Wine Life Today|Adventures and opinions on wine, technology, and marketing

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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!

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This weekend was the Inertia Beverage “Direct to Consumer” Symposium. I had the pleasure of presenting one of the larger sessions called “Marketing on Social Networks” and basically took it a little more horizontal and spoke more on “Marketing in Social Media”.

I think the presentation went well but a few things we are very certain in my mind as I start to evangelize and encourage people to participate via the OpenWine Consortium social network - since marketing in social media is a sociology problem and not a technology problem, wine companies have more of a head start then they think. Sure there are a blizzard of tools out there, but what is happening is that these technologies are moving in a direction that allows the skills that every wine brand already has offline - building a community around their product and getting to know their customers - to leverage the Internet to build that community on a much larger scale. Thats the basic synergy with Inertia’s business model. Once that broader community is established beyond just the tasting room, the final step is translating the connections made into a wine sale. Without the technology to do that, a winery is pretty screwed.

I really wanted to wineries to feel a little more comfort then they seem to be. Two main reasons - 1) online social stuff is happening and fast, but its not replacing everything tomorrow and 2) There are ways for wineries to benefit even though they are wearing many different hats already (and many don’t involve sitting in front of a computer 25 hours a day). This is where my talk and my co-presenter - Gary Vaynerchuk - differ. Always one for a bit of hyperbole (go figure) Gary says - email is dead (for some and many millenials, yes, but not completely), you have to be on every network all the time, and you can’t control your brand (which I agree with but influence is different from control). Ah yes, and he believes that there is no role for PR anymore with the new technologies - a point we differ on, its changing but PR doesn’t stand for Press Release so having built billion-dollar brands I can tell you PR is vital to a strong brand. Without PR there would be no Gary Vaynerchuk. PR is the art of image shaping and influence and there is alway a role for that. Most people have to outsource it, but others control it themselves (GV obviously controls his own PR). Anyway, long discussion.

Overall it was a good talk and hopefully we can get calmer heads to prevail and really help wineries to move forward with online strategies rather then just use “the sky is falling” discussions.

Well, now the in-laws are gone, daycare is back on (they had a week off for vacation after the 4th), so I have to try to get back into the groove!

Cheers!

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Here it is.  Wine Life Today in all its glory.  Just spent a little time updating the look and adding “My Story” (which I happen to think summarizes whats going on here pretty well).

I like the Digg-clone for wine that was formally WLT, but I have bigger fish to fry.  I’ll soon make an announcement of what my next move is in the wine industry but I can assure you things are gonna change - there is a Vincent in the wine industry now and I intend to make that mean something.

Cubicles suck and as of July 3rd, the paperwork I handed in is my official “Hasta La Vista” to cubicle nation(hence my “fugitive of a cubicle nation” tag) but there’s no denying that we all may have to work in them some day.  My intention is to make sure that if/when I do, its on my terms.

I don’t feel like I’m going it alone though.  As word trickled out that I’ve made a move to the “free” world, friends from all over (virtual and real world) have offered me great advice, support, and love.  This is going to be fun!

When I read Inertia Beverage’s announcement of a change of CEO it was not only interesting but actually a very wise move by the current CEO and a friend of mine Paul Mabray.  I don’t want to get into a long post on my business philosophy but I thought I should post a short commentary as I saw some conversation breaking out that made it seem as if this was a negative thing.

I know many times press releases put alot of spin on a bad situation to make it seem like a good one.  I know because part of my role in various marketing jobs had been to do just that and I always put out the story before someone makes a "scoop" and spins it negatively first.  Thats just good PR.

But I view Paul’s announcement differently.  I’ve been in High-Tech since the 1980’s even before I was in college (when I was working for a software retail company).  But more importantly, my view is shaped by something my mentor, Don McKinney, imparted on me when I first moved to Silicon Valley.  Basically, if you want your company to really succeed you first have to recognize that the company will require different CEOs and RARELY does the same person have the personality to be all of these.

