Social Media and the Wine Industry: A New Era(2)
And before you say (ahem, Steve Heimoff) that a great score from a critic can solve this problem, I urge you to look at the hundreds of deep discounting and flash sale outlets for wine, whose primary selling tools (for the bottles that wineries are shoving their way as fast as they can sell them) happen to be critics scores. If those scores were worth something, then wineries would be selling all their wines through traditional (read: non-closeout) channels, not funneling them to outlets where they're lucky to recoup their costs. Sure, a 98 point score from the Wine Advocate will sell more wine than some outreach on Twitter, but this is the exception that proves the rule. If I had a dollar for every 94 point rated wine I've seen selling at 50% off its retail price in the last year, I could buy a case of Chateau Lafite.
For most wineries, points don't sell wines, relationships do. Relationships with people, and relationships with brands. In that way, nothing has changed, and nothing ever will. This is the way that marketing works. But the relationships that customers have with both people and brands are overwhelmingly shifting to social media, and this goes for wine as well. It may just not feel that way to most wineries yet, in the same way that the folks selling Rolodexes thought everything was perfectly fine in the few days before the Palm Pilot (or whatever electronic PDA-thing truly rang the death knell of a six pound barrel of business cards) hit the shelves.
Which brings me to something called Vintank Social Connect. I spent a little time this afternoon getting a tour of this free web application that is now in its second or third incarnation, and I have this simple thing to say about it.
Are you listening wine industry?
Any winery in the world that does not have a free account on this service, and does not spend at least an hour or two every week using it, is dumber than a bag of hammers.
Vintank's software offers wineries an incredibly sophisticated set of tools to monitor their brand presence in the sphere of social media, and to engage with their customers in this space.
The fact that this tool is available for free (and, says its provider, will always be free) is simply staggering. It may well be the single greatest gift that anyone has given the wine industry since the invention of the steel fermentation tank. I'm not kidding.
Outside the wine industry (i.e. many of my Fortune 1000 customers) pay thousands of dollars every month (gladly) for the kind of functionality that Vintank is offering every winery in the world for free. Forever.
