Are We Engaged Yet?

I had just finished writing my presentation for the U.S. Drinks Conference and was reflecting on a few recent conversations I had on social media marketing and it dawned on me that we’ve turned a corner.

Within the past two days I’ve spoken to self-described Luddites or representatives thereof (guy has his secretary print out emails for him), expert practitioners of the craft, and a bunch of folks somewhere in the middle.

That whole spectrum will always be there, but what I realized is that I’m no longer an evangelist having to explain the new thing.  We’ve finally reached a point where at least everyone’s heard of social media. And while they might be a bit hazy on the definition and terminology (social media, social networks, word of mouth, viral marketing etc.) there’s pretty much universal recognition of its existence and importance.

That’s progress.  In spite of the few comments you still hear that “this Internet thing is gonna blow over” I think most people in the marketing business recognize that there’s been a sea change in the way we need to communicate with our customers, prospects and suspects. 

Simply stated, it’s no longer a situation where marketers are shouting at the multitudes and hoping someone hears and maybe even pays attention, but rather a conversation among and between people whose actions indicate they share an interest in a subject.  Whether they’ve become a Fan of a Facebook page, bookmark a forum or newsgroup, read or get an RSS feed from a blog, they…WE… all have one thing in common…we’re ENGAGED.

Engagement, however, is a two way street and has an implicit agreement that the commitment is mutual.  So it’s incumbent on marketers to recognize that at its very core, social media is personal.  Even a brand with a quarter million Facebook fans has to make each one of them feel an individual connection.

Coming back to my intro thought here, we have turned a corner, but we still have a long road in front of us.  The challenge now is how to scale personal communications within larger communities. 

That’s one of the subjects we’ll be hearing a lot about at the USDC…I’m psyched to hear what Gary Vaynerchuk has to say, as well as the folks on the panel I’m moderating on social media.  So Tyler Colman, Colleen Graham, Nora Favelukes and Carter Reum….what do you think?

Sphere: Related Content

Virtual Vino Seminar at Vino 2010

Wow! I’ve had some time to reflect on Thursday’s panel “Virtual Vino” at the Italian Trade Commission’s Vino 2010 event. It was standing room only and great to see so many familiar faces in the audience. The feedback we got was extremely positive and clearly reinforced just how important…and controversial…social media is in the U.S. wine market.

vino10 on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

With only two hours for presentations and discussions, it was a pretty big subject to cover, so we were really able to only touch on some of the more “sensitive” issues. The overriding theme centered around the implications of the democratization of information created by this thing known World Wide Web or informally as the Wild Wild West.

Fred Plotkin asked the first audience question which led us right into the conundrum of how blogging is impacting traditional journalism and where the line demarcating fact from opinion lies.

I’ve been thinking about all the ramifications of Fred’s question which initially centered on the idea that “authenticity” was a critical issue to Millennials. He asked how I defined the word. And as I’ve had the chance to cogitate on it I realize there are two definitions that need to be addressed individually. One is in regard to authenticity as “honesty”, and that is more a function of voice of the writer/blogger. The second relates to authenticity as “truth”: facts and disclosure about the source of the content.

As to the writer’s voice, the conversation at the seminar revolved around the subjectivity of wine criticism and review. Your “notes of tobacco, tar and leather” may be someone else’s “bold, assertive and ripe fruit.” No one is “right” and a numerical rating scale is inherently flawed in that it presupposes the reviewer is comparing all wines against the same set of criteria. There’s been a lot of discussion on wine blogs about evaluations focusing more on a scale of “I like it” to “I hate it”. It’s perhaps more of a useful way to rank (not rate) the personal appeal of all wines against what is inherently a complex of personal opinions. At the end of the day, a Parker 94 and a 1WineDude “I really liked Wine A better than Wine B” are equally useful. The former more so from a commercial perspective and the retail price elite wines can command in the marketplace, the latter because I’ve found from personal experience that Joe Roberts and I share similar preferences in wine. (but Joe's opinion is free, Parker's you have to pay for)

