In a recent blog entry, wine writer Steve Heimoff revisits an article he penned in 1997 about the emergence of the internet and winery web sites.
Here’s what he writes, contrasting his 12-year-old observations with the present day:
I quoted the then-PR manager of St. Clement to explain why her winery had rushed to set up a Web page. “We didn’t have a goal,” she explained. “We just knew we had to be a part of it.” From there, I quoted Peter Granoff, an original founder of Virtual Vineyards (which went belly up; it’s now morphed into wine.com). “Most wineries are still caught up in the Web for its own sake and are struggling to find out what to do.”
Peter, or that PR manager, could say precisely the same things today! It’s amazing that, as far as we’ve come, most California wineries remain well behind the digital curve and don’t seem to know what to do with the Internet, including social media (which didn’t exist in 1997). True, most wineries have a website. But most of them are boring, unfriendly, and not even up-to-date with new vintages (which you’d think would be easy to do with a computer). Wineries should be leading other businesses in forging ahead on the Internet, not dawdling behind.
Heimoff’s conclusion is open to debate, but he does make a compelling point.
On that note, we believe that there are two fronts that need to be optimized for a winning web presence: technology and content.
Our line of business is content, or what we call storytelling. The story is the delivery vehicle of your message, be it the larger message that defines your brand, or the smaller messages that communicate your special events or new product releases. Even a 140-character Tweet is a story, albeit a short story.
This brings up the question: Why would you invest a year’s worth (or more) of careful labor and tens of thousands of dollars to put a wine in the bottle (or bring some other product to market), only to wing it in matters of telling the product’s story? That’s a good question, but we see it all the time.
Before you charge forward with your next web site upgrade, or new web site, ask yourself: Do I have a clear strategy for communicating my message and telling my story? Does the caliber of my content match the quality of my product? What can I do to take my content to the next level, to generate more impact and more sales?
Of course, we’re always happy to help you find the right answers to these questions.