1. the "$0 to $10M" CEO - this CEO thrives on the startup situation.  Risk taker, entrepreneurial, big-game hunter, and business developer (as well as visionary and marketeer), this CEO is usually one for the founders.  The key here is to have a sales person in this role and drive the initial products to be customer-oriented with a saavy product team.  This CEO recognizes that getting A+ players on the team is more important then having the right structure or hierarchy.
2. the "$10M to $100M" CEO - This CEO can take those first few BIG customers and nourish them such that they can be cash cows for the company.  At the same time he/she starts to pull in trusted sales and business development folks as well as marketing folks to compliment development and empowers them to do their job.  What can happen to a company that may cause it to fail is if CEO #1 thinks he/she is CEO #2 but isn’t really and has trouble either getting help to create new business, create a polished brand, or both because he/she still thinks he/she has all the best ideas and no one else can do it for them.  Its the beginning of scaling the company.
3. the "$100M to $1B" CEO - This CEO recognizes that the company is going to go BIG TIME and needs processes that allow the organization to scale.  Oh the dreaded "P" word, but its true.  At this point, customer care is still job #1, but setting up the structure to scale operations is becoming more and more important and this CEO needs to allow that to go to a professional A+ COO type.  Again, failure can happen here when a CEO doesn’t appreciate what an operationally oriented person’s value is (i.e. can make the organization scale in ways the CEO never dreamed up).  This CEO also has to be able to attract the investment levels that typically the founding CEO doesn’t have access to.  This is usually when you see a CEO finally step aside but it can be too late.
4. the "$1B to $10B" CEO - Now your talking about the professional CEO that you see at the top of Cisco, GE, and companies like that.  Charismatic and oozing leadership that can rival Bill Clinton in his prime.  This CEO still focuses on his top customers but there usually are so many that the top 10 are likely the only he/she gets to visit.  This CEO could be very very smart but is really removed from day-to-day so is fed development information and status from a staff of A+ lieutenants but likely has a big company filled almost 50% with B players (inevitable at this size).  The hope is that CEO #3 created solid enough processes that the company will thrive and compensate for some incompetence that has inevitably creeped into the the ranks of the company.

Thats the idea in a nutshell.  You can move the revenue bands up and down a little but this is generally true.  I had this wisdom passed on to me in the early 1990s and I’ve seen it proven out time and time again.  What I see in the Inertia announcement is a smart man that wants to see his company do great things.  But I say "smart man" because from my conversations with him, he intuitively sensed he wasn’t CEO #2 or #3, checked his ego at the door, and did the right thing.  He’s still working in there directing strategy and given his history in the wine business thats probably a good move.

The employees of Inertia should be excited.  As a Silicon Valley veteran, I can tell you more often then not that a move like this initiated by the CEO prevented this from happening later in your lives when the Board of Directors forces this decision (and they always do) because the CEO isn’t scaling the company for the big time.

Cheers!

I’m in the process of closing down Wine Life Today the social bookmarking service and making it into my personal blog so that I can dedicate my time to creating real change and real value for the entire wine industry.

WLT is a two year old project that had a decent amount of success and even generated some advertising revenue which is cool.  But I never intended it to be a revenue source as much as it was a learning experience.  I LOVE the wine community and I spend tremendous amounts of time creating and learning from my creations/experiences.  So I always thought that creating things for the wine world would be the best of all worlds - I could meet more and more people in the wine world all while having my creative outlet.

Recently, OpenWine Consortium, a brainchild of mine that was inspired by the need of some industry friends I met through my other creations (this blog and WLT), has emerged as an unmitigated success.  With really no marketing whatsoever, it has garnered attention across all corners of the world, been written up in Wines & Vines magazine, signed up nearly 1000 members in less than three months, and really become something I can spend GOBS of time working on.  Its special, it fills a need that the industry has, and most of all, its something I’m very proud of but believe it can be so much more.

I believe OpenWine Consortium is 10 times more useful at 1000 then it was at 100 in terms of affecting change in the industry.  Real business connections are being made, value is being created through the exchange of expertise and advice, and new ideas are being spawned just through the interaction.

Guess what…I also believe that is OWC were 10,000 people is would be 100 times more useful and would create 100 time the value it does today.  So I’m setting a goal for myself and the OWC community.  The industry needs this site to be at 10,000 members from every corner of the globe to make it an invaluable place to be on the Internet if you are in the wine trade.  This goal is SOOOO doable its rediculous.  There are tens of thousand of wine brands and just an un-Godly number of service businesses that work with those brands and ALL the employees/owners/proprietors of all these businesses can benefit from the OWC community - the interaction, the community, the technology exchange.

So that is my goal today.  I’m very proud that we’ve gained 1000 members.  But I’m going to dedicate the time and effort needed to really move the needle in the industry and I hope others in the community who see the value will do the same.

I’ll start with something simple - a Logo that others can get behind.  Some good friends have put time into creating a logo and I”ll get it out there soon.  Look for the preview here.

What are some other things I can do?  Partnerships with others in the trade, training to properly use OWC as a tool for trade associations, implementing the changes that the membership wants to see on the network.

Me and about 1000 of my industry friends should be able to make a difference so lets see where this takes us!

Cheers!

