Continuing on our retrospection of 2009 and Murphy-Goode’s Social Media Magic, I have decided to share with you today the ONE young man who was, in all fairness, slightly distracted by the beautiful Anita during the run for the MG wine country lifestyle correspondent position. Yes. Frank married Anita shortly after Hardy was crowned prince of MG, viking horns and all.
I discovered Frank relatively early in my hunt for the goode guys. His URL was set up, but he was still “creating” himself online as Frank loves wine. Wow. A passionate fellow this one, and a very lucky Anita, for sure! To call Frank a filmmaker would be correct but not appropriate: He is a story teller. This is what Frank wrote when I touched base with him recently asking what he is up to since Murphy Goode:
Hi Andy,
Sorry for the very late reply.
I’m very happy to hear about your new business. I hope it all goes well.
A lot has changed for me this past year.
My latest accomplishment is the video for Conundrum Winery
The ball is still moving and I hope to have more news for you in a couple months.
This little piece of art shows Frank’s mastery of his work: pairing wine with social media. It has been a pleasure to meet up with Frank and one day, I hope to sit with him and his lovely bride and enjoy a glass of creepy wine… 😉 .
Any winery can call itself blessed to enjoy strong ties with Frank Gutierrez, for it is surely to be a fruitful relationship.
Moving forward fastly to the end of stretch ONE, the application process. Having jumped into this Murphy-Goode deal without ever tasting wine, never blogged before in English, nor having much understanding of the American “way of life”, I can only say: What an awesome learning experience these past weeks have been!
As I know nothing about the wine industry, I have been foraging around the blog-o-sphere looking to educate myself on who’s in and what’s on. Over on Twitter, what with the #hashtags and all, it is easy picking to meet up with wine-types all over the place. It is here that I met most of my contacts. However the blogs have been essential to broadening my horizons in a huge manner. Take for example Tom Wark’s Fermentation blog where I caught up with my next guest author, Amy Atwood of MyDailyWine.com.
Amy, I am glad you came to tell us a bit about how you see social media and the wine industry.
There was a spirited discussion on Tom Wark’s Fermentation blog last week about a new job category in the wine industry.
This new category is the social media manager for wineries. Of course, this has come to the forefront as a result of Murphy-Goode Winery’s search for a Social Media Director.
Then VinTank, digital think tank for the wine industry, became involved by offering $100,000 worth of digital consulting services to the winning candidate and Murphy Goode free of charge , as well a smaller free package of consulting services for any winery that hires VinTank’s top choices in the MG competition.
I am not applying for the MG position but am a wine professional who wanted to weigh in on social media and online sales synergies.
Return on investment has been noted as a concern by many wine companies when it comes to social media.
There are many ways to measure that return. For starters, Cruvee offers social media monitoring services for the wine industry.
But what about the connection between social media and actual sales? “E-business is an asset that is greatly underutilized by the wine industry.” Paul Mabray, VinTank
Social media can be used to drive sales, both passively and actively. Look at Dell’s Twitter strategy for example. They have made over 3 million in sales from their Twitter account by sending out coupons and specials to their followers.
And as I noted recently on my blog, MyDailyWine:
In a recent study of women’s wine buying habits, 21% said they buy wine online.
And 36% of Millennials say that they research wine reviews online before purchase (this study did not ask whether the purchase was made on or offline).
Additionally, five out of ten women would consult a friend (47%). One in five would consult the internet (28%).
These wine consumers are engaging online at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn , etc but are wineries engaging with them and activating a sale? There are are tremendous opportunities for synergies between social media strategies and driving sales both on and off line.
Run localized Twitter campaigns that support and drive sales to specific retailers that carry your product. These campaigns should not be spammy with messages that say “Buy my wine”. But instead can bring value to their followers by announcing special wine events and discounts.
“Sincerity, fun, transparency help “wash” away corporate.” Paul Mabray, VinTank
http://www.vintank.com/
As a wine professional, I help wine companies maximize their online sales strategies, especially direct to consumer and direct to trade programs.
What are wine companies doing to optimize their wine clubs? Are they seeking out online marketing agents, etailers, etc?
Are they using direct to trade programs to target specific trade accounts and have greater control over distribution?
All of the above sales solutions should work hand in hand with a comprehensive social media strategy.
Wow thanks, Amy. Loads of questions to think on. Especailly at times like this when there are loads of social media savvy applicants out there who won’t get the Murphy-Goode gig. We can take those questions served up for the wine companies and develope our own answers to them, presenting ourselves as the new generation of Wine Social Media Managers!
