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A few great US blogs have recently taken up the topic of wineries using social media (a topic that is constantly coming up since the Internet likes to talk about itself).  I want to contribute a bit to the conversation, adding the perspective of a winemaker who has embraced social media.

Here are the three posts I'll be referring to heavily:

• Joe Roberts "Wineries suck at engagement"
• Steve Heimoff "Lighten up on the social media thing"
• Alder Yarrow "Social Media & Wineries: A new era"

A brief summary

If you don't have time to read all three posts, the titles pretty much say it all.  Joe is surpised at the number of wineries who don't consider social media to be a serious way to invest their time.

Steve thinks winemakers are doing the best job they can to balance their priorities and communicate about their wines in the few spare hours where they aren't actively making their wine.

Alder says that social media is a great opportunity and tools like Vintank are making it more and more accessible to the busy winemaker.

The winemaker's perspective

At O'Vineyards, I have started tapping into the power of social media.  I am the 1%.  lovethatlanguedoc.com and to a lesser extent ovineyards.com have opened doors that are normally sealed shut to new winemakers.  But it took a huge dose of free advice from Gary Vaynerchuk and Vrazon, a big leap of faith, and a fair amount of luck.  I regularly talk to other winemakers, trying to convince them to join the social fray. And I think I can explain why it isn't happening on the scale that Joe wants.

Barriers to market

Haha, yes, I start writing a blog post about the importance of social media (one of the most overdone topics on the Internet) and it turns into a post about the archaic barriers to market (the second most overdone topic on the Internet).  

But here's one of the biggest issues.  Winemakers aren't inherently obsessed with pleasing critics (a point that comes up repeatedly in Joe and Steves' posts).  We try to please critics because we know that importers respect that.  And what we really need are importers/distributors.  

I can be a social media king with thousands of adoring brand advocates who love me and have never tasted my wine.  But if I don't have an importer in the states and a distributor for each state that those brand advocates live in, then I'm dead on arrival.  

So Joe's post is really targeted at winemakers who are already present on a specific market. He's saying "If you sell your wine in Texas, you should try to engage your Texas customers online."  Of course a potential issue here is that Texas doesn't have its own Internet (although I bet they'd like that idea).  If I see a tweet about my wines, I don't know if it's coming from Texas or Massachusetts.  And heaven forbid it's coming from MA. Cause I'll never ever be able to ship to that poor guy.  Winemakers are often worried that the time they invest online is wasted because the people they're talking to can't even buy their wine.  And what's the point of engaging non-customers?

Here's a comment under Steve's post:

DrinkerX says:
January 25, 2012 at 10:35 pm
I work retail and have yet to have a single person mention anything about wine to me and how they heard about it via social media. I know of people who keep up to date with certain wineries who do use it, but it wasn’t how they discovered it. Most of that comes from reading reviews, ordering wine at restaurants, sampling wines at retail events or they had it at a friend’s house.That doesn’t mean FB and Twitter should be ignored (but I would ignore all the others for now), but like I said, I’ve yet to see any proof that it influences actual purchases.

This comment might be worth its own post.  On the one hand, I think a lot of social media driven sales target consumers who don't have in-depth conversations with vendors (since they already know a bunch about the wine and hopefully where to find it).  And a lot of the sales are Internet based (at least for my wines in the UK) so nobody is wandering into Berry Bros & Rudd asking about the winemaker who blogs about the Languedoc.  But the daringly named DrinkerX is thinking like a typical producer.  Are people actually going to the store after reading my tweets or buying a bunch of my wine because I posted a picture of the vineyard dog on Facebook.  And I know the answer to that question is yes, but WinemakerX is uncertain.  Winemakers worry that they are going to invest time and energy into social media to engage people that can never even buy their wines.

Another way to see customer engagement

 I don't think about customer engagement in the same way.  For three years, I knew that the majority of people who visit my website were not able to buy my wine.  And yet, I plowed on.  I built a modest audience (really small numbers like a couple thousand visitors per month) of people who sort of like me and are mildly curious about how good my wine is.  I did this in the hope of becoming incontournable. The French use that word when something is unavoidable.  If you make enough noise, then people will have to start acknowledging you.

That was a big gamble.  And we got very lucky when we met Rowan Gormley from Naked Wines, one of the few importers I've ever met who gave a damn about how good we were at engaging people online.  (Also one of the few importers who deigned to taste my wine at all, but that's another rant for another day).

We spent a lot of time on the Internet hoping we would meet a company like Naked Wines.  And that time could only be spared because my parents and I have enough time between the three of us to make wine on forty-five acres and then tweet before going to bed.  Most winemaking families don't have three full time family members on the job.  Many of the young projects in the Languedoc Roussillon have a young couple at the helm who often have to balance the winemaking, the vines, children, and another job (a point raised by Steve).

And even if they do make time to communicate online, they have no guarantee that they'll connect with anybody.  And even if they do engage with people, they have no way of converting them into customers.  On the other hand, you can fly out to the Wine Enthusiast headquarters (as alluded to by Steve) and you pretty much know what you're getting.  Fixed cost. Fixed result. Predictable.

Vintank actually wrote about the related concept of direct through trade recently.  They tackle the issue from a slightly different perspective.  If a winery sells to a distributor in Texas, then is it in their best interest to engage customers in Texas?  After all, shouldn't it be the distributor's job or the restaurant/retail vendor's?  Well Vintank argues that every social engagement with a customer is as good as a sale. They call that sale direct through trade.  Even if people are not buying direct from the winery, they are your customers.  Interesting and related idea.  

How to convince winemakers

Ultimately, if you want to get more winemakers to embrace social media, you need to show them how effective it will be.  

The proven path to import and distribution in the US is critical praise.  More winemakers will embrace social media if Internet presence becomes a criterion of wine importers/distributors.   So folks like Joe need to write posts urging wine importers to find winemakers that are active on social media.  :D  That's how you change winery behavior.

And if you want to convince importers... well if I knew how to change importer behavior, I would be a much richer winemaker.

note: I didn't talk much about Alder's article, but he's giving very constructive advice too.  While I maintain that the best way to change winery behavior is to first change importer/distributor behavior, I agree that tools like vintank/cruvee, wineeverybody, and so on are making social media a less time consuming and more profitable endeavor for winemakers.