Preparing to Set Up Your Winery’s Facebook Fan Page

I’ve spend a bit of time talking about the Fan Page, hopefully got you to set up your Personal/Profile Page, and now we’re ready to get ready to set up the Fan Page.  As I wrote previously, you can’t set up a Fan Page unless you have a Personal Page; while you can set up a Business Page, just don’t do it.  It will take awhile to do this right, so stay alert!

Understand that Facebook is always tinkering, so what I write today might not hold in a month.  And Facebook is multi-layered, with a lot of not-so-obvious functions that may or may not help your page.  We’ll get into templates, of which there are at least 40, and there is no guidance (that I can find) regarding the various functions of each page.  So that’s why I said that this could take awhile to do right.  If you charge right in, you might find yourself rebuilding your Fan Page later.  No fun with that.

One thing you need to decide, and this applies across Social Media, is who is going to be the voice for your winery’s Social Media presence.  There doesn’t have to be only one voice, but there should be a main voice, and supporting voices should play off the main voice.  The reason I bring this up here is that whoever sets up the winery’s Fan Page is the primary Page Administrator, and wields a bit of control.  The primary Admin decides who else gets to serve in an Admin role, so has a lot of say on what goes on the Fan Page.  And, as far as I can tell, you can’t change the primary Admin, so if everything goes to seed, you start the Page over, from scratch.  So, just because you have an enthusiastic intern who’s a Facebook geek doesn’t mean that she should be your primary Admin, because when intern time is over, there goes your primary Admin.

It’s your call on the primary Admin role.  Larger operations might have the head of marketing do it (assuming that this person understands that SocMed is not a push advertising channel), while small wineries might add this hat to the already overworked owner/winemaker/vineyard manager.  It’s important to recognize that the primary Admin is a necessary control point; it doesn’t have to do everything associated with the Page.  However, well, it gets complicated here.

The primary Admin can’t appoint assistants until the Fan Page goes public, as the admins must be fans, and you can’t fan an unpublished Page.  So maybe the primary Admin, with no time/patience to set up the Page, gives his sign in and password to the willing Facebooker to get the Page done, then change the password once the Page launches.  Just a thought; you’ll have to tinker with your options if faced with this scenario.

What are you going to call your Fan Page?  You get to do this once.  Do-overs mean you build a new page.  You need to do something that makes sense, and is intuitive.  For example, when Dr. Vino posted on the Wall Street Journal article a few weeks ago, the whole thing was about Alpha Omega’s use of social media.  So I go to the search block on Facebook, and dutifully type in “Alpha Omega”.  Thought I found “Animal House”, what with all the fraternities that popped up.  OK, how about “Alpha Omega Winery”?  First listing was “Ao Winery”.  Hmmm, who’s that?  I suppose that if you pay attention to Greek letters, or were already following the winery, that could make sense, but I had to dork around a bit to see that it really was the Fan Page for Alpha Omega Winery.  Oops, it’s a Group Page.  Bummer.

But you get my point.  My fantasy winery, Flatulence Vineyards, would get that exact name for the Fan Page.  No abbreviations, just something easy and relevant.  Note also that Fan Pages are indexed by search engines (Group pages aren’t), so you want something nice and literal.  Later, when we think about a custom URL, we can go short and sweet (e.g., FlatVine), since literal URLs are clumsy.

By the way, I can’t name my Fan Page “Facebook for Wineries”, since “Facebook” as a standalone term is forbidden for a Page title.  Lawyers.  Looks like I’ll use “Facebook4 Wineries” or similar.  No, I don’t have a Fan Page yet; I’m too busy researching Fan Page variables.  I have a bunch of test Pages that don’t go Public.  Go figure.  )

Next up:  wading through the Fan Page themes.  Caution: if you jump ahead and start building your Page, do it with great care, and review the Page carefully before you click “Publish”.  Once you publish, you cannot change the theme; you have to start over.  Much better to dork around with several without publishing to see what works best.  While you can have only one Personal Page, you can host as many Fan Pages as you can handle.

