Twitter and Wine Marketing

Notorious for outages, wasting otherwise productive time and allowing you to follow the thoughts of MC Hammer, Twitter may now be making its mark as a powerhouse marketing platform. Twitter, for those of you new to the whole social media thing, is a web application/platform that allows you to share 140 character messages with anybody who cares to tune in to what you’re saying. It’s really that simple.

This past year, Dell shared messages on Twitter offering exclusive discounts to some of its products. They pulled in $1 Million in revenue from those little messages. Surely there must be room for others, including wine marketers, to exploit this communication platform. To this end, I present my ideas for how the wine industry can use Twitter to best advantage. One prerequisite: get a twitter account at twitter.com; it won’t hurt a bit.

1. If you run a winery, twittering (yes it’s a verb too) can put a human face on your organization. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh represents his company on Twitter and has written an article about how Twitter has helped him and Zappos.
2. If you have a web site which you update with new products or news, flag those changes in Twitter. This will drive additional traffic to your site.
3. Experiment with Twitter wine tastings. Project Vino, based in Australia, organized a wine tasting over twitter last year. Twitter Taste Live is another project I’ve come across trying something similar. Seems to me that 140 characters is just right for sharing a thumbnail sketch of a wine’s character.
4. Find fellow wine industry professionals on Twitter and follow them. You can search twitter for keywords and get real time results of what people are saying. A search for “Napa” brought up several results that looked like promising leads for people in and around the wine biz. Update: A fellow known to me only as dhonig has saved you some time and put up a long list of Wine Twitters.
5. Twitter is a great way to use the “lazyweb”. Once you’ve built a twitter network you can throw out questions that others in your group of followers might have an answer to. Twitter becomes a great cooperative exercise in this way.

I’m sure there are numerous other ways for you to use, enjoy and grow your business with Twitter. I’m convinced that we have only scratched the surface of this fascinating and sometimes infuriating new technology.