Ultimately, this allows wineries and wine companies to have control over their message and brands, essentially ‘owning’ their brand again.

As Paul Mabray, CEO of Vintank said:  “With more than 30 wine-related social networks, 50 mobile wine applications, 300 online wine retailers, and 250,000 offline wine retailers it is nearly impossible to provide consistent and quality wine information to everyone and OwnIT solves this problem.”

Read full article

My timing coincided with the bottom of the business cycle. In short order the US stock market had lost more than half it’s value, ending March ’09 with a Dow Jones Market index below 6,500. Housing values, the base of asset wealth for most consumers continued to decline in all but a handful of smaller SMSA’s. Credit to small businesses had been so severely constricted as to be non-existent, especially for wineries with slow moving, devalued inventories. Times were tough for the wine industry. Before this recession, now called ‘The Great Recession,’ the wine industry had always been considered to be recession proof; but this time at best our industry has proven to be recession resilient. Several cultural and structural changes were accelerated by the difficult economic times that had direct effects on wine sales. As consumers rushed to reduce credit card debit and increase their rate of savings , a significant downward segment shift hit wine pricing almost overnight.

The pressures on pricing and the shift from fine dining to a more casual food experience with an emphasis on value, led to a rapid change in channel strategy for many wineries. The rapid movement from an on-premise focus to retail distribution had eviscerated any pricing leverage that formerly not sold at retail wineries had displayed, squeezing profits and/or creating negative margin sales. In light of the current times I decided to write a blog focused on wine marketing. A blog that in part told stories that would be of some help to smaller family wineries in these difficult times. I took a Socratic approach of creating a central narrative and then providing a workbook like ending. As I look back over the last 3 quarters of 2009, and look forward to 2010, I hope that I’ve helped provide some positive mentoring to at least a few family winecos out there in the ether.

READ FULL ARTICLE

However, after doing a bit of research, we were shocked (OK, maybe appalled is the better word) to find the number of such blogs could be counted on a single hand.

Fast forward to 2010 and things have certainly changed, albeit relatively slowly. Sure, there are now thousands of winery blogs, there’s a strong and growing community of wine industry-related Twitterers and just about every winery now has the obligatory Facebook Fan Page and/or YouTube channel.

The thing is, in many other industries all these things are merely table-stakes at this point. So, can 2010 be the year the wine industry goes from following to leading in social media?

With the state of the economy it seems not a day goes by where we don’t read a headline about high-end Napa Valley wineries struggling as demand has slipped dramatically or how some wineries are trying ‘new’ marketing tactics to help drive sales.

There seem to be quite a few opportunities for the wine industry to lead in 2010. Here are just a few examples.

Cross promotion and partner marketing
You’ve spent all this time and energy building your following on Twitter and Fans on Facebook, why not do some serious cross promotion and/or partner marketing? Just looking at the Napa Valley there are loads of restaurants and hotels who are actively engaged with these social networks.

Why not tag-team to promote and host events, run contests, giveaways, solicit visitor feedback, photos, videos, etc.? Why not promote your presence on these channels prominently on your website, in marketing blasts AND in the tasting room? These types of things happen on a daily, if not hourly basis in other industries, but we see surprisingly little from the wine industry from where we sit.

OwnIT–Your Wine Your Way
Another obvious step has to be managing how your wine is represented online. That’s why you should get to know OwnIT if you don’t already. In short, OwnIT enables you to enter your product information in one central database and then sit back and have that information distributed across mobile applications, online retailers, social networks and beyond. This is afteral where more and more consumers are getting their information prior to purchase. Simple, yet effective and much needed.

Foursquare
Blending online and offline activity is powerful–that’s why we think the guys at Foursquare are onto something big. The company, which is all about allowing users to find new ways to explore a city, announced yesterday that people “everywhere” can now ‘check-in’ at their favorite local places.

That means the Napa Valley is far more accessible to users and businesses today than it was at any point previously. While there are loads of businesses in other regions doing some fun and engaging things for users, we sure haven’t seen any Napa Valley establishments taking the lead with this emerging platform to-date.

Given the 400+ wineries and countless restaurants, hotels, B&Bs, spas and other activities, it won’t be long before this becomes a missed opportunity. Now’s the time to dive in and do something innovative. Time to lead, not follow…

It will be interesting to see how much, or perhaps how little, things have changed one-year from now. Any predictions?