Some Current Thoughts on Social Media for Wineries

Some Current Thoughts on Social Media for Wineries

Some will notice that I frequently will take a detour from the “how to” aspects of social media to provide some notes on observations of social media.  I think these detours provide some good context to the whole SocMed/Winery conversation.  Today’s detour:

Lots of people are talking about social media, and much of what is said touches on wineries and similar small businesses.  Before we move one to more discussion on social media technique, here are some reading assignments and such around the philosophy of social media.

In my post “You Have to Work to Maintain Your Social Media Presence”, I mentioned a blog that Dr. Vino posted on a Wall Street Journal article.  It’s very interesting to look at that article now to see the variety of comments that have been posted.  There’s one that indirectly takes issue with my view that the Fan Page, not the Personal Page, should be your Facebook hub:

Interestingly we sell more wine via my husband’s personal Facebook page than we do our Fan Page. It all comes down to a personal connection with the winemaker – no different than in-store events, winemaker dinners, festivals like Pinot Days, etc.

Margaret Ryan
Olson Ogden Wines

No real problem with this, except Facebook’s “rule” about not using personal pages for business.  However, note that Personal Pages won’t be indexed by search engines (neither are Group Pages), and Fan Pages are.  Go back and read the comments, starting at the bottom (as the later comments are more interesting – this from the guy with the first comment), and take some notes.  Good stuff here.  Then go on to Dr. Vino’s follow-up blog, “Small Wineries Tweet Harder”.  It’s interesting to read the adversarial comments from the guy who seems truly not to like social media, as well as some thoughtful entries from Eagle’s Nest Winery (which gets SocMed).

Next, let’s turn our attention to an article by Jeremiah Owyang, who’s with Forrester Research.  Owyang’s post, “Breakdown: The Five Ways Companies Let Employees Participate in the Social Web” should be quite useful to folks who are just getting into SocMed, or who are still moving up the learning curve.  As you develop your SocMed strategy, it is critical to determine, up front, who all will speak for your winery and in what context.  Should someone else be your “voice”? Tough question, and we’ll take another detour soon to discuss this.

I really like Hubspot’s post on Why Your Email Needs Social Media (and How to Do It Right).  Everybody’s built an e-mail list, right?  This article talks about how you can use your e-mails to let your fans know about your social media presence.  The concept seems pretty straightforward to me, but the implementation could take a bit of work.  I’ll post later on about the techniques necessary to embed these kinds of link-outs.

Finally, wine industry PR veteran John Corcoran at Think Wine Marketing writes about the changes in the PR business being brought about by social media.  Corcoran cautions against throwing out the old ways in the rush to embrace the new, making “Is the Medium the Message?” an important read.

Comment back on these, as well as on any other useful materials that you’d like to share.

Optimizing the Facebook Personal Home Page, Pt 2: Workin’ the Profile

Your Profile Page is where the important stuff happens.  You’ll recall that your Home Page is where you interact with others.  Your Profile Page, starting with the Wall, is where people interact with you.  And there are a lot of trick actions that you can initiate on your Profile Page.

When you first get your page set up, there’ll be a couple of default Tabs: Wall, and Info.  You populated the Info page when you first established your Facebook presence.  You can add more data whenever you want; just click on “Edit Information” in the upper right to open the Info page for editing.  Don’t forget to go to Settings to set whatever access limits you deem appropriate for Friends and visitors.

I discussed the Wall in the last post: it’s where all your visitors land.  When somebody comes to visit, by default, they go to your Wall.  But they aren’t limited to just your Wall and Info pages.  Oh, no.  See the tab with the “+”?  Click on it, and you’ll see some of the fun options available for your Profile Page.  My fave is Notes.

