The Social Media Phenomenon

As you may have noticed from my earlier posts, I’m a fan of e-marketing. I’ve been doing what I call e-marketing 1.0 for the past several years. This has consisted of sending occasional email blasts and weekly or monthly newsletters. The results were favorable and the ROI was always something I could crow about.

It used to be that if you had a good website, you were at the bleeding edge of the e-marketing curve. Email blasts were a great way to cheaply launch direct response campaigns and to gain insights into what’s working and what to let go.

These days things are changing and changing fast. Email campaign response rates are down and periodic e-newsletters, while still a very effective way of keeping in touch with your customers, are so ubiquitous that many people are opting out due to the mailbox overload.

For so many years consumers have been bombarded with advertising messages. The number of ad messages an average consumer sees each day is difficult to nail down, but during an “exhaustive” research session, I found the range to be from 250 to 1,500! With so many messages and so many companies telling you what their product does or offers, the gravity of those messages have been diluted to the point that they are at best merely suggestive and at worst “downright lies”. It will not surprise you then that the word most associated with advertising is “false”.

Enter social media.

Social media is not advertising. It is word-of-mouth. People have caught on to the advertiser and no longer see ads as the way to learn about a particular product. So how do they find out about a product? They ask their friends. OR they go to sites like YELP to find out what other people have to say. One industry has also recognized this fact and, while they still make TONS of commercials, their commercials are NOT for prospective buyers. Try to guess which industry I’m talking about. There’s a commercial virtually at every break in a tv show and at the end of the commercial you know next to nothing about the product. Have you got it? It’s the auto industry. Those commercials with cars zipping around sideways on wet tarmacs or the ones with beautiful women telling you how the car makes them feel are not for prospective buyers. They’re for current owners. The auto companies are providing talking points for current owners so that when their friend asks them, “How do you like your car?” they can reference the commercial! The auto companies get it.

What does this mean for the small to medium sized winery? It means that you’ve got to “get on the bus” or get left behind.

Below I’ve included a link to a presentation entitled “Wrapping Your Head Around The Social Media Phenomenon” along with a few stats. The presentation is a great way to see what’s out there and to understand why social media is the next wave of customer contact. There’s no doubt in my mind that social media is right for a winery. It’s relatively cheap, it’s relatively easy and it’s fun!

• “False” is the term most associated with advertising


• Email response rates are dropping due to Social networking


• Social network member communities are now the 4th largest sector of online traffic


• Fastest growing segment on Facebook? - women over 55

“Wrapping Your Head Around The Social Media Phenomenon”

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/755315580