Love Wine | Spit Wine | The personal blog of Lloyd Benedict, Founder of AmericanWinery.com
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Category — Wine 2.0 Topics

Alright…we bought a bunch of Gary’s books, so what?

by Lloyd





Lindi in the booksSo, if you’ve been living under a rock the last 18 months, you would not know who Gary Vaynerchuk is. He’s the guy with a crazy popular wine video show that you need to check out.  But for all who have heard of Gary, I have an offer for you…AmericanWinery.com is begining a promotion as of today. We bought a truck load of Gary’s new book, “101 Wines: Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World” maybe not a truck load but our accountant was puzzled.  Scheming to sell the books for record profits was quickly shot down in board meetings, and then Erica Sharp our Customer Service Evangelist said she’d quit unless we give the books away.  Erica’s value far outweighed the profits to be had and the “101 Wines in 101 Days AmericanWinery.com Promo” was born. 

Thats right, getting your hands on one is as easy as creating a free account at AmericanWinery.com, no purchase neccesary to keep the ABC folks at bay, but every day for 101 days we are giving these books out in droves, or maybe a steady book a day, we dont know yet but we got a bunch of them to get out there, see for your self!  Check out how you can get a free copy of the book head over here

To check out my official review as well as two other awesome reviews of Gary’s book go here

Cheers,
Lloyd Benedict



August 1, 2008   No Comments

Walla Walla Wine Marketing Summit Recap June 16th, 2008

by Lloyd

June 17th, 2008
Sunday night was quite a brain racker.  I felt like I was back at Whitman preparing a Biology presentation–half my time preparing was spent trying to figure out Power Point (in this case it was Keynote) and the other half was spent trying to figure out what I was going to say.  However, this time around I was able to speak about something I am really stoked to talk about!

I was given about an hour and fifteen minutes to speak about ways wineries can open new channels within the direct sales model.  My goal was to introduce new technologies that may be easily implemented, be easily managed and are essentially FREE!  Here were the higlights that I hope people took away from the presentation.

  • Facebook–Mark Zuckerburg has a site with over 500 different wine groups and nearly 500,000 users that are apart of those groups, start your FREE profile and build your community and let Millennials follow your winery.
  • Gary Vaynerchuk–Be sure to send him an email, garyv@winelibrary.com.  He will respond.
  • Google Analytics–Google has released a totally free web analytics program that is very easy to use.  Just plug in the code and find out who, when, and where from your visitors to your site are coming from.  You can’t learn what’s working from above with out the analytics piece. Go to Google.com/analytics
Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to go into CSE’s Comparison Shopping Engines or SEO Search Engine Optimization but both of those are a little more difficult to crack and more technical
Lastly, even if you don’t understand how these things work or if you carry the “if I don’t use them than I bet no one else does,” mentality you are way off course.  These tools are used to drive sales in all other web businesses.  They are proven and effective.  If you don’t want to manage them your self, have an employee who is web 2.0 savvy make sure they keep you updated and fresh in your facebook account, blogs, and videos.  First time setup for all of these tools combined should take less than an hour for a web person to install. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.
I hope my presentation was helpful and perhaps inspiring concearning what is possible when a little passion and technology are mixed.
Cheers,
Lloyd Benedict

June 17, 2008   No Comments

There are a lot of wine community sites, I had to make my own?

by Lloyd





Alright so there are a bazillion wine community sites out there and many more probably being developed. Here is a brief accounting of the ones I’ve comes across so far:

Corkd.com, OpenWineConsortium.org, OpenBottles.com, WineChatr.com, Vinorati.com, Winelog.net, Snooth.com and the list will go on for a quite a bit longer if i had the patience to hunt them all down.

Now these sites are pretty good however, I have never been sucked into any of them and I am a community guru in my opinion. The reason none of these sites will explode with users is because they are all too focused at any one type of wine drinker or age group, in this already niched group….the wine drinking group. Whether the site is too focused on the millennials (corkd.com needs to remember what happened to Wine X magazine) and distanced from baby boomers, or the sites are catering to only buyers and not the hardcore reviewers these sites will have a short life span.

Thus this last week I have taken my stab at the Wine 2.0 scene and launched WineSocial.com (I have already built a solid consumer and winery community at AmericanWinery.com, but this takes shape as an “Amazon” like community, and my attempt is to build a “Facebook-ish” community based on social interactions.)

With WineSocial.com I will build a community that encompasses many aspects of the industry, from winemakers to vineyard managers, and casual tasters to Robert Parker wannabes, WineSocial.com will become a hub for many types of wine drinkers looking for many different things, give me two years ;) I expect catching some criticism for this endeavor but I feel that the folks attempting to build wine community sites have missed the boat in many areas. Im not going to go much further into it, just signup and have a good time!!!

Sign Up Here: WineSocial.com!

Lloyd

April 20, 2008   No Comments