You can do goofy stuff on the Notes page.  Several months ago, I posted “26 Wildly Careening Random Tidbits”, a list of things that most people don’t know about me.  It was fun and got some interesting comments.  But more to the point of what we’re doing here, you can pull your blog posts (yes, we’ll get to Blogs!!) into your Notes.  When I post this blog to WordPress, it is imported to my Notes page, is posted as a Status Update on my minified on both my Home Page and Profile, and posts on my Friends’ news feeds (Home Page).  Part of my 15 minutes of Fame, I guess.  But!  My Friends’ Friends could see the post on the Friends’ feed, and click on the link to read my blog post.  See, the viral thing at work again.  There are lots of opportunities in Facebook for this.

When you open the Notes tab, there’ll be a box to the right that reminds you that you aren’t importing a blog.  If you want your blog to post to your Notes page, just follow the instructions.  It seems that you can import only one blog, as these instructions don’t show up on my Notes page (inferring that they go away once used), but they are on the Notes page of Back Room Wines, as I don’t yet import Dan’s blog posts.  Blogs don’t always import cleanly, as my social bookmarking string is vertical, not horizontal; who knows why that is.  If you aren’t blogging yet, you can write up some interesting stuff about your winery, new wines, and similar, and post that to your Notes page.  All sorts of opportunities here.

Whatever you post in Notes will be listed chronologically in the box on the right.  If Friends really like your content, they are given the opportunity to subscribe to your Notes page via RSS feed.

You’ll see that there is a Photo tab in the Profile (at the “+” tab), to which you can upload photos; I surprised a lot of my Friends, who didn’t know that I motocrossed in high school, with a couple of action photos.  You can create photo albums for upload, and there’s also a spot for “mobile uploads”, where photos that are uploaded from smart phones will end up.  I posted several photos from the barrel auction at Auction Napa Valley this past June, which was fun.  No, I don’t have money to bid on those lots; my wife and I were volunteers.  There’ll also be a spot where you’ll find photos by others in which you are “tagged”.  Tagging is an interesting concept in which you mention a Friend in a photo or post, and that sends the photo or post to their Page.  My wife tagged me in a backyard photo, and Barry Martin tagged me in a photo taken at Back Room Wines; both are in the “Photos of John” section of my Photo page.  You’ll see available tag options come up when you are uploading or posting.

By now you are getting the drift of the Profile section of your page, where you can use a number of applications to enhance your interactions with your Friends.  Other available applications are Videos and Events; you can search Applications, at the bottom left of any page, to see what else might work.  Some people do some pretty custom stuff, but I tend to think that the hardworking applications should be on your Fan Page.

Your Facebook Personal Home Page/Profile should be in pretty good shape now, and hopefully you’ve started to accumulate some Friends.  What should we do next?  Twitter, FB Fan Page, Blog?  Any thoughts?  Could be dangerous leaving this all up to me.

Optimizing Your Facebook Personal Home Page (aka Profile), Part I

Last week I talked about setting up your Personal Home Page/Profile, and Friday I mentioned that this page should be about you; it shouldn’t be your winery’s presence on Facebook.  So, of course, now things can get tricky, and you’ll have to make a few decisions.

Unless someone happens to look for you on Facebook, you won’t get any Friends unless you go looking.  The easiest way to look, and something that Facebook will prompt you on as you got through the setup process, is to have the site match your e-mail list against current Facebook users.  Just go to the top of the page and click on “Friends”; the page will open and prompt you to put in the password for your e-mail account so it can get to work.  You can also click on “Upload Contact File” (to the right), and that screen will let you either upload a list or go to Outlook (if that’s your mail client) to match up against Facebook users.  Understand that matches (potential Friends) will get a Friend Request, and will choose to “Accept” or “Ignore” the request – there are no “automatic ins”.  Bummer if your significant other hits the “Ignore” button…

So here’s a decision: do you use your personal e-mail list, or do you upload the winery’s e-mail list.  Hard to say.  Whichever you choose, you’ll be inviting people to become your “Facebook Friend”; if you want folks on the winery’s e-mail list to be your Friend, that’s fine, but it could be a little confusing when you launch the winery’s Fan Page (“Heck, I’m already her Friend, so why to I need to be her winery’s Fan?”).  So just give it some thought, because your goal will be Fans.

