Social Media and the Wine Industry: A New Era(1)
On occasion I write purely for the wine industry, and today I'd like to address the role of social media in the wine industry. Whenever I write these kinds of things, I like to remind people that by day I run a company called HYDRANT that gets paid a lot of money to help big brands be extremely successful marketing, selling, and engaging with their customers online. In short, what follows below isn't just random opinion.
Let's be clear, first, what I mean by social media, a phrase that has become widely used but perhaps not fully understood by everyone who uses it. Social media are those channels of interaction on the internet where the public has a voice. Any outlet at which an ordinary person, free of charge, can say something, create a piece of content, react to something that someone else has created, or establish relationships with people and companies falls under the banner of social media. This, of course includes blogs and Twitter, and social networking sites like Facebook, but also bulletin boards and forums, location based services like Foursquare, image posting services like Instagram, and several other esoteric services.
Of late there have been a number of blog conversations about what wineries should be doing, if anything, about social media. Fellow blogger Joe Roberts, of 1 Wine Dude, wrote a piece entitled "Where Can Wineries Really Innovate? In Engaging the People Who Actually Drink the Stuff!" in which he accurately describes many wineries' approach to social media as some combination of fear, scorn, exhaustion, or 'can't-be-bothered.'
Joe is correct to suggest that most wineries suffer from a deficit of consumer engagement in social media and are missing a huge opportunity as a result. This is nothing new, of course. The wine industry has been one of the slowest industries to adopt internet-based technologies, barely edging ahead of pawn shops, bowling alleys, and dry cleaners in having web sites, e-mail addresses, and actually using them both.
Even though those folks making wine are often farmers first, with little interest, and sometimes less ability than they might desire to engage with technology, that no longer justifies the lack of adoption that still plagues the wine industry. In an increasingly globalized world, where consumers are living, learning, connecting, and buying online, anyone who wants to sell a product in a competitive marketplace must be engaging their customers online.
As little as five years ago this wasn't true. But the world changes very quickly these days. The problem is, reality doesn't send you a memo before it changes. Just like it didn't send the people who made Rolodexes a note about their impending obsolescence. But you better believe that one day, the folks whose entire livelihood depended upon people buying rolodexes saw the writing on the wall. Perhaps just before they smacked right into it. Wineries that fail to comprehend the way the world is moving will quickly find their customers hanging out with someone else's bottle in hand.
