needs to pay attention. My bottom line points are simple.  I've written about and preached on the "Wine Life Value Chain" where I talk about how the strength of a relationship basically has direct correlation to influencing a wine buyer.  The closer you are, sociallogically, to the source of a wine recommendation the faster and more likely you are to buy it.  So with that theorum guiding my thoughts we look at social media. Social Media is basically conversations online, but the nice thing for wine (or bad) is that "word-of-mouth" becomes lightning quick and globally scalable.  So get on board and incorporate it into your business. The reason for this post is we basically had a case study in the power of social media yesterday with Twitter and the wine crew (or it seemed like the wine "hit men/women" on Twitter yesterday!).  Here's what happened. The scene starts with Jill finding a wine writer in Florida at Tallahassee.com using the pseudonym of one of our fellow wine bloggers (DrDebs).  Jill tweets "Hey, someone is hijacking DrDeb's good name" and to boot she was reviewing TERRIBLE wines and giving them good ratings - Yellow Tail, et al. A bunch of people immediately flocked overthere to check it out and left some choice comments for Fake DrDebs. Next, one of Jill's "followers", Brittany aka WineQT, is from Florida and notices that the reviews from Fake DrDebs is eerily similar to a newsletter written by Nat Maclean.  Sure enough, it was plagarized!  We quickly see WineQT tweet out that "Fack DrDebs ripped it off!".  Subsequently, Jeff Stai of Twisted Oak Winery sees this, logs a complaint with the website "Tallahassee.com".  Within an hour the post is removed from the site for copyright violation! Within an hour, a small post about wine that was plagarized was noticed by someone in LA, recognized as a fake post by someone in Oakland, and taken down by someone in Florida!  THAT, my friends, is Social Media.  That is word-of-mouth to the 100th degree.  And that is what wine companies can tap into if they just take the time to learn how! Cheers!