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The Top Wine Tweeters – hello @SommelierSara!

7 September 2010

SommelierSara was a surprise top 5 entry. Less of a surprise was garyvee, nectarwine, lenndevours, nytimesdining (think The Pour), and thirstforwine. All of whom scored in the 50s, with Gary at 60 and leading the pack. I like Klout. Rather than offer a simple top 10 list they are more subtle about how a social media person is important – not just that they are. It includes awareness, engagement and authority measures.

Wine Retailers and Local Wine Bloggers – an opportunity for both

6 September 2010

I believe a local wine retailer has a huge local advantage over large and online wine retailers in the internet world. There are many ways a wine retailer can take leverage this. One of these is to cooperate with local wine bloggers. Sure they’re not going to be as large as the top wine bloggers I’ve been reviewing. But you have some overlapping interests not the least of which is a similar passion for wine.

How to Rank Wine Blogs – a DIY rough and ready approach

5 September 2010

1. Choose a blog you want to rank yourself against – perhaps it’s one of the top blogs, or just another local wine blogger
2. Go to compete and enter your blog and the other blog address.
3. Go to Open Site Explorer and enter your blog, and then the other blog address.
4. Go to PostRank and add up the last 10 scores for your blog, and then the other blog.
Now you have comparative figures for volume, authority and engagement. You could weight them depending on your priority.

The Wine Drinker Engagement Pyramid and Socialgraphics

2 September 2010

One of the best ways I’ve seen of deciding how to utilize social media in the wine world is the Engagement Pyramid. Watchers are at the bottom with increasing involvement and decreasing numbers as you move up the pyramid to Curators. It’s part of a strategy that asks
- where are your customers online?
- what are your customers’ social behaviors online?
- what social information or people do your customers rely on?
- what is your customers’ social influence? Who trusts them?
- how do your customers use social in regards to your brand?

A Wine Retailer’s Perspective on Social Media: why bother?

1 September 2010

Let’s look at why you could be interested in wine social media, from a business objective perspective, not because it’s the latest marketing buzz word. Here’s a table I’ve compiled from my own general internet marketing knowledge combined with various social media expert that looks at Social Media Objectives, Metrics, Software and suitability – all from a wine retailer’s perspective.

No one knows you? Wine blogs a wine retailer could advertise on

31 August 2010

Wine blog advertising is one way to boost awareness, if that’s your objective. Using Google’s advertising tools the only ones (from my list) are vinography.com and drvino.com. And to be fair they also usually come up near the top of the 15 tools or blog lists I’ve been using. I wanted to make this my advertising recommendation (for free blogs) and yet… half of the rest also accept Google ads. So an initial recommendation is to advertise on these two and do some investigation into the rest.

Social Media Objectives and Wine Blogs

27 August 2010

I’ve created a diagram of the interplay between social media objectives, success metrics, the Paid/Owned/Earned continuum, types of media, and the marketing funnel. In the end I decided that my social media objectives covered the lot: branding, engagement, information gathering, purchase and customer service. Each has its own success metrics. The conclusion is I should start to put wine blogs against objectives rather than have one list.

Wine Blog Traffic – some big differences between blogs

24 August 2010

Estimating traffic volume using Compete. Compete has a 2,000,000 member panel but it’s not completely accurate so I’ve used their ranking system to come up with relative sizes of wine blogs. Wine Library TV, Vinography and Dr Vino do well but I have some gaps in the data because I can’t get data for subdomains. However a pattern is starting to emerge.

Wine Blog Engagement Scores – a surprising result

23 August 2010

PostRank analyzes the “5 Cs” of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking. Using this method each wine blog is given a score for their last 10 posts, which is added up to give a total engagement score. The highest possible score would be 100 and I’m impressed with how many are scoring well. The stand out is “another wine blog” with a score of 75 – holy cow they’ve beaten Wine Library TV!

Websites votes for wine blogs

16 August 2010

What I’m looking to do is replicate Google’s successful ranking process to rank wine blogs. SEOmoz offer a free tool called the Open Site Explorer which measures Link Popularity very similar to the way Google does. This tool gives anyone the ability to see external links and their worth to any site or page on the web.

