vReview #2 – Winespies.com

Second edition of Wine website video reviews – what I’ll call vReviews for short – comes with my first impressions of Wine Spies. Wine Spies contacted me to see if I would review their site. Here is a First Impression review – a review no longer than 5 minutes to give my raw, unadulterated reaction to the site.

I think, as a marketing professional by trade, that the first encounter with a site is hyper-critical. If you don’t convey your value within the first 5 minutes of a visitor (in this case, me) then it would be a little much to expect that visitor to come back, let alone spend money on the site.

Have a look at my first impression review of theWineSpies.com, vReview #2.

With this review, I’m also going to start a rating system. Rate 1 to 5 stars. Check out the video to understand why I give WineSpies.com 3–Stars. For reference, that means I may come back and make a purchase but I’m not over-the-top compelled to try it out.

New Site Feature – Video Wine 2.0 site reviews…

I came across a useful tool that I’m going to implement. I surf MANY wine related websites. I wish I could write about them all and share that with you. Unfortunately, I can’t. But what I can do, now that I’ve found the tool to let me do it, is create short screencast reviews of sites I find and my impressions of them. I’m testing this out so bear with me on the first review.

Since I literally just figured this out I wanted to put my first review up. See what you think of it. Its optimized for 1024×768. I’m not totally psyched about how this came out, but I’ll improve with practice.

Overall, I’m still not completely sold on Snooth but I think it could build up to a good new tool. It may be suffering from a little bit of a “critical mass” issue in that not enough people are using the tool (yet).

Check out the video. If this works out, it was easy to do and I’ll record more of my online wine adventures.

Enjoy the wine life!

Snooth – lets take a look

Tasting notes just got WAY EASIER!

Tooling around with new tech tools as I usually do, I just found one of the more useful tools that Typepad has created a posting client for my smart phone (Nokia e61). While most bloggers either don’t have a mobile blogging device or bring their laptops with them, I have a nice little phone with a 2 Megapixel camera. It’s been great for email but no way of blogging.

Well, that changed today! With this client I can write quick notes and get them up here. This whole post is written via Nokia e61. I don’t anticipate writing long posts in the future but I couldn’t resist doing this one. Now I have an easy way of capturing my first impressions and (with this phone) including Pics!

Enjoy the Wine Life!

Marketing in Wine 2.0 World – A Whole New Way to SPAM?

Well, I’m seeing a light at the end of the tunnel with my myriad of projects so I thought I’d post a little bit on a topic I’ve been thinking about for a few weeks. I guess I’ve noticed a subtle but disturbing trend
in the world of Wine 2.0. We are just starting to chip away at the social networking technology world as it

relates to wine (we’ve even got the cool moniker of Wine 2.0 to describe these tools) and it really does open up alot of exciting possibilities particularly if you’re a techie marketing person like me.

First, what do these sites do? Well, whether its Twitter or Pownce or Jaiku, Facebook or MySpace, most of these “social” sites basically help you to use online technology to find people with common interests and share ideas with them. When you verticalize that concept into, say, wine, that broad, general, somewhat useless “tell everyone what I’m doing all the time” actually becomes quite useful. I’ve decided to use Facebook as the epicenter for my wine contacts (that use online stuff – mostly blogger friends). Doing that I find that I get quick recommendations, find out about events, hear about people coming to town, all with that baseline of wine connecting me with these people. “Its social…demented and sad, but social”. Wine is a good topic to use these technologies for because its inherently social and so even before the Internet existed there was already a global conversation and community around wine. New technologies are just facilitating.

(side note: someone mentioned to me that a good way to help understand why these things are popular with kids is to imagine what you would’ve done if you could do all this stuff before you could drive a car – you could ‘keep in touch’ and interact without relying on your parents for a ride…I guess I could see that).

So the social nature of wine in meshing very well with new social technologies. The challenge that the wine marketer needs to meet is simple – how do I get tapped in and have my wine company join the global conversation? How do you spark a conversation between producer, consumer, and marketer/advertiser? How do you join your brand into the conversation in this online world? If social technologies like blogs and social networks are moving from broadcast (I print/televise and you watch/read) to conversation and interaction then marketing has to transform from “impressions” and “eyeballs” into conversation and interaction (I have a many thoughts on this area as a marketing professional). A marketing campaign is not as much about repeating my brand so many times that you’ll never forget it as it is about doing something that gets your brand accepted into the conversation.

This is where Wine 2.0 is starting to falter and lose some steam. I’m going to pick on Gary Vaynerchuk a little here but first, I will say some positive things about him. He’s a good one to use because he’s put himself up front for marketing his business in some brilliant ways and in other ways he somewhat falls short – really representing the faltering I am seeing in Wine 2.0 based marketing.