Not everybody in your e-mail contact list will be on Facebook, but Facebook gives you the opportunity to send the non-Facebookers an e-mail inviting them to join up.  Just go to the left column of the Friends page and click on the “Invite Friends…” link; Facebook gives you several options for processing these invitations.  If you don’t use one of the supported e-mail clients, you can load addresses in manually.  So, go out and find some Friends.

Once you get some Friends, you’ll find that Friend “Recommendations” start to pop up in the right column of your Facebook Home Page, as well as on the Friend page.  I’m not sure how the selection algorithm works, but these are Friends of your Friends.  Could be people you know, so you might take a bit of time to review the Suggestions (I do occasionally).

Friends are important for a number of reasons, besides just keeping up with their status updates, kid photos, and the like.  You see, Friends (and later, Fans) are the key to the viral action of Facebook.  Go to the top any page, click on “Profile”, and you’ll be whisked to your FB Profile Page; this, specifically the Wall, is where people land when they come to see you.  If you and I are FB Friends, and I click on your name, I am taken to your Wall.  The Wall is where all the stuff that you originate, and that Friends and such send directly to you, shows up.  “Home” is where all of the posts and similar originated by your Friends (and Fan/Group Pages) for general distribution go.  So you go Home to see what people are saying to everybody, and to the Wall to see what they are saying to you.  Explaining this is trickier than I thought it would be.

The box at the top of your Wall, and your Home page, is known as the “Publisher”.  Type something interesting in it, click “share”, and whatever you wrote pops up immediately below; these are known as “Status Updates”.  AND it pops up on the newsfeed of all of your Friends’ FB Home pages, so all your

Friends know what you are up to.  Say you entered “Went to In-N-Out for lunch, had Animal-style Burger and chocolate shake”.  I see it, and comment “I love In-N-Out”; when I click my comment, your original post and my comment shows up on all my Friends’ newsfeeds.  If one of my Friends comments “Double-Doubles are my faves”, the whole thing goes to their Friends’ newsfeeds, too.  And so on.  It certainly doesn’t always get this crazy, but when you post interesting stuff, it can (Yes, In-N-Out is interesting!).

Think about what you post.  Critics of social media, particularly Twitter, complain that all they see is minutia, and who wants to see minutia.  I agree.  I post when I have something to say, because I don’t like posts about nothing in particular.  With all that’s going on in SocMed, people are going to be selective, but this goes back to which groups of people you decide to Friend.  Your personal friends will likely be interested in different things than winery-related folks, but feel free to tinker around, maybe some mix and match; as long as it works for you, you’ll be in good shape.  Do note that if someone decides to “unFriend” you, you’ll not get a notice of that action.

Some of the actions I’ve discussed are explained in the Facebook Help Center; the link is at the bottom right of any page that you’re on.  Sometimes the explanations are helpful, sometimes not, and occasionally it seems that FB feels that some actions are self-explanatory.  I’ll do the best I can to keep things clear…hopefully in the next post, with more about the Profile Page (and Notes…Notes rock).

You Have to Work to Maintain Your Social Media Presence

Before we get too far into our Facebook work, which will continue Monday, let’s pause to take in a couple of important notes, one brief, the other a bit, ummm, wordier.

The Brief Note: On Wednesday, I laid out the steps for building your Facebook home page, also known as personal profile or User profile; whatever you call it, it’s what you set up after you sign up for Facebook.  This page is about you; it is not the platform from which you promote your winery.  Personal home pages have some cool functionality, which I’ll get into on Monday, but they lack a bunch of stuff that makes them valuable for a business presence.  And, technically, Facebook can slap your hand for using your Home Page for your business.  Don’t ask why; they have rules, and that’s that.

