Return to Whining

One can only keep up so much theses days. Between tweeting, facebooking, blogging, spacing, and launching a new wine business - Access Wine Club - I have been very tardy on my own personal wine blog and my LocalWino.com site. That being said, I've decided to use my Local Wino Whines forum to express shorter, more concise consumer views about wine and link my observations from the wine business side with the consumer side. More of a view from inside out that may be of some interest.

My goal is to be very to the point and approach certain subjects more directly as they occur from my primary focus now which is the Access Wine Club catalog and website venture.

So here goes...subject #1 - Social Networks and Wine.

There is obviously a lot of interest in Social Networking across all channels these days and it has become the latest Internet darling. It is a broad term very loosely used now since there are so many of these portals that have been developed, but there is a more technical term being thrown around referred to as a "viral-expansion loop". This is a fancy way of saying friends telling friends that tell other friends and so on that revolve around a common interest of sorts whether it is where they went to school, family, social clubs, activities or key interests and the such. The expansion and growth has been exponential, literally. Now, people are trying to find out how to capitalize on this (i.e. monetize) with the huge numbers we're dealing with.

I've created a wine group on Facebook, I tweet as much as I can, and I have a portal, a forum and website all revolving around wine. And now, we sell wine through some exclusive partnerships here in Napa. Although interest is high and the numbers can be 'fruitful', the buyers are still tough to identify. Just because there is a wine "interest", it does not mean that they are buyers.

In summation, wine is a very social commodity and there are big numbers to reach. The next step is to find what compels people to go from sharing their interests about wine online to actually becoming a buyer. Access Wine Club attempts to do this through offering specialty wines through some exclusive partnerships along with giving the (potential) consumer more thorough information about the wine, the background, the winemaker and the winery itself to create interest beyond just a rating or a couple of sentences about the wine.

So far so good...we just need to continue to expand the pockets and do our best to inform the consumer well enough to make comfortable decisions about their purchase when trying something new.

More to come...

Cheers,
James
Chief Wino