(almost makes me want to say “To infinity and beyond!”…but I’ll refrain)

Just read an very interesting essay that makes parallels between blogging and the open source movement in software.  There was a discussion about a year ago in the wine blogosphere regarding professional versus amateur and what the distinction is.  This essay points out some really interesting ideas relating to this topic is worth a read.  In particular, I enjoy these passages:

First this on that actually relates open-source to blogging

Like open source, blogging is something people do themselves, for free, because they enjoy it. Like open source hackers, bloggers compete with people working for money, and often win. The method of ensuring quality is also the same: Darwinian. Companies ensure quality through rules to prevent employees from screwing up. But you don’t need that when the audience can communicate with one another. People just produce whatever they want; the good stuff spreads, and the bad gets ignored. And in both cases, feedback from the audience improves the best work.

Then there is the comments on amateurs versus professionals…

There’s a name for people who work for the love of it: amateurs. The word now has such bad connotations that we forget its etymology, though it’s staring us in the face. "Amateur" was originally rather a complimentary word. But the thing to be in the twentieth century was professional, which amateurs, by definition, are not.
That’s why the business world was so surprised by one lesson from open source: that people working for love often surpass those working for money. Users don’t switch from Explorer to Firefox because they want to hack the source. They switch because it’s a better browser.

More great insights here…

Actually, the fad is the word "blog," at least the way the print media now use it. What they mean by "blogger" is not someone who publishes in a weblog format, but anyone who publishes online. That’s going to become a problem as the Web becomes the default medium for publication. So I’d like to suggest an alternative word for someone who publishes online. How about "writer?"
Those in the print media who dismiss the writing online because of its low average quality are missing an important point: no one reads the average blog. In the old world of channels, it meant something to talk about average quality, because that’s what you were getting whether you liked it or not. But now you can read any writer you want. So the average quality of writing online isn’t what the print media are competing against. They’re competing against the best writing online. And, like Microsoft, they’re losing.

And finally, this passage is probably my favorite…

The third big lesson we can learn from open source and blogging is that ideas can bubble up from the bottom, instead of flowing down from the top. Open source and blogging both work bottom-up: people make what they want, and the best stuff prevails.
Does this sound familiar? It’s the principle of a market economy. Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like communist states.

This essay really is worth a read.  Its a couple years old by Paul Graham, an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer.  Wine bloggers are a very powerful force especially when you consider that its driven pretty much by love of the community’s past time rather than money.  And like open source, the job of following and documenting wine requires more than a single entity with several dozen people.  Its going to take a cast of thousands with a shared passion and the best will naturally rise to the top.

Enjoy the Wine Life!

There are lots of things going on in my life these days. Very busy times. But for now, its a good busy…

My second daughter is due any week now (officially March 4th, but the last Dr visit said the baby was already 6 lbs and Kelly is petite so she won’t be in there too much longer…).

In my life I find I draw inspiration from many places. Usually my family and friends. A few weeks ago the wine community inspired me. I’m hatching an idea. I’ve spoken to a few of you about it and I’ll more than likely speak to a few more. But for now, I’ll use the pages of WLT to chronicle what I’m doing with my idea and its evolution.

Its amazing the what the meshing of a passion with a profession can accomplish. Its a powerful thing when that gets match with inspiration.

I have an idea…

Thats right. I said it. Although it may not be what you’re thinking.

Can you guess what’s wrong with tasting note web sites? Exactly, none (and I mean N-O-N-E) have reached anything close to critical mass of users to make their notes useful. Why is that? Well there are too many wines every year to have multiple reviews per wine. So every wine tasting note site tries to get their hands around an unbounded number of wines and create a tasting note site that is actually useful. NONE have succeeded and even the biggest are only useful for organization purposes (CellarTracker) not for looking up wines.

One approach with promise is Snooth, but they’re actually smarter about it. Its not about tasting notes, its more about personalizing wine selections for you and if there are tasting notes to help then great. I actually like that concept. They’ll bring in a gambit of ratings and notes and attempt to normalize them and match a wine to your liking. This is (obviously) not a tasting note record keeping site but it leverages that function.

So what’s this about “Freebasing”? Well, if you haven’t heard, there is another approach to gathering data out there and they’re gaining steam. Freebase is a massive database that is completely open so that a site can use as its database as a backend. Then anyone can query this DB and get at that information or submit information and contribute to the collective. Also, tags in that information make connection automatically regardless of the original source. The best explanation of this is here, at Tim O’Rielly’s blog (the guy who originally coined “web 2.0”). Its an instance of the semantic web (what some call “web 3.0”). The advantage? Since a tasting notes are not a business but a feature, if all the sites created real business plans with tasting note functions as a part then there wouldn’t be a need to hide the notes in an isolated database. Sure, protect your user DB but submit your notes to Freebase. Gary V can go on ranting and raving with the Vayniacs, Snooth can continue making educated selections for you, WineQ could add value to their custom wine clubs. These are all sites that don’t depend on notes as the core of the business. One thing I won’t get into is this aspect (and the power of Freebase) - if Winehiker were to create an application that was a database of trails in California and some wines he experienced there, then Freebase would automagically create a query result for any other application that connects wines related to the notes Winehiker made about his travels and the wines on each of those trails with other wine notes submitted from these sites. You would start to see a world evolving of things connected to wines and trips and tastes that you’ve never imagined before…but thats a whole different post!

