According to Alex Burmaster, internet analyst at Nielsen/NetRatings, South Africa has seen phenomenal internet expansion – growing by around 50% in each of the last two years. There are nearly four million people online in South Africa. This represents a huge opportunity for wine marketers.

Gary Vaynerchuk, a keynote speaker at the recent Wine Industry and Technology Symposium (WITS), noted in his remarks, (highlighted from the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat):

The wine industry is missing a huge opportunity to forge deeper relationships with consumers using new technologies such as Web videos and wine blogs.

That was the blunt message delivered to wine industry executives in Napa on Tuesday by a young, outspoken New Jersey wine retailer who said the industry needs to embrace change or die.

“Ninety-nine percent of the people in the wine business are really blowing it,” said Gary Vaynerchuk, director of operations for the WineLibrary, a Springfield, N.J. wine store with a popular interactive Web site.

Citing blogs specifically as a customer acquisition tool, Gary Vaynerchuk, as noted in a recent Inertia blog post, is something of an Internet sensation with his video blog and Josh Hermsmeyer, owner of Capozzi Family Winery and the blog Pinotblogger.com is building his wine business before releasing a single bottle of vino. Hermsmeyer gave a presentation on the power of blogging for wineries at WITS. His presentation is posted at his site, found here.

Source: ReThink Wine Blog

Mack Collier created the Company Blog Checkup series that critiques a different company’s blogging efforts each week. Building on the lessons he’s learned from his own blogging experience, he helps and advises companies of all sizes on their social media strategies, from startups to companies as large as Dell and Nettwerk Music. According to Mack the companies that are successful in their blogging and social media efforts aren’t the ones that view these tools as new selling channels, but rather as ways to offer value and utility to their customers.

Stormhoek is a South African winery that has done an excellent job of leveraging blogs to promote its brand. In 2005, the winery began working with blogger Hugh MacLeod of GapingVoid fame, and later launched a promotion where bloggers received a free bottle of Stormhoek, with no strings attached. The idea created quite a buzz in the blogosphere, and it resulted in the company’s sales doubling in less than 12 months. Then the company followed that promotion in 2006 with a ’100 geek dinners in 100 days’ idea. Both ideas were great examples of a company utilizing social media in its marketing efforts. So of course when I started the Company Blog Checkup series, I knew that I wanted to review Stormhoek’s blog.

First, let’s start with content. You would expect that a blog about a winery would likely cover their offerings, as well as coverage of the wine industry. Mission accomplished here. But where the blog shines is in leveraging the blog itself as a promotional tool, as well as other sites. For example, Hugh links to pics of Stormhoek wine on Flickr, and then builds an impromptu promotion around it. He states on the blog that readers can get either free wine, or vouchers for cash off Stormhoek, if they will post pictures of themselves in the Tesco chain with Stormhoek. Then Stormhoek makes a point to post some of the pictures that readers have sent them, as well as posting an email from a customer. Great way to let the customers have a sense of input into the blog, and it also lets Stormhoek show pictures of their customers with their products. Very smart move.

But as with a few of the other blogs I have profiled so far, posting is sporadic. Stormhoek has only posted 4 entries so far this month, with the last one being on the 9th. A reader even left a comment to the most recent post asking why no one was posting. Yikes. There appears to be at least 3 writers for the blog, so I’d try to get each writer to commit to one post a week. It’s very hard to develop a community for a blog without regular posts.

One final point on content, note that in this post, Hugh adds a link to the reader’s site. Remember how I keep stressing about the need for companies to promote their readers, and link to them if they have a blog/site? This is a great example of what I am talking about.

Now let’s turn to comments. Stormhoek probably does the best job of replying to comments of any of the companies that I have profiled so far. And I noticed that at least three different writers had left comments. This is so simple to do, and for some reason most companies miss the importance of comments, but Stormhoek is all over it.

Finally, let’s move to the sidebar. The usual suspects are there, as well as links to…..non-company blogs! Ok not many, but some is better than none. Complete contact info is there, but I would really like to see a section clearly identifying who the writers are, and their bios, along with pics. And a link to some sort of page/site that tells customers where they can buy Stormhoek would be good too.
Overall, I think Stormhoek’s blog is pretty stout. I’d like to see 3 posts minimum a week, and a section for the writers on the sidebar. Those tweaks alone would make the blog exceptional. Even so, the blog is already a great example of writers that are properly utilizing comments from readers, as well as promoting them via pics and links. Great stuff.

