Savvy North Bay wine companies are going online to get people talking about their brands.
Anyone who’s strolled down the beverage aisle of a major grocery store can see the wine industry is among the most fragmented of all consumer product categories. According to The Wine Institute, there are more than 60,000 labels registered to California wines alone. For wineries, developing awareness in a crowded marketplace can be a brand’s biggest business challenge.
Here in the North Bay, several wine marketers are connecting with consumers and boosting brand loyalty through innovative public relations programs centered in cyberspace. Essential to the success of these campaigns is “viral” reach—that is, visibility and awareness through word-of-mouth or “tell a friend” tools.
Viral videos; blogs, which act as an intimate and often casual glance into the inner workings of a writer’s professional (or personal) world; and social networks such as MySpace and Second Life have exploded onto the scene in recent years. And marketers have grasped their potential to reach audiences both huge and highly targeted.
Viral video
For George Christie, owner of Christie Consulting in Healdsburg, viral videos (online content that gains popularity through email, IM messages, blogs and other media sharing websites) have become an increasingly important tool in raising visibility, awareness and, ultimately, sales for his clients. “The wine industry, with its emphasis on direct sales and marketing, is perfectly positioned to leverage this emerging technology,” he says.
Since founding his company in 2006, Christie has produced 25 videos for clients. But it’s the videos that were designed to “go viral,” as Christie puts it, that have shown the most immediate impact for his clients. Christie’s first viral video was produced as part of a campaign to launch a wine club for Groom wines, the eponymous brand of Sonoma County-based winemaker Daryl Groom.
The inspiration to create the video “came out of frustration with a lack of response to email campaigns,” explains Christie. “People are bombarded by emails these days; it’s not enough to get their attention. And from YouTube, to CNN, NFL.com, Yahoo—everywhere you look online, people are adopting video as a way to communicate their message.”
In addition, Christie notes, creating a video let him capture what he thought of as one of the brand’s greatest assets and points of difference: the passion and personality of its owners, Daryl and Lisa Groom. “I knew there was no way I could capture [their] personality in an email, and that if I put them in front of people [via video], something would happen.”
The response was instantaneous: While the initial email blast to 320 people yielded 10 new wine club members, the video blast sent to the same list generated five times as many. A wine club that looked like it might have a hard time getting off the ground took flight almost instantly.
Just as exciting, adds Christie, were the reports that tracked viewership. “We’ve had more than 700 unique viewers, and the video has been watched more than 1,000 times,” he says, “meaning that people were forwarding this on to their friends, and some were watching it more than once.” These stats are particularly impressive for a segment that’s essentially a five-minute sales pitch to buy wine.
Consumers watching winery commercials voluntarily? Judging by Christie’s success, if you make it appealing and authentic enough, it’s a slam dunk.
It’s this endorsement of content or product from a target consumer to a potential consumer who’s likely to share similar brand affinities that’s the first and most important characteristic of viral marketing. Person-to-person endorsements from a trusted source make viral marketing a particularly compelling tool for wine marketers, who need to overcome consumer confusion and impatience in the face of the dizzying plethora of wine brands saturating the market.
Blog about it
Josh Hermsmeyer, president of the nascent Capozzi Winery in the Russian River Valley, was inspired to launch his own experiment in social media by Stormhoek, the South African winery that’s become a poster child for the success of viral marketing via the Internet.
As has been widely publicized, Stormhoek quintupled its sales from a base of 50,000 cases in only two years and created enormous on- and offline trade and consumer awareness, thanks largely to an innovative outreach program to influential bloggers that began in 2005.
Capozzi Winery is still in the process of being built and hasn’t released a drop of wine yet, but thanks to the winery’s virtual presence, PinotBlogger.com, the brand already has a waiting list of more than 850 people who want to try the wine. “I started the blog about three days after we decided to build the winery,” recounts Hermsmeyer. “I thought it would make a good story—that someone might be interested in following along as we tried to get the winery off the ground.”
The “someone” whom Hermsmeyer hoped would want to read his posts has, since the blog’s launch in November 2005, turned into about 10,000 someones who visit PinotBlogger every month. It’s a number that rivals the website traffic of some of America’s largest wine brands and includes about 4,000 steady visitors who return regularly to read Hermsmeyer’s thoughts on everything from learning about winery sanitation to “Super-Secret Winery Financial Data” to “Bashing the 100 Point Scale.”
But, as Hermsmeyer grasps effortlessly, the power a blog holds lies not just in its content, but in its interactive possibilities. It can be easy for a novice to understand a blog as the online version of a newsletter. But blogging is an inherently communal act, and Hermsmeyer has engaged his visitors and fellow bloggers at critical junctures of Capozzi’s creation. He’s asked them, for example, to help pick the winery’s logo, to vote on its label and to provide feedback on the tasting room design.