Anyway, Freebase allows sites like these tasting note sites to be built and while they individually create communities for whatever purpose they are all adding to Borg collective known as Freebase.

There is one other approach – creating a micro-format that makes a standard format that allows any note written out there be crawled and scanned into a DB automatically…what-ever. Thats never going to happen unless Microsoft, Apple, and every other user interface company decides they want to support MicroFormat for wine tasting notes. Chances of that happening? Pretty much Zilch…

It would be far easier for other sites that have note functionality to migrate their DB to Freebase, effectively merging all note DBs, and write database calls to the Freebase API rather than their own MySQL “Silo” of information. You think CellarTracker is cool? Imagine every note ever entered into a site on the Internet, regardless of the site, being available to Snooth or WineQ or any other site that wants it!! I’m an Alpha member of Freebase and I can attest that its difficult to explain the potential impact of this site, which brings me to the practical, marketing side of my brain – I’ve seen too many technologies that were just too far ahead and couldn’t survive until the world caught up. I hope Freebase doesn’t go that route…

Every wine note site in the world should be Freebasing!

Enjoy the Wine Life!

Second edition of Wine website video reviews – what I’ll call vReviews for short – comes with my first impressions of Wine Spies. Wine Spies contacted me to see if I would review their site. Here is a First Impression review – a review no longer than 5 minutes to give my raw, unadulterated reaction to the site.

I think, as a marketing professional by trade, that the first encounter with a site is hyper-critical. If you don’t convey your value within the first 5 minutes of a visitor (in this case, me) then it would be a little much to expect that visitor to come back, let alone spend money on the site.

Have a look at my first impression review of theWineSpies.com, vReview #2.

With this review, I’m also going to start a rating system. Rate 1 to 5 stars. Check out the video to understand why I give WineSpies.com 3–Stars. For reference, that means I may come back and make a purchase but I’m not over-the-top compelled to try it out.

Well, I’m seeing a light at the end of the tunnel with my myriad of projects so I thought I’d post a little bit on a topic I’ve been thinking about for a few weeks. I guess I’ve noticed a subtle but disturbing trend
in the world of Wine 2.0. We are just starting to chip away at the social networking technology world as it
relates to wine (we’ve even got the cool moniker of Wine 2.0 to describe these tools) and it really does open up alot of exciting possibilities particularly if you’re a techie marketing person like me.

First, what do these sites do? Well, whether its Twitter or Pownce or Jaiku, Facebook or MySpace, most of these “social” sites basically help you to use online technology to find people with common interests and share ideas with them. When you verticalize that concept into, say, wine, that broad, general, somewhat useless “tell everyone what I’m doing all the time” actually becomes quite useful. I’ve decided to use Facebook as the epicenter for my wine contacts (that use online stuff - mostly blogger friends). Doing that I find that I get quick recommendations, find out about events, hear about people coming to town, all with that baseline of wine connecting me with these people. “Its social…demented and sad, but social”. Wine is a good topic to use these technologies for because its inherently social and so even before the Internet existed there was already a global conversation and community around wine. New technologies are just facilitating.

(side note: someone mentioned to me that a good way to help understand why these things are popular with kids is to imagine what you would’ve done if you could do all this stuff before you could drive a car - you could ‘keep in touch’ and interact without relying on your parents for a ride…I guess I could see that).

So the social nature of wine in meshing very well with new social technologies. The challenge that the wine marketer needs to meet is simple - how do I get tapped in and have my wine company join the global conversation? How do you spark a conversation between producer, consumer, and marketer/advertiser? How do you join your brand into the conversation in this online world? If social technologies like blogs and social networks are moving from broadcast (I print/televise and you watch/read) to conversation and interaction then marketing has to transform from “impressions” and “eyeballs” into conversation and interaction (I have a many thoughts on this area as a marketing professional). A marketing campaign is not as much about repeating my brand so many times that you’ll never forget it as it is about doing something that gets your brand accepted into the conversation.

This is where Wine 2.0 is starting to falter and lose some steam. I’m going to pick on Gary Vaynerchuk a little here but first, I will say some positive things about him. He’s a good one to use because he’s put himself up front for marketing his business in some brilliant ways and in other ways he somewhat falls short - really representing the faltering I am seeing in Wine 2.0 based marketing.

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