I have noticed that most blogs I have seen in the MG gig are not “pinging” (to be honest, I have not seen very many of the 300+ applicants stuff, so *yours* may be pinging just fine). On top of that I have noticed that people associated with you are also not pinging, which kind of defeats the term “social media networking”. What good is it to you if someone sets a hyperlink from their blog to your blog if they are not telling the world that this has happened? Sure, you get exposed to their readers, but why on earth would that be enough for you?
Same goes for all the effort you go to to give someone else a hyperlink coming from your blog. Yeah, he is getting exposed to your readers, but would it not be more savvy to let the search engines KNOW about this so that say if someone types “[place search term here]” into google, they have a chance of finding your blog? I mean, social media is partly about letting people who are looking for the information you have to offer actually find you… right?
Pinging is important if you want to build serps within your network. Which is why we are here, right? Essentially there are at least 8 of you who will go on to blogging success (for I am certain that blogging will be an important part of your social media strategy). Potentially there are 9 going on to wine web2.0 fame (if MG chooses someone other than the VinTank 4 + 4).
And it is my firm belief that even more of us can go places with this gig up and going (see the post by Caveman Wines So you didn’t get the Murphy-Goode job, now what? ). Ergo it follows that pinging will be very important for all of us to understand and master.
Now before you get intimidated, “master” does sound like loads of work…, it can all be automated, to degrees, depending on your blog platform.
What is a ping or what is pinging?
I tossed the ping question out on a forum the other day and this was one answer to “What is a ping and how does it work?”:
Using my tech. knowledge, I would assume it’s when my blog will “ping” or touch/announce to a search engine or other site it exists. Sounds like a push mechanism vs. waiting for a crawler or bot to find you.
Then someone tossed the WordPress Glossary terms into the discussion, which I will copy here to be able to differentiate between what WP means and what I mean:
Pingback –
Pingback lets you notify the author of an article if you link to his article (article on a blog, of course). If the links you include in an article you write on a blog lead to a blog which is pingback-enabled, then the author of that blog gets a notification in the form of a pingback that you linked to his article.
Trackback –
Trackback helps you to notify another author that you wrote something related to what he had written on his blog, even if you don’t have an explicit link to his article. This improves the chances of the other author sitting up and noticing that you gave him credit for something, or that you improved upon something he wrote, or something similar. With pingback and trackback, blogs are interconnected.
These definitions are not poor and actually describe how wp uses pings and trackbacks well, however pings are *more* than what is stated in the glossary.
Ping comes from U-boots (submarines)–they send out “pings” (as ina noise) which go forth through the water and when that noise wave hits an object, it gets pinged (sent) back to the submarine. This brings us up the first definition: it is the blogger informing the bots (from various search engines) that you have published fresh content. If you ping, you tell google, yahoo, technorati etc to come and crawl your site, index everything it finds and send that information out to whomever is searching for it. So pinging is KEY for SEO purposes — to up your own ranking and findability.
It is also essential if you want to build a stable and strong network (which is why I mention it here). I have noticed that some of you (and the term *you* may mean someone in this group directly but is generally meant for all those involved with blogging and the MG situation) are not pinging. You see, each time you mention another persons blog (with a hyperlink to their blog) this information also gets pinged and this strengthens both the other persons seo as well as the network you have together. Think of a spiders web… when the bots come and spider your content, this is exactly what they do: make connections.
Why is pinging important to networks?
I hope you could see in the video how important pinging is for each blogger in your network to be pinging. It is fine to be giving your networks “link love” by setting up a hyperling in your post linking to them. This is a great way to present their work to your readers — but why would you be satisfied with ONLY going this far and “limiting” the exposure to those who already read your blog? By pinging you are letting all the pinged all pinged search engines know you have published new content and immediately upon getting pinged by you they send their bots over to spider your content, turning over every word, checking the hyperlinks, the hover texts, the titles, the pictures as well as the descriptions to the pictures, the videos, podcasts = EVERYTHING. It all gets indexed and in the process connections are being made (on the side of the search engines) while you are weaving a tighter web within your network. Just imagine if everyone who links to you from his or her blog were aware of and actually implimenting good pinging tactics?
Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention: SERPs are the S.earch E.ngine R.esults P.ages which if you and your network bloggers are pinging correctly should start to become stronger for your chosen keywords… (oh, keywords, another topic we could discuss here on my blog!)
Now that you understand the importance of pinging not only for yourself, but for your network, I look forward to presenting you in a new post the “how-tos” to pinging.
If you find this to be valuable information, then pass this post on to your network buddies. Let’s work at strengthening the great work you have already done by understanding and using the social media to your advantage. It is not about working harder, it is about working smarter.