“People who’re using blogging and social media—I don’t think they’re looking at their consumers as faceless, nameless people. I think they’re treating their consumers as individuals. They want to talk to them and have a relationship with them,” explains Hermsmeyer.
And while creating a community of brand fans is an accomplishment in itself, the conversations that take place on PinotBlogger serve another important marketing function by providing Hermsmeyer with immediate feedback from a relevant audience. “It’s like having your own focus group for free,” says Hermsmeyer, who estimates about half of his core visitors are passionate consumers and half are in the wine industry.
Hermsmeyer has even enlisted PinotBlogger fans to help promote the blog. He created high-quality T-shirts with the PinotBlogger logo and offered them free to any reader who wanted one. Avid fans quickly snapped up the shirts. “It kind of shocked me that someone would want to wear a T-shirt [advertising PinotBlogger],” admits Hermsmeyer. Of course, in addition to rewarding loyal fans, those readers are now walking around “IRL” (online slang for “in real life”) as billboards for the site.
In a twist to the T-shirt offer, Hermsmeyer created an exchange just for bloggers: send me a picture of you wearing your PinotBlogger shirt, and I’ll send you a bottle of the first vintage of Capozzi Pinot Noir. A quick Google search reveals numerous posts of bloggers who’ve taken Hermsmeyer up on the offer.
Such posts not only help Hermsmeyer get his blog noticed, they also help its Google ranking. As he explains, “If you don’t show up on the first page of a Google search, it’s like being a nobody. Blogs are taken very seriously by the search engine, and since that’s what most people use to find information online, there’s quite a benefit.”
Ever-ready to adopt promising avenues for exploration in new media, Hermsmeyer has publicized a quirky, wine-centric adaptation of Twitter, the service that lets users instantly blast their text-based posts out to their circle of friends. Using two Web applications that work with Twitter, Hermsmeyer has found a way for wine geeks to have someone transcribe, for free, their spoken tasting notes in real time and publish them instantly however they choose—say, to their tasting blog or to their friends’ cell phones.
Other areas of social media also interest Hermsmeyer, who’s nearing completion on a project to build a virtual Capozzi Winery in Second Life, the “metaverse” that has about a half-million active members. Here, visitors can pick grapes, make them into wine and compete for “Farker” points (a not-so-subtle jab a wine critic Robert Parker).
Whether Hermsmeyer’s more experimental new media ventures will translate into real world results is up in the air. Are Second Lifers the kind of people who will even care about Capozzi’s high-end Pinot Noir? And Hermsmeyer’s Twitter transcription seems like a great idea for wine geeks, until you imagine talking to the operator in India who transcribes your reviews: “I said, Boisset Chambolle Musigny 2002. That’s Boisset—B like boy, O like Oscar, I like Igor…”
But these questions ignore the most basic point, which is that the wine industry is still in its infancy when it comes to exploring the ways social media technologies can be exploited to serve the needs of wine consumers.
Online and offline, others in the wine and marketing worlds are taking notice of PinotBlogger’s success. Since PinotBlogger began, the site has been featured in The Wall Street Journal’s “Blog Watch” and, in August 2007, was named by Wine & Spirits as one of the five best wine blogs on the Web. Hermsmeyer been asked to speak at local wine industry conferences exploring new media topics, and he’ll be contributing his thoughts to a new marketing textbook edited by Sonoma State University professor Dr. Liz Thach. In just over two short years, he’s become Sonoma’s poster child for breaking new ground in wine industry publicity.
“I have no wine. All I have is a story about what I’m doing,” reflects Hermsmeyer. “If you can have this kind of success with no juice to sell, it seems that if you had any kind of equity in, and excitement about, your brand, you could do much more.”
Strategic partnerships
For Jason Daniel, brand director for Sonoma County’s Clos du Bois, Hermsmeyer’s words are preaching to the converted. “Millennials are the fastest-growing segment of wine consumers, and the Web is their primary source of information. You can’t effectively reach that target without the Web being an important—if not the most important—part of your marketing platform,” says Daniel.
For Clos du Bois, Daniel has redirected the brand’s print and out-of-home advertising budget to put its marketing and consumer public relations focus squarely online—and not just to target the Millennial generation. The result is “Generous Pour,” a multi-pronged cause marketing campaign designed to generate awareness for the brand among 25- to 34-year-old women.