By Mack Collier.

Wine 2.0 is alive and breathing, and with it comes a plethora of companies working to build social networks around wine. All of these companies do one thing great – bring awareness of wines to more consumers. Moreover, the service they provide helps consumers make buying decisions based on peer reviews.

With so many brands and so little information or ability to test every one,we hope all these new communities thrive as they help consumers help each other bridge the gap to buy more wines (both on and offline). Additionally, if you are a winery in limited distribution or have winery only products – where are they going to go? To your website to buy the product. Wineries should support these communities strongly and even encourage your customers to comment on your wines at their favorite social network site.

There are so many of these companies launching that I only have time to name a few (if I left your company out, please comment):

www.snooth.com 

www.corkd.com

www.tastevine.com

www.winelog.net

www.bottlenotes.com

www.calwineries.com 

www.americanwinery.com

www.cellartracker.com

How will these communities help wineries succeed?

• More brand awareness. Any consumer can put your wine up to review and the entire web can find it in multiple places. In fact, Gary V. at Corkd.com has done an incredible job and when you Google a particular wine, Corkd’s reviews tend to come up through his powerful SEO efforts usually in the top 10 and sometimes in the top 3.
• The power of recommendation has been STRIPPED from the traditional rating magazines and now is firmly placed in the hands of consumers. No longer are you dependent on one single reviewer, but the masses in aggregate will judge your product.
• Helping customers find your wine through powerful search (snooth.com), or through keywords (like food pairings), or through similar taste profiles (tastevine, bottlenotes).
• Interconnecting consumers who share similar tastes and organizing micro (and sometimes macro) audiences that communicate through word of mouth about your products.
• Community content to help consumers understand wine (winelog) and learn more so they try more after being educated.
• And much, much more (plus things we haven’t even thought about yet that will emerge as these tools become stronger and more prevalent through other larger social networks like facebook, myspace, flickr, and more).

My recommendation to you as wineries is engage with all of these. Pick your favorite and support it strongly.  Use both your advertising dollars and recommend your customers to use it to rate your wines.  Tell them make friends with other people who also like your wines. Give away your content to them en masse. Yes, give it away – all your tasting notes, all your recipe matches, jpg’s of your labels, all your wine information – just give it to them.

Become part of the community (but disclose that you are ITB – In the business). Use it as a tool to communicate one on one with people that like your wine. They are right there. Right in front of you. That is what is great about these communities, you have visibility into the people that rate your wine. This is the 101 of direct sales – finding your audience and communicating with them. You now have incredible visibility to who likes or dislikes your wine and a vehicle to communicate with them. Use it to convince the naysayers differently. If they hate tempranillo from CA and you make a great one (www.paradorcellars.com makes a killer one), engage with them and work to convince them. You may wine an advocate who will shout your name from the top of buildings.

Direct sales for wineries have their window now to engage and own the channel. You just have to turn your attention to it and it is yours for the taking.

By Paul Mabray.

Like most recommendations, word-of-mouth is still king. While most of us rely on critics for advice before making a purchase, the people we trust most are friends and people who are like us. With the advent of technology, the new word-of-mouth is web logs or blogs.

Gary Vayerchuk, Director of Operations at www.winerylibrary.com, spoke last week at the Wine Industry Technology Symposium (WITS) saying that the industry has followed too long a handful of critics whose opinion means nothing to the average wine drinker. Most people give more weight to other consumer’s opinions than critics any way. Take movies for example, critics may help guide movie goers initially, but its word-of-mouth that makes it a blockbuster or even a bomb.

According to Max Kalehoff, Vice President of Marketing for Buzzmetrics, 67% of consumers relied on word-of-mouth recommendations when making a purchase three decades ago; today that number has risen to 92%. He also said that 73% of people who shop online leave behind comments to share their experiences with other consumers. While everyone secretly hates a critic, deep down everyone secretly wants to be one.

Wineries are not immune to consumer feedback. In fact, 5 of the top 10 references to Santa Rosa’s Kendall Jackson wines on Google are consumer driven, according to Kalehoff. Instead of fearing consumer feedback and opinions, wineries should embrace them. Those who don’t embrace this new form of word-of-mouth (blogs) and engage customers with more familiar language will find themselves left in the cellar.

