What’s 100 points between friends?

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Let’s give you a situation. How would you handle it?

The winery owner/winemaker/marketing/sales director bursts into your office, waving the latest issue of The Wine Advocate.

He or she is practically dancing: “Look! We got “96-100” points! Fabulous! Get it out there! Tell everyone! GO!”

First step: you do the due diligence. You carefully read through all 1,536 reviews. You see that 10 wineries did receive “pure” 100 point ratings. Your winery’s wine, at “96-100,” is one of many.

Now what?

How DO you broadcast this? Did your wine receive 100 points? A bit sticky….or not….?

An interesting exercise in ethics, perhaps?

We offer this case study because we see it play out occasionally, that “96-100” turning into “100.”

Is that a win?

Not really: here’s why. It’s entirely possible that the writer who runs that item will somehow find out what the score really was. Or other readers or an editor will find out and the writer will have some consequences—accordingly, you’ve burned a bridge and damaged your reputation with that writer. You’ll have to rebuild the trust; it will take time. There’s another angle, too: savvy readers who know will now have a lesser opinion not only of your winery but of this writer. Collateral damage—but every relationship matters. The effort to repair this trust takes time away from everything else on your plate.

Sometimes, good or bad, the world is black and white.

Be yourself — bon voyage, Tom Magliozzi!

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On a daily basis I see how important it is for a winery to distinguish itself. How are you different? What’s your personality? How do you express it? A few days ago I was honored to be in a brainstorming session with an excellent marketer about how to create memorable and unusual video tasting notes for his winery. This winery is ‘secure in its skin’ and knows that creativity—and attractive content—are so very important.

Here’s how this concept plays out. It’s not in a wine context; that might make it easier to see in action….

If you’re a fan of Click & Clack, you may already know. Tom (and Ray) Magliozzi were always themselves, even if it meant walking a line where they might alienate listeners. For them it was finding humor and then laughing raucously. Please take a sec to read Bob Collins’ tribute to Tom.

Tom Magliozzi's laugh boomed in NPR listeners' ears every week as he and his brother, Ray, bantered on Car Talk.

And then listen to the on-air wake for Tom.

Cin cin!

Wine Bloggers: You Are Only As Valuable As Your Audience Size

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numbersBy all accounts, the Digital Wine Communicators Conference that took place recently in Montreaux, Switzerland left its wine blogger and wine writer attendees with a great number of interesting and provocative ideas for  to consider. Among the most thought-provoking idea I came across was this one, reported in Harpers and delivered by public relations professional Louise Hurren during a panel on the Future of Wine Blogging :

“[To succeed wine bloggers must] understand and recognize their place in the wine industry and ask themselves what value are you offering and not just what you can get out of it”

The communicators who heard this message most likely understood quickly and intuitively that there is only one answer to the question, what value are they offering the wine industry? But before I repeat that answer it is important to put Ms. Hurren’s advice in context. Additionally, she wanted to explain to the wine bloggers in the room the size of the investment that marketing and promotional sectors of the wine industry make in wine communicators. She discussed, for example, the cost of taking a blogger on a press trip as well as the expectations the marketers reasonably had when they spent the thousands of dollars on trips for wine communicators.

The takeaway of Ms. Hurren’s talk was that understanding how the wine trade works is an essential element in a blogger becoming more professional, which is a requirement for success as a blogger.

This is all excellent advice. But what I did not read in the coverage of her talk in Montreaux was the one and only possible answer to the question, “what value are you offering the wine trade through your blog”.

The answer is The Size of Your Audience.

In fact this is also the answer to the question, what value do commercial wine publications offer to the wine industry. The fact is, it does not matter how professional a wine blogger is. It does not matte how well a wine blogger understands the wine trade. It does not matter how interesting their ideas or observations are. To the wine trade the real value of any wine blogger is the size of their audience.

The more eyeballs that see what the blogger writes, the more valuable that blogger is to the wine industry that has one goal in mind: expose as many potential customers to their brand as they possible can. This is a somewhat cold, cut and dry way of understanding the work of the wine blogger or professional wine writer or commercial wine media outlet. But there is no other way to calculate the value of a wine media publication. If the most brilliant, the smartest and the most prolific wine blogger on the planet reaches 50 readers a day, their value to the wine industry is very, very small. Meanwhile, if the most incompetent wine blogger on the planet reaches 10,000 readers a day, then the wine industry will see great value in their swill that they produce.

If, then, it is the goal of a wine blogger to be of value to the wine industry, the advice I would have given the attendees at the recently Digital Wine Communicators Conference would be this: BLOGGERS: WORK ON INCREASING THE SIZE OF YOUR READERSHIP…IT’S THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS.

