Social Media and the Wine Industry: A New Era(3)
So, what does it do?
Well, just imagine that there's this huge nightclub, that can fit hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in it, and regularly does, night after night. And the only way anyone gets into this nightclub is if they can prove to the bouncer at the door that they enjoy and drink wine. Not so hard to do, right? OK. And then once they're in, they can buy, drink, and talk with their friends about any wine in the world. Man, I want to go already, don't you?. And then imagine every single one of those conversations they have, every comment they make, every joke they tell, every story they relate, is recorded and transcribed. And then magically, you get to read every single one of them that mentions you.
Wouldn't you want to do that? Wouldn't you want to know what people are saying about you and your brand(s)? Wouldn't you be at all curious about whether people actually recommended your wines, or tweeted to their friends how much they sucked? Or want to know when a blogger reviewed your wine, or when someone complained on a wine bulletin board about an unusually high percentage of cork tainted bottles in their annual allocation?
If you answered no to those questions, then I can promise you that you will one day reap the bitter harvest of your own ignorance. If you answered yes, then you're thirty seconds and a free online account away from having the answers to all of them.
Vintank's Social Connect software mines millions upon millions of conversations about wine that take place in the social media sphere, and reports to you what people are saying about you and your products. It tells you who is saying it, where they said it, and helps you understand how influential those people might be. Simple as that.
It does a lot more, for those who want to dive into the world of Customer Relationship Marketing, but for many wineries, that may be leaping into the deep end of the pool too quickly. For most, it's enough to be able to see what people are saying about you, and to respond. And that would be a huge leap forward for most wineries. A leap they desperately need to make.
I have no relationship to the company Vintank, nor anything to gain by making this recommendation, other than a desire to prod the wine industry to make use of technology trends that many other industries are embracing, and profiting from, much more rapidly.
Facebook will have its IPO in the coming months. As part of its filing, it had to disclose its financials for the first time, which included $1 billion of yearly profit, representing a net margin of around 30%. That is but a tiny slice of the value that social media is producing in today's economy. Hundreds of businesses, some of them worth billions of dollars, have sprung up solely because of the functionality that Facebook has provided to the world.
It's time for the wine industry to stop treating social media like a newfangled gizmo, and start doing business with it.