One great wine community is www.snooth.com.

By Larry Cole.

Check out Simon Backs blog which he writes for the family farm Backsberg. Simon is currently studying Business Science Economics at the University of Cape Town. Having grown up on the farm he’s able to give a more personal insight into the workings of the farm.

By Mike Carter.

Do you read winery blogs? If not, you should be. I know, I know: we all have to much to do/read/see/ watch on TV, but if you’re a wine lover this is your best opportunity to get information straight from the vineyard, delivered to you by the folks that are actually making the wine you want to drink. (photo by Ian Britton of FreeFoto.com)

Many of the winery blogs I read regularly are extremely well-written, lively, and engaging–which is something to marvel at, considering the fact these folks are blogging in their “spare time” between helping to manage the vineyard, making the wine, averting tasting room disasters, going on public relations junkets, and attending marketing meetings.

So here are the five reasons you should read winery blogs, with links to blogs that I think are particularly good.

1. Reading winery blogs dramatically increases your knowledge of winemaking. If you’ve ever wondered what malolactic fermentation is, or wanted to see a punch-down that doesn’t take place in Vegas, then winery blogs are for you. I’ve learned so much from Jason Haas’s Tablas Creek Vineyard Blog, and all the information is delivered in a clear, non-technical fashion with great pictures. (Jason: if you ever leave the wine biz, which I hope you don’t, you are a born teacher!) I subscribe so I can keep up with all that’s going on in the vineyards, but if you want to learn about winemaking, the impact of weather on grapes, and how work gets done in an organic vineyard, this blog’s for you.

2. Winery blogs provide incontrovertible proof that good wine is the result of a long and thoughtful process, not just a marketing strategy. Josh Hermsmeyer, of the new Capozzi Family Vineyards that he started in the Russian River Valley with his wife Candace, has given us a peak into not only the physical work that makes a great winery, but the mental work, as well. His blog, PinotBlogger, has posted on everything from designing their tasting room to the most lucid discussion of Pinot Noir clones I’ve ever read to how they came up with the name. If you’ve secretly yearned for a vineyard of your own, Josh’s blog brings that experience to you and gives you an awful lot to think about before you take the plunge.

3. Winery blogs demonstrate that wine is made by real people–or at least it should be. This is the best reason, I think. I love getting to know the people behind the wines that I drink. It makes the whole wine experience richer and more satisfying to get to know the people who make you so happy after a hell of a day at work. And how many of us live within driving distance of any–never mind all–of our favorite wineries. Whether it’s folks brandishing chickens at Twisted Oak’s blog El Bloggo Torcido, or the more sedate days and nights (ok, except for the lost delivery truck) at the Dover Canyon blog, winery bloggers like Jeff “El Jefe” Stai and Mary Baker paint some great portraits of the characters–human, animal, and mechanical–that are involved in making some terrific wines.

4. Winery blogs remind you that good wine should never be taken for granted. Amy Lillard and Matt King upended their lives in Berkeley and bought a farm in Castillon du Gard where they grow grapes, have converted a farm house into a winery, and are making some great wine after lots of hard work. Reading Amy’s blog at La Gramiere reminds us all that wine takes time, effort, passion, and love. So, too, does Mike and Helen’s blog It’s My Vineyard, which focuses on growing grapes and making wine in the Regnie district of the Beaujolais. All the highs and lows of life are captured in farming and winemaking, and that’s why it’s so special.

5. Winery blogs help to make a personal connection between you, the winemakers, the grape growers, and the wine you are drinking. Who could imagine that two women with roots to the English city of Liverpool, would both be wine fanatics, live in California, and blog? Sometimes the unimaginable happens in the blogosphere, as I discovered when I started reading Elsbeth Wetherill’s blog, the Vineyard Diary. She and her husband Steve were wine pioneers in the San Antonio Valley AVA in Monterey, and Escafeld makes the best Petit Verdot I’ve ever tasted (stay tuned for my thoughts on their Merlot and Zinfandel). Also in Monterey County, Annette Hoff of blogs about her work at Cima Collina, where she draws together grapes grown by superb Monterey growers and crafts them into distinct and distinguished wines. Reading her blog makes me feel like I know all about the growers, the grapes, and the folks who put it all together in the winemaking. It’s these personal connections to wine that turn a beverage into a life-long obsession–at least for some of us.