And as Daniel points out, leveraging the Internet’s viral possibilities is critical for the brand: “Traditional media isn’t only less targeted and more expensive, but there’s a lot of skepticism about that media among this target audience. In a viral campaign, we can target the people we want to reach very specifically. That person is then empowered to share our message with people within his or her network. So if the campaign is compelling, the viral piece adds exponential efficiency. We can’t control the viral component, but we also don’t pay for it.”
Creating a compelling viral program, for Daniel, meant adding a charitable element. For the first online campaign that Clos du Bois executed, in May 2007, the brand worked with Sausalito’s Opts Ideas to partner with WomenHeart, an advocacy organization supporting the 8 million women in the United States living with heart disease. Consumers could raise donations for WomenHeart by sending a free Mother’s Day e-card, courtesy of Clos du Bois. An option to personalize the card by uploading a photo added a second interactive, user-generated content feature. Once sent, recipients of cards were encouraged to send their own cards. Ultimately, more than 30,000 consumers logged onto the site, with viral traffic from one consumer to another playing a critical role in generating traffic.
Echoing the basic tenet of viral marketing, Daniel comments, “Things that come from trusted sources are much more likely to be embraced. And with cause marketing, there’s an altruistic element—the message isn’t as commercial and offers a brand the opportunity to be introduced by what it stands for, not just about product features and benefits.”
For the second Clos du Bois campaign, the brand again worked with Opts Ideas to partner with a nonprofit organization, Share Our Strength, on a program to generate awareness for the brand during the 2007 holiday season. The campaign supported Share Our Strength’s efforts to the feed the hungry, with the goal of raising $50,000 for holiday food programs. A free download of R&B artist Corinne Bailey Rae’s Grammy-nominated hit song, “Like a Star,” raised cash to fight hunger. Recipes, music playlists and party planning suggestions from celebrity chefs added layers of seasonal content to a microsite that brought food and wine into the online experience.
Key to the program’s strategy was blog outreach. Working with the San Francisco office of Current, a lifestyle public relations agency, a targeted list of relevant blogs was developed and carefully pitched. The result was nearly 90 blog and online placements, including buzz on heavily trafficked sites like Splendora, Hungry Girl, Foodbuzz and USA Today’s pop culture blog, Pop Candy.
A second viral leg to the program rested on leveraging Bailey Rae’s online network. Working with the pop star’s management team, Opts was able to get Rae to promote the Clos du Bois program on her MySpace and Facebook profiles. On MySpace, Rae’s Clos du Bois blurb was posted automatically to the pages of the 100,000 or so friends in her network. “These viral efforts delivered an immediate and significant bump in both site traffic and music downloads,” says Daniel.
All told, the Clos du Bois holiday program drove more than 140,000 consumers to its microsite. While the majority of traffic was driven by search engine optimization and online advertising, the brand team estimates that at least 15 percent of the traffic came through viral publicity.
Other North Bay wineries have ventured into social networking on their own. Roshambo, the 15,000-case Sonoma County brand owned by Naomi Brilliant, has its own MySpace page as well as the Roshamblog, a platform for Brilliant’s boyfriend and official Roshamblogger Scott Keneally.
Roshambo’s MySpace profile has about 500 friends on it, who, Keneally says, “are mostly people who’ve tried our wines, who know us, have been to our events and partied with us.” The winery posts bulletins and events to its profile, instantly alerting its fans when there’s news to share.
Facebook, YouTube videos and a website revamp are in the works, according to Keneally, who envisions creating short, funny commercial spots that capture the brand’s edgy and irreverent spirit. He enjoys being the voice of the winery via the Roshamblog, which draws about 2,600 people a month: “We started the blog to regularly communicate with our fans, but more than that, it’s there to support Roshambo’s vision of an accessible wine culture,” he remarks. For Keneally, this means posting about everything from his favorite indie rock band to Brilliant’s tattoos.
Conspicuously—and purposefully—absent from his posts is much about wine. “I’m a self-proclaimed ‘vineyard idiot,’” he says. “My tasting notes consist of ‘yum’ and ‘yuck’ or a series of emoticons. I’m not qualified to comment on things like ‘terroir.’
“But there are things, like music and art, that we support that help give a broader sense of the winery’s personality,” he continues. “The new wine catalog on our website focuses on the wines, but the blog focuses on the personality imbued in each bottle.”
Roshambo’s approach highlights a point that comes up over and over again with successful viral marketers: be authentic. “Don’t do it unless you’re passionate about it, because people can tell if you’re not into it,” says PinotBlogger’s Hermsmeyer. Jason Daniel of Clos du Bois agrees: “Especially in the wine industry, delivering authentic messages about the real story behind the brand—whether you’re a small, family winery or a national brand like Clos du Bois—is important. You need to stay true to what your brand is about.
