Wineries and Social Media Part I

Rebecca Gibb has an article in Decanter discussing a talk Gary Vaynerchuck gave last week at Winefuture basically saying winemakers should be more involved in social media. From the article:

Gary Vaynerchuk, the relentless host of of US Wine Library TV, told the Winefuture conference in Rioja that wine producers are 'lazy', leaving retailers to talk to their consumers rather than doing it themselves.

He also slammed producers for failing to take advantage of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to communicate with their consumers.

I have not seen the whole talk yet, just bits of it (I'll post the full talk as soon as it is available online). Clearly, Vaynerchuck is generalizing, a great number of wine producers have blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. But, I question the underlying assumption that all wine producers need to have a social media presence. Rather than lurching from new idea to new idea it makes much more sense for wine producers to understand their customers and have a comprehensive marketing strategy.

If your customer base is a demographic that uses Facebook and Twitter and it will drive sales, then, of course it is a good idea. On the other hand, if there is no benefit, then why do it? Does Opus One really need to Tweet to attract new customers (there is an OpusOne Twitter account, but it is not run by the Opus One Winery)?

What I think is glossed over in the rush to move to social media is that there is a real cost in using these services. Setting up a Twitter account doesn't cost anything. But the person who has to update that account, who has to respond to questions, who has to monitor the brand on Twitter costs money and money spent doing that takes away from other, potentially more lucrative, marketing venues.

If you don't incorporate social media into your marketing strategy and just start a Facebook page or create a Twitter account you run the risk of creating a social media ghost town: accounts that sit there unused or not updated are potentially worse than not having any presence at all.

If you want to find a list of wineries on Twitter this web page is a good place to start. It is not anywhere close to complete, but you'll see most of the wineries listed on the page follow other wineries and so on...so you can expand your list pretty quickly.

The thing is, neither Gary nor I own a winery. So, while we can pontificate as much as we want, it boils down to what do the winery owners think. For the second part of this post, I am going to ask for opinions from different winemakers. Assuming any of them respond I'll put the opinions into a coherent post and get the perspective from the real experts.