Regarding facts and disclosure, the operative word is transparency. The FTC has mandated that bloggers must disclose the source of samples. (Interestingly, traditional journalists are not held to the same standards.) Many if not most bloggers have been doing this routinely anyway. But it came to a head with Tyler Colman’s (aka Dr. Vino) outing of Robert Parker and The Wine Advocate’s inconsistency in enforcing its own policies on samples and trips. The original post thread begins here and there is also a good summary published on Slate by Mike Steinberger. My personal opinion is that we will look back on Tyler’s post as being the point at which the influence of established wine critics and journalists crossed with the influence of the online world. And let me be perfectly clear here. It may have seemed that the whole seminar was saying that Andy Blue's self-described dinosaurs are going extinct, but that's not what we were saying at all. The point was the internet has created a new medium that enables regular folks to weigh in, and an audience that respects those opinions more highly than the traditional journalists. The very real problem faced by many traditional writers is how to get compensated for those skills and services they've honed over the years when arriviste bloggers don't expect to make money at all.

I’ll be writing more on this in my next post, but wanted to get this up in response to requests for access to the video archive of the session. http://bit.ly/9jXwou For those who want to see the slides I presented, they can be found here: http://bit.ly/bBm6hG. The Vintank report on Social Media in the Wine Industry, Tyler’s original post on the Robert Parker Kerfuffle and Mike Steinberger’s summary of the hoo-haw Dr. Vino created at http://www.slate.com/id/2229518/pagenum/all/ Sphere: Related Content

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

Great post today by Dr. Vino with a link to a very good summary post by Mike Steinberger on Slate that gives a well written overview of what I've termed the "Parker Kerfuffle".

For those not familiar with the specific issue this was a watershed moment in the evolution of the modern wine industry. Steininger titled it the democratization of wine drinking but I think it goes much further than that...it marks a tipping point in the democratization of wine evaluation, wine communications and wine marketing. And the ramifications are just beginning and will be felt far beyond our little wine and spirits industry.

OK, the king may not be dead, but Dr. Vino and Co. just pulled aside the green curtain and it turns out the king has what may become an incurable case of gout. Sphere: Related Content

Do Medals Matter?

Alder Yarrow of Vinography and Tyler Colman of Dr. Vino both posted today disparaging the value of medals from wine competitions based on a study published in the Journal of Wine Economics by Robert Hodgson professor emeritus of oceanography at Humboldt State University.

I commented on both posts from the perspective of a marketing guy. Bottom line, while Dr. Hodgson's paper makes a compelling point, it ignores the more practical side of the business.

In the U.S. the three-tier system has effectively put a roadblock in front of products from new or small producers. Without the leverage of the big multinationals at the distributor and by extension the retail level, the big challenge is not to produce a quality product; that's simple (but not easy!). Rather it's how to get through the distributor and retailer gatekeepers to get the product on the shelf and in front of the consumer.

And in both spirits and wine, a medal--whatever its provenance--is often an effective tool to get the retailer and distributor to take on the product. It is third party validation of quality that a small supplier can bring to bear that his own economic clout can't.

So at the end of the day, do medals mean anything even if they are not statistically valid evaluatons of product quality?

Call me narrow minded, but my answer is yes. So we recommend our clients take the practical conclusion from Dr. Hodgson's paper...that winning a Gold is a matter of chance as much as quality...and enter as many competitions as they can, and promote the gold medals they get to the trade. And once they get a gold...don't enter the competition again.

Need proof of this strategy? Look at Grey Goose. They won a gold from the BTI in 1998 and rode that medal to a $2 Billion sale. Valid award? Maybe. Good marketing strategy? You bet!

So, my POV is that in today's marketplace, a gold medal is a necessary but not sufficient tool. What Grey Goose did was brilliant for its time, but its not a repeatable strategy by new competitors.

The role of a medal in today's market is more for the trade than consumer...a tool (just one of many you'll need) to convince a distributor or retailer that your brand warrants a place on the shelf. Sphere: Related Content

Blogging, Forums and Journalism: Compare and Contrast

There's a fascinating thread going on at www.drvino.com regarding some apparently heavy handed editing at The Wine Advocate Bulletin Board edited by Mark Squires.
Schadenfreude acknowledged, but there's a legitimate debate here about journalism in blogs and forums/bulletin boards...do the same rules apply? And I'm talking not just about the core question of journalistic integrity and ethics, but the clear differentiation between fact and opinion. I posted a comment in the thread posing the question and I'm thinking about asking it again at the Tales of the Cocktail seminar I'm participating in...it'll be interesting to get feedback from real people as well as the blognoscenti.

I'm conflicted, how about you? Sphere: Related Content