The Wordier Note (but ya gotta read it!):  In his Wednesday blog, Tyler Coleman (aka Dr. Vino) pulled a paragraph out of a Wall Street Journal article on the recession and luxury wine and asked “Can social media save the day for wineries?”  The paragraph appeared to suggest that Alpha Omega’s use of social media was associated with a significant increase in direct to consumer sales (everybody loves DTC, right?).  Dr. Vino was a bit skeptical about this claim, given that Ao has about 300 Facebook Friends (“Friends” is an important clue here), 400 Twitter followers and no blog; how good could the outreach be from such a small platform?

I commented that, even with a small number of Friends/Followers, the viral aspect of SocMed could cause good news from Ao to fill newsfeeds and Retweets, bringing many more eyes to them.  Fortunately, I used the phrase “could happen”, as a few commenters took me to task on this, noting, for example, that Ao had only one Tweet retweeted, which strongly suggests that their Tweets are lacking in substance.  Hey, I wrote my comment during break! 

At lunch, I checked out Ao’s Facebook presence, and it had no more going for it than their Tweets.  Lesson time here! 

• First, their page was hard to find, as it is called, not Alpha Omega Winery, but “Ao Winery”; I guess that makes sense if you already follow the winery, but likely not for someone, like me, who had heard of the winery and was simply interested in their page.
• Remember when I said “Friends” was a clue?  You “Friend” a personal home page, become a “Member” of a Group Page, and become a “Fan” of a Fan Page.  As noted above, you shouldn’t promote a business on a Personal home page, if for no other reason than lack of functionality.  Ao’s FB presence is a personal home page; they really should consider moving to a Fan Page, ASAP.
• The winery’s posts on the Page, and there weren’t that many, were unremarkable in that they really didn’t do anything to engage their Friends.

What’s the big lesson here?  That you have to take the time to do Social Media right.  Social Media represents the opportunity to engage your fan base in conversation, and in doing so, bring new people into the mix.  If you don’t post thoughtfully, no one will pay any attention to you, and if you don’t pay attention to some of the other wine-related conversations on Twitter and Facebook, you won’t know what’s topical.  It takes some time to do this.

You need to take the time to set up your Facebook presence on the right type of page, with appropriate apps, in a manner that will thoughtfully engage your Fans and encourage them to pass your information along to their Friends.  Useful information needs to show up in your status updates with some regularity, and you need to respond to Fan questions and comments timely.

No lecture on this one, as you’ve already read my posts on it (haven’t you?): you need to start a blog.  Yes, we’ll get to blogs.

The take-home here, as is reinforced by the thoughtful comments to Dr. Vino’s post (do take the time to read this), is that SocMed is not a passive activity.  You must be active, and being active takes time.  You need to strategically incorporate your SocMed work into your other marketing/PR channels; it will not work in a vacuum.  And none of the SocMed platforms will stand alone: you need Twitter, Facebook, a Blog, maybe YouTube (if you are videoish) and others, and engage in social bookmarking.  We’ll get into all this.  Just realize that good use of SocMed takes time; while many of the platforms are free, there is certainly an investment of time.

In closing, I invite you to click over to Jo Diaz’ blog.  Jo’s been doing traditional winery PR for many years, and the current downturn provided the opportunity for her to look into Social Marketing.  It will be interesting to read Jo’s thoughts on blending the Traditional with the Social in her winery PR adventures, and there will likely be insights of use to us all.  I anticipate that Jo would agree with many of the comments on Winery SocMed found at Dr. Vino’s blog, in that social media is a valuable addition to a winery’s outreach/marketing efforts, but you have to have a good strategy in place, and a willingness to dedicate some time to it, in order for it to work for you.

Getting Your Winery Started with Facebook

OK, no more breaking news, so we’re back on track.  This will be the first of several posts on establishing a presence for your winery on Facebook.  I’ll be getting into a bit of detail so you can avoid the mistakes that I (and others) have already made.

First, a few rules.  To get started, you set up a User profile.  You can have only one account (personal profile/User profile) on Facebook, and it must be in your name.  If Facebook finds that you have more than one Profile, they can kick you out.  You’d be surprised at just how many rules Facebook has; it’s worth it to review their Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.  The alternative to a personal account is a business account.  Don’t go for this, as it can be very limiting. 

