A strong SM and wine2.0 presence is crucial for a winery setting itself apart from their competitors, and I believe that right now truly is the witching hour where the customers are looking for that online, connected, social relationship from a winery, and few wineries have figured out how to provide it successfully.

A winery that does it will will win, big time, everyone else will just have to work a little bit harder to get the same bump.

A competent, first rate Social Media team in the wine country will not need to worry about competing with Gary Vaynerchuk. His expertise and evangelizing will only help expand the pie. No, your main competitors for client dollars will be the hundreds of freshly minted “SM Experts” that have a twitter account and a bizilion followers, and believe that makes them an expert and are willing to work for free.

We have seen this before. This is a repeat of all of the Web Page experts who with a copy of Web Pages for Dummies and living in their mom’s basement, convinced clients that they were Brand Makers and would work for nearly free.

Differentiation and success will come (with a lot of hard work) to the qualified and experienced PR professionals that understand this new SM aspect of the old problem of connecting to people. Not to a script kitty with a Twitter account and not much more of a clue.

In my social media classes, I stress that they have to be ready to engage with the consumers, ready to spend that 1.5 a day to provide content, answer questions, conduct blog/twitter searches, etc. etc. They have to be ready to listen and connect in a meaningful way. Basically, bring something to the table that will peak consumer interest.

I think a lot of wineries now realize they have to “be on” twitter and facebook.

But, figuring out how to spend the 1.5 hours a day engaged in Internet-Based marketing is tricky.

Also, figuring out how to put out content that gets “liked”, “Re-Tweeted”, “Tagged”, and “shared” is tricky. I was surprised that two of my students had “liked” something that a winery had done on facebook.

Interesting Lecture. It will be interesting to see if Gary sells his services to anyone in the wine business besides the very largest conglomerates.

At this point in the game, getting a winery to engage in social media is the first hurdle. It’s not a matter of simply putting up a face book page or a blog. In fact, depending on the winery and the personnel they have, a blog may not be the right thing to do.

That said wineries that can spend 1.5 hours a day engaging in Internet-Based marketing, and do it in a serious way, can make a real impact on their business.

Cheers,
Tom…