The Ranking Method. I have put the list of 28 wine blogs that I selected from various Blog Search Engines and have sorted them by the SEOmoz Page Authority. The Pour (NYT) and Wine Library TV are clearly at the top with DrVino and Vinography close behind.

Using DoubleClick to find the best Wine Blogs

13 August 2010

One way to track down what websites the target audience is reading is to use DoubleClick. This has some excellent tools that show demographics of readers for 88 wine websites. The best and largest ones are snooth and wine-searcher. Interestingly they are also the best specialist wine comparison shopping sites. A good middle range one is cellartracker as well as some wine magazines, experts, and wine stores. There may be some possibilities in this group. Some smaller websites that have a very good target audience include winesandvines and vinography. The could well be some more gems in there but the graph’s tag are cumbersome so I’ve also posted the full list.

Tapping into the Long Tail of Wine Bloggers

6 August 2010

One of the things I’m doing is trying to work out the long tail of bloggers in order to find good writers and audiences for wine retailers. Rand Fish from this SEOmoz video explains some of the background of a way to create content.

Wine Blogger Audience and Blog Quality Factors

6 August 2010

The Social Media Brief, some initial thoughts but only partly completed. By writing a brief I’m forcing myself to set some objectives and specific measures of success. Here are some sections of the brief (I tried to, and still intend to, write): Background, Business Objective, Social Media Objective(s), Target Audience, Success Metrics or KPIs, Deliverables, Budget, Mandatories. Some of this is easy and some needs some more work.

The Top 28 Free Wine Blogs – an initial list based off Blog Search Engines

4 August 2010

An initial list of the top 28 wine blogs for a US wine retailer to be associated with. Used Google Blog Search, PostRank and Yahoo Directory plus some medium authority blog search engines to come up with an initial list for further research. Full list is included here in a Google Doc spreadsheet with all the rankings.

Wine Social Media Types – a Diagram

3 August 2010

What are the types of wine social media and what is a wine blogger exactly?! Before I went any further with my wine blogger list I thought I’d try to define the different types through a Wine Social Media Types diagram. It visually shows how free wine blogs, fora, video and radio webcasts, pro blogs, online magazines, facebook and twitter all come together in a potpurri of wine social media.

A first, but failed ;), attempt at making a list of the best wine bloggers (for a wine retailer)

2 August 2010

The first step in coming up with the top wine bloggers is to compile an initial list. I want this to be objective and transparent, not subjective or using hidden algorithms. The first attempt at finding sources of these lists include: Google Blog Search, Yahoo Directory, Alexa, Wine Blog Awards ’10 and ’09, Cellarer, Top Wine Blogs, Food & Wine, Ala Wine, Wikio, blogs.com, BlogBridge, Blogged Directory, and Technorati. Here’s the initial results. In short more work needed.

Does a wine blogger’s audience overlap with a wine retailer’s shopper base?

1 August 2010

I’ve been looking into what wine blogs would be best for a wine retailer to be associated with. “Associated with” could mean anything from advertising in their website sidebar to commenting on their posts. I’ve outlined the start of the criteria. It outlines a target audience, initial thoughts on the process and some restrictions.

What do you think are the best wine blogs?

28 July 2010

I’ve been looking into what blogs would be best for a wine retailer to be associated with. “Associated with” could mean anything from advertising, commenting, linking to, inviting to guest post on your own blog (probably paid as many seem to be journalists). Here’s some initial thoughts including the industry’s Wine Blogger Awards.

Wine-Searcher, a Price Comparison Shopping Site Review

27 July 2010

Wine-Searcher is a large search engine of wine stores, winery, and wine auction, price lists and catalogues. According to wine-searcher it has almost 4mn products listed from about 18,000 wine shops. But it’s claim to fame is really the ability to compare wine prices. Here’s a review from a US consumers perspective.