By Dr. Debs www.goodwineunder20.blogspot.com

In three years Stormhoek have achieved a massive marketing presence that other wineries can only dream about. But what is the secret of their success? Can their success be replicated?

Stormhoek start by doing the blogging basics right - understanding their audience and marketing effectively by listening to their customers, so that they can continuously improve and fine tune their marketing campaigns. In other words they understand that the internet works best as a two-way mass communication environment.

Stormhoek have put together a list of 19 pointers that worked for them. Read it and learn. Click on the link and download the pdf: http://www.gapingvoid.com/stormhoekinsert324.pdf

By Mike Carter.

Blogging is an incredibly effective way to reach out and find new clients.

Peter Flaschner, Founder and Creative Director of The Blog Studio offers 16 reasons why wine businesses should be blogging.

• Build time-based relationships
• Tap into strong branding power
• Great value – can’t beat the price
• Expand your reach – take your business global
• Find new markets – take advantage of the long tail to do what you really love
• Turn customers into evangelists
• Create dialog with your clients
• Find hidden opportunities – see find new markets above
• Force you to think about your business – an often overlooked benefit of writing about your stuff regularly
• Build relationships with your most vocal customers
• Replace yellow pages – know anyone under 30 who uses the yellow pages?
• Spread buzz
• Humanizing – puts a face and personality to the business
• Create top of mind awareness
• Build trust-based relationships
• Take advantage of virtual word of mouth marketing

By Peter Flaschner.

Download The Guide to Business Blogging: http://www.theblogstudio.com/mint/pepper/orderedli…

Ryan Opaz founded his website dedicated to Spanish and Portuguese wines in June 2005. He’s also conducted his own research on the web, looking for wine blogs run by wineries.

He didn’t expect that wineries who started blogs to help promote their wines would make it SO HARD TO GET A HOLD OF THEM. Out of the 30 or more blogs that he went through, he was only able to find an email address a quarter of the time, let alone a contact page. Seeing that I’m attempting to learn as much as I can about the online wine marketing arena, I assumed the wise choice was to share this information with anyone out there interested in his discoveries. Here’s his list of Top Ten Winery Blogging Mistakes:

EMAIL - We all hate Spam! I hate Spam; you hate Spam; we all hate Spam. So I understand the reluctance to put up an email address on a public website, but this is not an option if you are a winery looking for publicity and higher sales.  Email is the telephone of today, and every time I have to search for basic contact information, the business is not only losing out on free publicity, but also a simple nice comment like, “I really enjoyed your wine the other day…”

Flash - Flash is pretty. Flash is sexy. Flash is also a waste of a journalists or consumers time when they already know your wineries name. We don’t need your name visually poured out of a glass and onto our page with discordant violins in the background. Flash is a tool to show ideas, or for fun games, but it is not a good communicator. How many times have I just wanted to cut and paste some text from a wineries site into an article for the sake of clarification but ran into a flash site? You can’t use the text in a flash image, nor can search engines index text that is included in a flash presentation – making your website a disaster to search for.

No Information about Wines – This I know seems a bit too obvious, but don’t ever think that the obvious is not capable of being missed. What’s the point of having a wine website without a link to a page about your wines? You don’t need to be flashy (pardon the pun), just a simple list of your wines, nothing more. Though, I feel there is one thing that you must include: a picture of your label, or preferably, a shot of the entire bottle. If you give a nice description, along with a visual, you’ve got a better chance of selling some wine. Without the visual, you’re making it incredibly difficult for someone to differentiate your wines from another when they walk into their local wine shop

Show me the Logo! – Granted, I’ve been looking for winery blogs and not winery websites, but come on, why start a blog about your winery without a logo on it somewhere? I’m confused. Is the story of your winemaking not related to your winery? Put another way, if I visit your website once to learn about you and notice your blog that is updated regularly with new information, which site do you think I’m going to visit more often? My point, make sure you have a logo/image everywhere I, as a reader, visit. In fact, if your are a regular visitor to the World Wide Web and find yourself commenting on other people’s weblogs, why not sign up to have a Gravatar of your wine logo? Then, anywhere you go where Global Gravatars are used, your comments and forum posts will leave a logo behind.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) – not having an RSS feed on your blog is like publishing a newspaper but only selling it at the printer’s front doorstep. I thought that all blogging software had RSS built into it nowadays, but I guess I was wrong. If you don’t know what it is, whether you have it already, or don’t know how to implement it, just ask the next 10 yr old you bump into on the street. I guarantee you that that not only will they put it together faster than you can change your email options, but they’ll also charge less. Maybe you can bribe them for some Mosto (unfermented grape juice).

