WITH sales falling and a faltering reputation caused by dirt-cheap brands, Australian wineries have a problem abroad, but small Australian wineries are fighting back.
They are building their brands online using the free social networking tool of the moment, Twitter, which allows people to post frequent short messages of up to 140 characters and keep fellow users updated on their world.
Many wineries and wine websites are discovering the advantages of Twitter, which is simple to use, costs nothing more than the investment of time, is quick to engage customers with a few sentences and can quickly build a global consumer and trade audience online.
When Aimee Williamson launched the wine networking site www.kampai.-com.au in January she turned to Twitter as a tool to engage boutique wineries. It was a way of reaching out beyond her immediate contact group, she says. “It is quite different to Facebook. With Facebook you initially form relationships with people you know. Whereas Twitter breaks down some of those barriers and helps you to reach out more broadly. It has been good so far.”
One of her new contacts is Wine by Brad, from Margaret River. Owner and winemaker Brad Wehr says the key to success is to simply engage in conversations and not try to sell anything. By taking this route he has made contact with, in addition to Williamson, importers in Canada and Britain, and retailers in Australia.
“We’ve managed to sell wine through it,” he says. “We’ve managed to get press out of it. We’ve managed to send goodwill around and add more people to our mailing list.” He, like most vignerons using Twitter, has also found it has driven high-quality traffic to his website.
In the Barossa Valley at Teusner Wines, marketer Dave Brookes has attracted almost 3000 Twitter followers since he joined in early February. “I’ve just been getting out there and following people who are interested in wine and getting a response,” he says. “One hundred and forty characters makes it a bit more conversational. It’s actually a chance to interact with people buying your wines.”
Through Twitter he is arranging winery visits and has developed conversations with importers, distributors and retailers abroad and has picked up new accounts and made sales, he says.
“I can speak to the guys in the Jugshop in San Francisco, who are great supporters of our product.”
On June 11, Teusner will be participating in a live Twitter tasting run by the social wine site www.projectvino.com.au, where three wines will be available online at a discount.
The event gives consumers a chance to have a conversation with winemaker Kim Teusner and ask all the questions they want while tasting and posting impressions on Twitter.
Brookes is also looking at becoming involved with the international tasting site www.twittertastelive.com as a direct way of building the brand’s appeal overseas.
In March the South Australian Government, together with Austrade, auctioned $100,000 of Australian wine from relatively unknown wineries as part of an online twitter tasting with the website www.nakedwines.com in Britain.
Tasters nominated how much they would pay for the wines and the website bought the ones with the biggest gap between premium over the actual price that consumers said they would pay.
Matt McCulloch, who joined Chateau Tanunda in the Barossa as general manager in March, says the future is this type of consumer input generated online.
Last year, while general manager at Kirrihill Wines in the Clare Valley, he organised one of the first twitter tastings with www.projectvino.com.au.
“It was a relatively low-cost way of getting our wines out in front of not necessarily the wine geeks, but just the social networking people — like real people who go into a Dan Murphy’s and don’t know what to buy,” he says.
He was following the path trodden by small South African winery Stormhoek. In two years of using social media to build its brand, Stormhoek increased sales from 50,000 to 300,000 cases at a cost of $US40,000 ($55,000).
Kampai’s Williamson says social media is particularly good for smaller wineries that have a personal voice.
“The retail market being so heavily dominated by Coles and Woolworths, the opportunity to directly connect with consumers is something the smaller wine makers really need to look at,” she says.
HOW TO USE TWITTER
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Don’t try to sell to people. Engage in a conversation
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Find people to follow by searching Twitter group #wine
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Download a desktop client such as Tweetdeck that allows search and follow for groups such as #wine, #food of #ttl (Twitter Taste Live)
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Tweets can also be sent as a text message from a mobile phone but can’t be received by text in Australia. Clients such as Twitterific make it easier to Twitter from smartphones
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Ensure that you have a full profile with a link to your website