 

A Great PR Guy Is Gone — And Why It Matters

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harveyImageHarvey Posert Jr. died on October 3 in St. Helena after a brief illness. At the age of 84, he’d lived many lifetimes, from a privileged childhood in Memphis to college at Yale to several years in military counter-intelligence in Europe. Then there were the phases of his career, from the copy desk at The Memphis Commercial Appeal to working for Dan Edelman in New York and San Francisco, before coming to wine country to represent Robert Mondavi and later Fred Franzia, as well as numerous others.

Harvey was a friend of mine for more than 25 years. I was both a professional colleague and a personal friend. By now you might have read articles about him which have appeared in The Wine Spectator, the Napa Valley Register, Napa Life and Wine Industry Insight. In the coming days there’ll be many more tributes, I’m sure.

Pardon the cliché: Harvey was the last of a breed, a giant among men—whether we’re talking about the wine industry or the world of wine PR. What does that mean? He was a thinker; he was also an enormously astute judge of character and personality; he was also someone who shaped our history as wine marketers. He literally created trends to shine a light on his clients.

You can read elsewhere about the specific programs he dreamt up and the numerous achievements of his career. Here are

10 Things I Learned From Harvey

1. Do The Work

Roll up your sleeves. Do the research. Write the materials. Be courteous to the client. Get the work out in a timely fashion.

2. Open Your Eyes

Read everything you can read. Talk to people. Be curious. It’s all ‘grist for the mill,’ the backbone of your creativity.

3. Every journalist matters

No one is too ‘little;’ if you identify yourself as a writer, you’re welcome in the tent.

4. Find the humor

Cultivate a big sense of humor. You can find it everywhere. It’s a leavening agent, a humanizing factor, a common denominator.

5. Standards

Be on time. Be courteous. Mind your manners. It matters.

6. Stay in touch

You never know when a writer will re-appear somewhere; never jettison a writer after having worked together, even if the outcome wasn’t what you wanted.

7. Be modest

PR people aren’t the story; the client is. Be present but don’t look for the limelight.

8. Don’t overestimate but don’t underestimate your audience.

A press release always has to include the obvious as well as the news.

9. Content IS “king”

Be known for your substance, for ideas and programs which have merit and meaning.

10. Niceness counts

Make sure you thank a writer once a story appears. Think of other gestures to express your appreciation. Be human.

How appropriate that Harvey suggested that donations to honor him go to The American Civil Liberties Union.

How To Turn Harvest Into PR “Gold”

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Harvest. It may well be the biggest, sexiest and most emblematic time of the year for a winery. And that means enormous opportunities for smart PR programs.

Wineries are farmers, right? Your product has spent a year growing and maturing and now at its peak is being brought to the winery to be transformed. These are enticing thoughts. The magic of ripe grapes in all their different colors and shapes and smells. When were the grapes picked? At night? Into small lug bins or bigger gondolas? The appeal of funky old trucks or the gleam of new huge shiny trucks….

Harvesting Grapes

Then of course, there the many ways grapes are sorted and crushed—whether with state-of-the-art optical scanners or by hand, by people. There’s the smell of the must in the air; what happens to that must at your winery? Does it go back into the vineyard?  Is juice being separated by vineyard block? Yeast? Leaving juice on the skins? And so unfurl all of the nuances of winemaking!

Using the harvest season as content for PR is almost Rule #1 in our world. You need to figure out to take advantage of what you’re already doing in a way which will attract attention from new eyeballs and build on your relationships with media and customers who already know about you. Maybe you have new varietals you’re crushing this year? Maybe you have new equipment on the crushpad? Maybe you’re sticking with what you’ve done for 20 years—and you know why it works!

So what can you DO? Here are some ideas:

  • Bring fresh grapes into the tasting room for guests to try
  • Bring fresh juice into the tasting room
  • Have a grape stomping party or offer grape stomping as a part of the winery visit
  • Post lots of details and photos on your social media outlets
  • Use harvest as a theme for a sales eblast
  • Offer a morning of grape picking as a raffle prize for club members
  • Offer to include guests or customers in harvest crew lunches or dinners
  • Shine a light on any traditions at your winery—-maybe it’s what’s served at pre-harvest or post-harvest celebration dinner (in the Champagne region there’s a specific stew)
  • Does your winery make tshirts each year for the harvest crew?
  • In general, take lots of photos and video if you can; this will be great material to pull from throughout the year. Even better—put those photos into a weekly harvest album or journal which you can send to your mailing list customers and keep on your website
  • Also very important: keep very precise statistics so you are a credible source about this year’s harvest versus last
  • Most important of all: identify what is unique to your winery at harvest time and make sure to share that message in all of your materials and outreach.

Happy crush!
Image credit publicdomainpictures.net, Karen Arnold