Social media and wine

Social media is supposed to save the wine business. The problem? The wine business doesn't understand social media and, more importantly, doesn't want to be saved by it.

Why this is, and what it means for wine drinkers, is after the jump:

Social media has been the post-modern marketing world's favorite buzzword for several years, but there's nothing really new about it. It's just an amped up form of word of mouth, which has been retailing's preferred marketing tool for at least a century (or even longer than I have been writing about marketing -- Grocery Headquarters magazine, anyone?)

The difference is that social media's reach, thanks to applications like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, extends word of mouth past its traditional boundaries. Instead of word of mouth working for neighborhoods and parts of cities, social media pushes word of mouth to cities, states and even countries.

And it works. I've seen it in the Twitter Tastings we've done for DrinkLocalWine.com, when, in one weekend, we may have gotten Texas and Virginia wine more publicity than each usually gets in three or four months. Other people have seen the same thing. Mark Hyman, who runs Texas' 160,000-case Llano Estacado Winery, visits grocery stores to see what people are buying. And, says Hyman, he is seeing something new. Younger consumers are standing in the wine aisle and taking pictures of labels with their phones. Then, they're texting their friends to ask if the picture of the label they've just sent is the wine they should buy.

So much for the Wine Magazines.

In this, it's important to note that social media is not the software or hardware everyone talks about, but a process. It's not an end, but one means to an end. This is something that confuses the wine business, which tends to see social media as something that it needs to do because it needs to do it. It doesn't see social media as a tool to be used to sell wine. Case in point is Murphy-Goode's wine blogger stunt from last year, when it held a national search for a wine blogger and reaped tons of cyber-publicity. But when's the last time you heard anything about the blogger, or what the blogger blogged, or Murphy-Goode wines? It was a terrific one-off promotion, but as part of a continuing process? Not as successful.

The wine business is so lacking in the social media graces, in fact, that people like me are asked to give seminars in social media at wine industry events (and the esteemed DC-area writer Lisa Singh was kind enough to feature some of my social media ranting on her blog last week).

Know, too, that social media does matter. We don't know enough about how it works to know how it will change how companies do marketing, but it will change it. I'm proof of that. Two years ago, I was a newspaper wine writer who was known, if at all, in one small part of the country. Today, thanks to social media, I'm known (for better or worse) throughout the United States. And all I did was extend the reach of my word of mouth.

But the wine business is baffled. It's baffled because it doesn't know how to measure social media on a spreadsheet. If it can't calculate ROI for something, it doesn't want to do it. But it's also baffled because social media is about word of mouth, and wine and word of mouth don't have much in common. Wine drinkers don't share wine finds the way women do shoe bargains. Some of this is because of the three-tier system; the wine business' customers are not consumers, but the wholesalers who sell wine to retailers.

But a lot of it is because (regular visitors can skip this part, since they've read it before) the wine business isn't interested in educating consumers. They're interested in selling them particular brands, targeted by price point and demographic. It's not a coincidence that the greatest wine industry marketing success of the past 50 years was white zinfandel, which was an accident --  and which still sort of embarrasses the wine industry.

This approach is the antithesis of social media, which is about democratizing how consumers make buying decisions. But that's not how wine works. Wine is elitist and snobby, and we're not supposed to make up our own minds. We're supposed to drink what the experts tell us. But what if we had a wine world where producers made quality wines where price was an indication of quality, and not an artificial barrier set by the marketing department? That's the possibility that social media holds out. It's something to aspire to, even if it will be difficult to accomplish.

social media, Twitter, Facebook

Comments

[Alfonso]

I hear ya, Jeff, our industry so doesn't get social media. Strange too, because so much of what the wine biz centers around is relationships.

[Jeff Siegel]

I think the relationship thing is part of the problem, Alfonso. You already have relationships --with retailers, with distributors, with wineries. So why do you need some new-fangled concept to help you do what you're already doing?

The catch, of course, is that the new-fangled concept will help you have better relationships.

[Christy Robinson]

Great post, Jeff. I think this can apply to any product or service. In the old days, you'd face-to-face, talk on the phone or even email with customers. But social media allows you allows you an acceptable way to communicate with them casually, as friends. It's an opportunity to build intimate relationships with customers; why any company wouldn't want to do that is beyond me, especially with something a social as wine.

[Meredith]

The wine industry is a lot like the investment broker industry. There are a few people in a small circle who have all of the information and inside contacts. Joe Q. Public wants to be a part of this world but knows that they don't have the time to devote their lives to it.

But that time and education hinderence never squashes the desire. Wine companies can use this desire to leave bread crumbs of 'insider information' through social media outlets.

When I consulted for Chilean wine companies years ago, I would have loved to be able to tel them to test their campaigns in a social media market. (Maybe they they would have listened to me a little better and not crashed and burned when they brought locally successful campaigns to an international market.)

There are a lot of things wine companies can do via social media, and as I now tell businesses, 'Get on the lingo wagon or get off the train'. The future is coming and it is not gonna wait for the wine industry to figure out if they want to figure it out.

In order to preserve the fun mystery and old school ways, the wine industry must become MASTERS of social media. Otherwise sooner or later in this world of rampant information, the mystique that drives the intrigue of wine will be pealed back like a grape.