To get started, simply go to www.facebook.com and complete all the boxes where it says “Sign Up”.  Give some thought to the e-mail account you use, as all the notifications and such from Facebook will post up to the e-mail address that you provide.  Notice that right under the “Sign Up” section there’s a link to “Create a Page for a celebrity, band or business”.  Not yet; you’re not ready. )

Creating a profile will be your next task.  If the winery is your business, you might wish to focus on the winery in your profile.  If you are a loyal winery employee, perhaps mention your winery association, but focus on yourself in the profile.  There’s really no right or wrong way to do this, so do what feels right.  You’ll go through Basic Information, Personal Information, Contact Information, and Education and Work.  You’ll also want to post a photo.

The photo is important because it represents you.  Comment on a friend’s post, your photo goes with it.  RSVP to an Event, there’s your photo.  Many folks recommend a professional photo, as opposed to one taken at 1 AM on January 1^st.  If you are going to represent a business, go with something that looks appropriate.  The avatar at the top of this page is what I use for everything on the web; I like it, as it represents my relationship with wine, and I’ve had a number of favorable comments.  And you know in an instant that it’s JD in Napa when you see it.  Works for me; use something good to represent you!

Under the photo, there’s a box into which you can put some profile info; put in some basics.  Below that, you’ll notice an Information box; click on the paperclip to open a screen where you can check off whatever you’d like to have displayed. 

The page tabbed “Info” will pop up when you complete the profile information.  Here you’ll see all the info you inputted, now in the page format; you’ll have plenty of time to do edits and additions.  All the blue terms are links; click on one to go to a search for that term within Facebook.

Now you have the basics set up.  There’s all kinds of other stuff that you can do with your profile.  Click around when you have time to see what’s there.  Do go up (at the top) to “Settings” and look around.  Here you can set various levels of privacy, to control who can see what on your page.  Many people set Privacy so only Friends can see the details; click on the question marks on the right to see what info is covered at a particular topic.  I like to leave the Profile open, so if someone wants to “Friend” me, they can see who I am beyond a subject line.

That’s enough for today.  Next I’ll talk about Friends, and some of the features of your new personal page.  Go on and work ahead if you wish, gathering up some Friends and such.  But do resist the temptation to start on the winery’s Fan Page, as there are a couple of very important decisions to be made at start up, which I’ll cover next week.

Social Media: Who’s in Charge, Anyway?

This is another of those “it’s not my fault” posts.  The master plan, as it was, has me posting on M-W-F, but it looks like this will go up on Tuesday.  Sigh.  Just trying to keep everybody in the loop.  This time, it’s Twitter’s fault.  On Sunday, Twitter’s anti-spam process got all tightened up, and started killing the accounts of the power users.  No, not me, but big SocMed players like Mari Smith and Denise Wakeman.  These folks, and apparently thousands of others, were Twitless for several hours, until Twitter retweeked things and restored service.  This gave Denise some food for thought, which I’ll pass along to you.

Now, do understand that Denise, along with other SocMed power players, is a big proponent of blog as home base.  Prior to the Twitter outage, she received a question along the lines of “why bother with a blog if I have a completely rocking Facebook fan page?”  OK, I paraphrased; you can see the question and Denise’s full response here.  The Twitter issue gave Denise another spin on the primacy of blogs: you have control of the platform, whether on your website or hosted.  With Twitter and Facebook, not so.  As Denise said:

“You are not in control of what happens on Facebook and twitter. Those sites do not belong to you and you are at their mercy. What if you had spent tons of time building a fan page, posting content via the Notes app, building your list of friends and fans, etc. and one day Facebook shuts down?  Now what?  You may have lost everything if that’s you’re only home on the web.”