Google Goggles – that customer may not just be sending an SMS

22 July 2010

Say your customer is at your competitor’s wine store browsing the aisles. They see a wine they like so they use their mobile phone to take a picture of the label and send it to Google Goggles. Google then compares the picture to all the pictures on it’s database through something called “visual search technology”. It determines that it is a wine label for Duckhorn Napa Merlot 2005 and sends a query to Google Product Search. The customer gets shopping comparison results from online websites sent to their phone while standing in the retail store aisle.

Breaking News: Australia invades New Zealand

17 July 2010

A bit of humor on NZ care of our Aussie cousins…

People drink other People’s Wines: the influence of others’ advice

15 July 2010

Tony Spawton on why consumers buy wine. He says, ‘the expectations of the consumer varies with the occasion for which the wine is purchased. The wine consumer is promiscuous in brand, price, region and style so to suggest that the consumer is stuck in one category is a fallacy. Consumers are most influenced by the advice of others “people drink other peoples’ wines” a phrase I coined in the late 1980′s. Brand is important as a choice factor and variety is a given. Another phrase of mine is, “the package sells the first bottle the wine maker the second”. The extrinsic attributes need to be distinctive to break though the clutter and jog the consumer memory whether in the retail store or the restaurant.’

Snooth Review – a specialist wine shopping comparison engine

13 July 2010

A review of snooth.com – a very interesting wine comparison shopping engine. How big it is, how to sign up, easy ways to upload products and maintain them and how to get traffic. Certainly worth a look.

What is most important to wine consumers? Is it selection or price or both?

12 July 2010

We don’t make the purchasing experience easy for consumers. There is an overwhelming number of SKUs to choose from, many labels look the same, the classification by wine origins is not obvious for everyone. For most consumers, it’s intimidating. It has been established that in average, consumers make a wine selection in 40 seconds, [so wine labels] being visible is important (care of Isabelle Lesschaeve, wine researcher).

Google Base Feeds and Wine

8 July 2010

This part of the internet ecosystem has it’s own peculiarities and optimization techniques. Your first port of call is the Google Merchant Center. You’ll be asked to submit your products by file or feed. Here’s how

Why are Comparison Shopping Engines so Important?

7 July 2010

Wine shopping comparison websites is a seemingly dry topic but as you dig into it you see just what an opportunity and threat it is. You could now have a Google search results page for XX brand wine with the first 1-2 listings being for the winery, next 3 spots for shopping results with an image, 2 spots for other comparison shopping engines, 1 spot for videos with thumbnails, and finally 1 spot for an organic result. On the Adwords side you may have images in the ads for those merchants who use the Google product search service as well as Checkout badges.

The Most Important Source for Online Wine Sales: this will surprise you

6 July 2010

I’ve been doing some research into wine comparison shopping engines and have come across some eye opening changes in getting more traffic to your wine retail website. This post outlines that insight mainly using a graph that combines traffic with conversion rates for the top websites.

The Top 5 Online Wine Stores in the US

30 June 2010

The top 5 by SEO factors only. Not by any usability tests, sales, content, wine range or other consumer factors – just industry SEO analysis for the broad term “buy wine”. Wine.com is miles ahead of anyone else. Winebuys is behind the rest of the pack. It’s the middle of the pack that are in a serious battle for spots 2 and 3.

How a Cheese Store did better than a Wine Store in Google

29 June 2010

Showing how to do better on Google by analyzing the search engine results for local wine stores in CA 90210. The Cheese Store of Beverly Hills is ranked in the top two places in local search and organic search. Now perhaps they are famous in Beverly Hills but check out their site. This cheese store has 686 external links from 250 unique websites. This little cheese store for Pete’s sake! Okay – they also sell wine, but not prominently on their website. Photos of the store suggest perhaps one third to one half wine and the rest in cheese? Let’s dig a little further into what’s going on

Robert Parker and his wine retailer page

27 June 2010

eRobertParker.com has the superb creditability of a brand name critic with a searchable database. Importantly this is matched with the 150,000 actual Wine Advocate reviews in the eRobertParker.com database.

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