See the Full Article

The success of your ecommerce venture depends on your ability to merchandize your products. Yet, the prevailing mindset in the wine industry is of companies that protect their content and hoard their intellectual property. The result is a barrier for retailers who attempt to sell online; either you invest in the labor to track down the content you need, or your website does a less then optimal job at promoting your products.

Imagine a future where online wine stores have easy access to product information. Wine labels, tasting notes, technical specifications, even reviews and ratings are widely and accurately distributed. In this vision of the future wineries and importers are making this information available as soon as products are released.  This content then circulates through service providers whose mission is to distribute it to retailers, marketing sites, bloggers and bulletin boards. Anywhere a consumer finds mention of a wine it includes consistent, accurate information that originated from the supplier.

If this sounds a little fantastic you would be forgiven for doubting it could ever happen in this industry.  But looking beyond wine labels for the moment, prominent retailers Amazon, eBay and Best Buy promote the distribution of their product catalogs as open APIs (application programming interfaces).  Web developers can import it, display it on their own sites and, most importantly, sell from it.  By being the source of product content, these retailers attach rules on its use that help drive sales for their business. For instance Best Buy requires that if the developer site offers ecommerce, Best Buy needs to be one of the options. By opening up access to valuable assets that were being hoarded on their servers, these retailers have greatly increased the reach of their products. Amazon announced last year that their web services (API) now consumes more bandwidth than all their global websites.

Back in the wine business, 2 companies recently announced open API’s that will provide wine information to various websites partners.  Cruvee, based in Napa, has been providing social media monitoring for wineries. They announced a new service where wineries can control how their wines are represented online. Cruvee then distributes it to marketing and retailer websites.  Adegga, based in Portugal, is a wine review site that spawned the AVIN, a universal identifier for wine.  Adegga, with the help of Catavino plans to turn the AVIN into an open project where wine notes from bloggers and review sites around the world can be linked.

Both projects are in their early stages and have a way to go before they can offer the level of product information available on Best Buy’s catalog; but this is where it starts. These projects point the way to a future with abundant and accessible wine information.

See the full article

We had a great time with Kaz and Randy and we covered some very important aspects of Own IT. Give the show a listen and let us know what you think.

The rapid proliferation of online retailers, blogs, other social media, and even mobile applications, has made it easier for consumers to learn about wines, find them, compare notes, and has created some transparency on pricing. It’s also created a minefield for wineries concerned about controlling their image, data and information.

Cruvee founder Evan Cover is launching a site this week that aims to address the wrong information problem by functioning as a clearinghouse of sorts. Wineries can upload their data to yourwineyourway.com so that it can then be pushed out to multiple sites. The vision is that requests for wine information could be sent to one place.

“We’re changing the way wine is represented online, Cover said. “They can put in all their data points – all the information on their winery, then, we publish it out for consistent messaging.”

The service will be free for wineries, though Cover hopes users will be inclined to sign up for Cruvee’s social media marketing services. The first phase of the launch will involve getting wineries on board to import the information.

The project is not an easy undertaking and is likely to take time but may lead to less confusion on the part of the consumer while make things easier for the wineries.

“We’ve got 40 brands over here and that makes for a lot of wine online,” Kendall Jackson director of social

media Adam Beaugh told winebusiness.com. “I like the idea of having a centralized spot. I’m all about the data integrity. I’d rather spend my time interacting with customers online instead of fixing product inconsistencies. Cleaning that all up would help us.”

“It’s pretty interesting,” Michael Wangbickler of Balzac Communications said. “One of the biggest challenges we face on the PR/marketing side is there’s so much wrong information out there from any one website or catalogue to the next. Facts may be missing. A Mt. Veeder Chardonnay might just say ‘Chardonnay,’ but the same winery has a different core Chardonnay. One of the biggest challenges is making sure it’s correct. It takes a small army.”

See article

Read More

Let me direct you to an effort from the wine information and data experts at Cruvee called “OwnIT.”  Their charge is to develop a centralized repository for all things wine by allowing wineries and the wine industry to control the information (content, brand and identity) that is disseminated to the world online and ensure it is accurate. read more