Denise asked for comments, and I responded with the following:

“I agree with all reasons listed (blog over Facebook), and would like to add one more perspective.  When I post a FB status update or similar, it goes to the Fans’ newsfeed, along with everything else. Unless they’ve taken Mari’s (?) tip to set up a Friends list and have it dominate the feed (and I hope I’m on that list), it’s easy for my post to be lost in the feed. But when I post up my blog, it goes to my RSS and e-mail subscribers in a manner that gets attention (and hopefully they read it…).  AND my blog post goes to my FB Notes page and from there into my Status Update. It seems to me that there are more opportunities to get “eyes” via a blog than solely FB.”

Note that I said “solely FB”.  We are going full steam into Facebook here, as well as Twitter and LinkedIn.  But we go with these guys to gain trust and authority, and build community, which should guide readers to our blog, where they should find out that we have interesting things to say about an important topic: wine.  The blog remains the fresh info “meat and potatoes” of our SocMed presence.  If we do it right, the blog inspires folks to see what’s on your websites, to consider the wines offered, wine club opportunities and similar.  After the relationship is established.  Patience, young Skywalker.

You will now be returned to your regularly scheduled blog programming.  But do read Denise’s piece at the link above, and follow it out to Mari’s post about lessons learned in the Twitter incident.  Wednesday: back to Facebook!

Wineries Should Use Fan Pages for Their Facebook Presence

Yes, I know that I suggested last week that we’d get into Twitter, but I changed my mind.  It’s not my fault; I’m going to “blame” it on Adam and Dianna.  You know, the Lees, the nice folks that run Siduri.  In last week’s e-mail blast, they mentioned that Siduri was getting into Social Media, and that readers should check out their Facebook page (probably Twitter, too, but I forget).

As a loyal Siduri follower, I followed the link to their Facebook page, and my heart sank: it is a Group page.  Group pages used to be cool, but when Facebook reconfigured the Fan Pages, Group pages were largely left in the dust.  The Facebook presence that I maintain for Back Room Wines started as a Group Page, but once I saw the greatly enhanced functionality of the new Fan Pages, I built a BRW Fan Page and the Group Page was abandoned.  An important point here is that you cannot “transfer” a Group Page to a Fan Page; you have to start over.  That’s why the Siduri Group Page suggested to me that I let you all know about Facebook Pages.  While I think Siduri would be better served with a Fan Page, they already have 600 or so Friends, so if they moved to a Fan Page now, they’d have to ask their Friends to move with them, which would put a crimp in their Facebook momentum.

You might ask “why are Fan Pages the Hot Ticket?”  Good question.  You might recall a few weeks ago that I was posting on the viral aspects of Social Media; most of those two posts focused on Twitter.  Well, Facebook Fan Pages can be pretty viral, too, but Group Pages, not so much.  And while virality is not the whole reason to go Fan Page, it’s significant.  Here are some examples of the differences.

I became a Friend of the Siduri Group Page early last week.  I have heard nothing from or about the Page, even though there was new content (a post from a Page Friend) on July 3^rd.  You have to go to a Group Page to see if anything is new, unless one of the Page Administrators sends something out to the Group.

If this was a Fan Page, most of the posts, from Fans and Admins alike, would have been posted as Status Updates, also known as minifeeds.  These minifeeds are posted on the newsfeed of every Fan, so you always know if there is something new on a winery’s Fan Page.  If you go to the Back Room Wines Fan Page, you’ll see an event that I posted to the Event Page.  When I posted this, it was also Noticed on The Wall (where the Feeds originate), which in turn was posted on The Newsfeed of every BRW Fan.  Same thing happened when Linda posted the photo of “Hot Dog and Wine Night”: it went to everybody’s Newsfeed.

Now, Group Pages do have a few advantages, which I’ll discuss later, but they are largely passive as far as putting out new information goes.  Fan Pages posts can readily go viral, which helps spread the word about your winery.  To me, the choice for wineries is clear: Fan Page.

Some July 4th Weekend Reading in Winery Social Media

Fourth of July weekend is a time for fun, friends, fireworks, food and wine (4FW); please don’t mix the wine and the fireworks.  I’m up at Lake Tahoe with a bunch of wine friends, and instead of me giving you social media food for thought, I’m going to send you out to others today.