Addresses - Another silly little thing that should be included with your email is your address, location, appellation, wine region, or what ever might help us to find you in the physical world on the website. People want to know where you are, and with today’s technology, you might as well show them exactly where you are with a Google map link. People love this and it’s SOOOOOOOO easy to do. Go to www.maps.google.com type in your address and then steal the link from the right hand corner of the map where it says, “link to this page”. That’s it. It is a simple link to a visual image of where you are located. This is an incredibly handy tool that I have used on several occasions, especially when visiting vineyards located in the middle of nowhere Iberia. If it weren’t for my doing a little research on Google Maps before my departure, I most likely would have found myself in the Mediterranean, rather than at the appointed winery. In the information age, more quality information is better then less.

Blogger.com – This is a great, easy blogging tool to allow anyone to blog about their life, winery, or stuffed animal collection; however, there is one glitch. On Blogger, there is an area that allows you to make an “about” page, where you can write about yourself. Why is it then that when I click the blog’s “view my complete profile” page, I’m taken to a page where I learn: whether the author is male or female, how long they have belonged to Blogger.com, what town they are located in, and that they are interested in wine, food and travel. If I’m really lucky, I can actually learn the varietals that their particular vineyard grows. An added plus is if you choose, you can actually see how many people have wasted their precious time viewing this profile. PLEASE, put something here that helps me understand who you are, what you do, and why you have a blog. A link to your “real” website, along with a page that tells us about your passion to create wine.

No Images – Wine is a sensory experience. When I taste wine, I sip, smell, look, feel, and at the greatest of times, spiritually connect with the wine in my glass. Going to a website that contains only text, and no pictures, has me running to the next website as fast as I can click. Why have a wine site if your not going to have an image of the wines you make, the vineyard the wine is made in, the local wine festivals, etc. With today’s online panoply of tools to make your blogging world easier to handle, there should be videos, pictures, and I’m sure it’s just a matter of time, smells coming out through your monitors.

Language - This is a point intended for all my Iberian wine pals, though I’m sure it applies to others. Your regional language is most likely not going to be the only language that will sell your wine. Chances are that your wine is being sold to people in several different languages, the most common of them all is English. I wish the whole world was multi-lingual, and that we all spoke in multiple tongues, but alas it is not so. Therefore, please make your site bi-lingual and well translated! By well translated, I am not referring to your sixteen your old doing it for you after taking her first English class. This does not count as professional translation! Find a native speaker. I’ve never been in a country where there wasn’t an American or British Ex-pat society with members, not looking for translation gigs!

Finally, SCHEDULE - Being that most of you winery bloggers, or winery owners with websites, are often busy with harvests, trade shows, and other time consuming events, it can be hard to post regularly. That’s fine. We wine lovers understand, and if you take the RSS advice to heart, then we’ll be notified the next time you post anyways. But here is one tip, please keep your readers in the loop. Before the next trip without internet access, post a note as to what you’ll be up to and what you hope to accomplish. If you’re going to be traveling, let people know where and when, so your fans can come out to see you at a tasting. Before Harvest, inform us as to what you’ll be doing and when you’ll be back. Take a camera, video, audio, whatever it takes to let us know how your doing! In short, communicate. Like a parent, we are thoroughly interested in your daily happenings. So please keep us in the loop even if it appears banal and uninteresting to you, because it will most likely be interesting to us.

Adapted from an article written by Ryan Opaz – Visit Website

Here are three more South African wine blogs:

1. Galjoengat Wines
2. Taste Matters
3. Withington Wines

Thanks to Mark Forrester for the tip on Withington Wines.

Any more South African wine blogs out there? Email me: mike@seriousaboutwine.co.za

By Mike Carter.