If you have any questions, hit me up in the comments.
* other posts of interest concerning pings, syndication and/or tagging for seo savvyness:
Thanks to Paul and the guys at VinTank: you are true sports — now people, let us roll up our sleeves, we have some super savvy web2.0 magic to do for one fortunate Murphy-Goode Wine Country Lifestyle Correspondent!
Official statement to VinTank pro-bono offer of $100k worth of tech support
Many of us have been wondering what MG thinks of this offer from VinTank. Here we have the answer.
I would like to take the time to thank Mark (from Murphy-Googe) as well as Paul (from VinTank) for both taking time out of their very busy schedules to comment on my little corner of the blog-o-sphere. And my greatest thanks go to all you bloggers who came out and voiced your questions making this conversation possible altogether.
Let us keep the lines open, I would like to encourage you to keep asking questions, seek wisdom and find answers.
What a privilage today to present yet another guest post here. Immediately I was attracted to the layout and the obviously planned approach that Alina has taken with her approach to the Murphy-Goode Wine Country Lifestyle Correspondent application process. What an amazing idea!
So without further ado, here is Alina Brown of the GoodeMovement campaign:
Why a beginning wine enthusiast might be the right choice for A Really Goode Job
The last few days I’ve been contemplating why I (or any other beginning wine enthusiast) could be the right choice for Murphy-Goode’s “Really Goode Job” opportunity. There is very little offered in the Wine Country Lifestyle Correspondent job description that helps applicants identify in-depth qualities and contributions the winery is seeking in its ultimate candidate. This is not surprising – the “bang for the buck” element means that Murphy-Goode wants to open the field to as many people as possible, rightly so.
It is easy to say that the two critical factors for candidates are an interest in wine and expertise in social media. The two apparent frontrunners in the job search, Hardy Wallace ( @goodetobefirst) and Rick Bakas (@rickbakas), are prime examples of candidates with vast wine and social media expertise. It got me wondering, do I have a shot at this job without the relevant background in enology (a word I only learned a couple of weeks ago)?
I’d love to hear you opinions on this – poa st comment on my website or shoot me an email.
Cheers, Alina
*************
People, this is hopeful news for any of us crazy willing enough to apply for the position. Thanks again to Alina for offering her two cents and encouraging words.
I say: Two thumbs up for Alina! Go on over and give her a chat up on:
In light of the big buzz around the niche of wine blogging, wine marketing and web2.0 savvyness for the Murphy-Goode Wine Country Lifestyle Correspondent position, I present you all with yet another tech simplicity to increase your attractive services in the wine industry–well, for any industry gone online, for that matter!
Intorducing a custom search engine which is so easy to configure while also remains a “low profile search widget” yet helps drastically improve the visitor experience, collects relevant data and presents the publisher (that would be the blogger, you!) with excellent user-related statistics to help improve your own content.
Lijit
Lijit provides an impressive search network creation dashboard where you can define and manage your trusted social networks connections. Basically you are creating your own search engine that searches your blog, bookmarks, photos, blog roll, and more…
But before I write up all about it, let me SHOW you lijit in action — working for the Goode of Murphy:
Don’t you agree: being able to pull in your network to expand search results on your blog is great and an awesome way to increase the power of your network? Social media goes bezeerk with lijit!
I mean, there are lots of bells and whistles, but their big service comes down to this–we can all search each other’s blogs from our own blogs… Awesome!
Did you want to check it out again in action? Try Ed’s Winetonite or Rick’s Back to Bakas. Go on, I dare you!
So if you have your own URL and can put up a lijit search engine, you might find it as awesome as I do! It is a wonderful way to learn more and leverage the power of your networks network.
Now only if the guys at wordpress.com would create a way for the little foot-people of the blog-sphere–I know I would not be the only one here interested in such great services!
Note to Joel: Would this not be an amazing tool to introduce to all your bloggers at the Wine Bloggers’ Conference next month? Just imagine the power you unleash if everyone got into the loop!
If you thought Murphy-Goode was playing high poker with their $60K gig, then have a look at these grapes:
We believe [Murphy-Goodes social marketing take] is a healthy step for a winery and the buzz they have garnered online is representative of the success of the medium. To show our support and to help ensure the success of this program online, VinTank will be choosing 4 of the applicants as “our picks” (one for each partner) and if any of “our picks” are chosen, we will donate $100K of consulting services pro bono to that candidate. Yes, $100K of our strategic consulting services for FREE! This will be helping them develop a strategic plan and key business development help to make their six month job super effective and successful for them and Murphy Goode. This is truly our way to support these people for their hard work and for helping wine succeed online!