First, let’s go visit Tom Wark’s “Fermentation”.  At this link, Tom reviews five years of wine blogging, and considers where blogging might be going.  Do read the comments, where folks get into what’s blogging and what’s not.  Where would you put GaryVee in all this?

Millennials.  Those kids are at it again, getting everybody’s attention as the coming wave of BUYERS.  Everybody needs people to buy things, and in this article, Sonoma State’s Liz Thach provides tips on marketing wine to Millennials.  It’s a small sample space, but some good observations are presented.  You won’t be surprised on the emphasis on social media, but what might be surprising is the apparent low use of Twitter by this demographic; if you want to find Millennials, go Facebook (and that, we will).

Check out some really nice blog work at Artisan Family of Wines, where Jeff Miller has a five (or more?) part series on Why Wine Costs What It Does.  This is an outstanding example of making your site “sticky”, where followers are compelled by the content to come back for more.  Wine folks need to understand that wine-savvy consumers are drawn to this kind of “insider” content.

Finally, for a bit of fun, head over to http://www.areallygoodejob.com/ to view some of the video entries of the top 50.  A lot of thought and work were put into these videos, and it’s clear that this event has brought the concept of Social Media into the front office of many wineries which had previously not given it a second thought.

You guys have a safe and sane Fourth of July, and I promise to try to not to blow up the Tahoe fireworks barge.  See you next week.

How Search Engine Optimization Can Enhance Your Winery’s Visibility

My last post made the case for having a blog, and not a website, for a winery’s social media home base. Before I get into today’s topic, I want to make it clear that having a blog within a website should be just fine; you’re looking for something that has valuable content, frequently refreshed. One could make a reasonable case for the blog-within-web setup, and there will be fans of the independent blog, too. Do check out Jason Haas’ comment to Monday’s post regarding the effectiveness of a website as home base. What I’d hate to see is links from a profile, Tweet, or status update go to a static homepage, particularly if that website portal makes you go through the birthday hoops ala The Century Council or similar (clicking out of that one!).

I’ve been beating the drum for fresh relevant content, and one of the reasons is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Wikipedia tells us that “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.” For most of us, the operation of search engines is some sort of black magic; I know they’ve changed a lot since I did some website work in the late 90s, when meta tags were the hot ticket.

Many of the Social Media leaders will suggest that the changing content of blogs will attract more search engine “interest” than will a static webpage. Search engines, like Google, send out “crawlers” to look for content to index. If the crawler sees a static page (e.g., a website) with the same ol’ stuff, it goes away. But when it comes to your blog, which frequently gets new material, it stops to gather some fresh info for indexing. In theory, sites with fresher info tend to creep up the rankings in Google, Yahoo or similar.

Some folks are big on using keywords in their post titles and first few sentences to attract the crawlers, but it seems that opinions are mixed on the use of this strategy. Many people, like blogging expert Chris Brogan, seem to think that relying excessively on keywords can cramp your writing style; since an objective is to maintain a conversational style, you might think twice before going on a keyword binge. Note that I tend to put “winery” in titles and first sentences of my posts. Couldn’t hurt. If keywords are of interest to you, just pop “SEO keyword research” into Google for a host of options and opinions.
Probably more important for SEO than keywords are “inbound links”. Google’s algorithms see a link from my page to your page as a “vote” for your page, and you get a point. This could be why most bloggers link back and forth to other blogs (the “blog roll” or similar). You provide a link from your blog site to mine, and I’ll return the favor, helping us all gain traction with the search engines. I wonder if linking back to your home base site from Tweets, Facebook status updates and such can serve to game this system. Hmmm….

SEO is but one strategy to enhance your social marketing visibility, and, as we’ve seen, if you keep your content fresh and promote good linkbacks, it can pretty much be on autopilot. Now let’s work on other processes to bring new eyes to your home base. Yep, we could be goin’ a’Tweetin’!