Moving my wine blog

Hello all!

I have really enjoyed the “Really Goode Job” process and have made some amazing connections, and have certainly learned a ton. Not to mention, all of this was just really fun and a great learning experience! Although the process is over for me, but I have really connected with the Wine 2.0 topic and community, I am going to keep this wine blogging thing going. I have started a new blog here and have already transfered relevant posts from this blog, while repurposing them a bit. Please note the URL change, and I hope that you will come visit my new wine 2.0 home! 

I have also changed my Twitter handle to @thewinemaria

Thank you all for your support during the Murphy Goode process!

xoxo

-@thewinemaria

Acting Silly is Sometimes Goode

By now I am sure that you have heard that I didn’t make the Murphy Goode “Top 50″. Although a tiny bit disappointed, I am mostly happy for having had this great opportunity to connect with awesome minds in the “Wine 2.0″ industry, having tasted tons of wines, produced quite a few blogposts and videos, and had a ton of fun in the process.

Yes, it was fun indeed. Shooting the many takes of my entry video, as well as my mock commercial, can almost get tiring, unless you commit to having fun in the process. So we took some footage of us just fooling around. Sharing these is a fantastic way to close out the experience on a positive note. Enjoy our outtakes (and please note that we are not really drunk – actually we are stone-cold sober): 

Outtakes Vol. 2:

Abridged Social Media Plan for Murphy Goode

Any successful social media strategist has to develop a social media plan for the brand he / she is supporting. Although this plan should be more in-depth, here’s my very abridged version that is appropriate for a blogpost length.

There are three major parts to any social media interaction. Listen, engage, empathize and respond. Below is a set of tools and techniques to help Murphy Goode (or any brand for that matter) get started on the social media. To get the rest… Well, they will just have to hire me.

Listen:

Why it’s important: you need to know 1) what’s going on in the industry, 2) what your competitors are up to, 3) what your customers are saying and 4) what your non-customers are saying.

Tools you should be using:

 Google Alerts. Google Alerts have been around for a while, so I won’t spend a lot of time on them – basically it’s a service that emails you when a  specified keyword / phrase is mentioned basically anywhere on the Internet. 

Tweet Beep is like Google Alerts for Twitter – have it email you each time a specified keyword / phrase is mentioned on Twitter. To stay sane and organized, filter it into separate folders in your email. Murphy Goode may want to set up keywords “Murphy Goode”, “wine”, “E. & J. Gallo”, “J”, etc.

  Netvibes / Google Reader: set up RSS feeds from respected / thought leading blogs for the wine industry that mesh with the Murphy Goode’s brand, strategy, social media approach, etc. For someone as on the forefront of the “Wine 2.0″ movement as Murphy Goode is, I think WineLibrary.tv is a good fit. Both possess a no-fuss, yet fun and educational approach to wine, using social media tools to bring wine into every home. Share great content with your readers and followers, as well as contribute comments to relevant blogposts. The more you get out there and participate, the more awareness you will raise.

You can also use Yahoo! Pipes to help you in blog discovery. I have built a pipe to help you find each blog that has the word “Murphy Goode” mentioned in it (the pipe address is: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=bFH0.Di32xGnPkr_qu5lkA). You can feed it via RSS into Netvibes, Google Reader, other RSS readers, or embed it into your site.

Empathize:

Part of the reason to listen is to understand the trends in the industry, and do competitive intelligence. The second part is to measure sentiment towards your own brand. You need to know exactly what your consumers are saying about you. If an experience was negative, get in touch with them immediately to understand why and see how you can rectify. Excellent customer service is synonymous with brand building these days, considering how fast word-of-mouth spreads. Please check out my post on customer service, as well as Gary Vaynerchuck’s keynote. Talk to happy consumers too. The idea is to turn non-believers into believers, and believers into brand ambassadors. If you can have customers selling your product to others… Why not?

Create engaging and relevant content:

You need to become an authority figure and a thought leader; otherwise no one will be taking you seriously. You have to work for it, and it won’t happen overnight. Social media engagement is powerful, but it’s not magic. To develop your authority, you must produce content that is right for your brand and your audience. Since the Murphy Goode brand is all about laid-back wine appreciation, having fun, family, friends, and even poker and football, all original content has to reflect this brand. The Lifestyle Correspondent will be responsible for creating this content and developing best practices to be left behind after the 6 months are up. Content should include text, video and photo.

Tools you should be using:

Make sure you install the proper SEO and sharing plugins for your blog; WordPress has a rich ecosystem of plugins. An example of a cool plugin is Zemanta – it automatically adds content and links so possibly related blogs (and in turn suggests your blog to other blogs’ readers). It also makes your post easy to reblog, with just one click. Disqus is a superb commenting platform that I highly recommend, as it doesn’t force the commenter to create a separate login, and drives comment contribution, due to comment portability across all Disqus-enabled blogs. 

YouTube has become the de-facto video publishing platform. It garners much higher traffic than all the other video sites, allows you to subscribe to channels, as well as for others to subscribe to yours, and embeds easily into WordPress, Tumblr and other blogging and social tools. If you want to share any other HD work, you should use Vimeo instead as it looks higher quality, and the interface is a little nicer. Make sure to tag the videos with relevant tags to optimize SEO. Subscribe to wine and Sonoma related channels that you and your readers would be interested in. Like with any social network, interact by favoriting, subscribing, commenting and friending.

Flickr is the de-facto photo service. You can upload photos via your computer (there are great upload tools that make it easy for large sets – iPhoto has a direct feed into Flickr, for example. You can also upload to Flickr from mobile via m.flickr.com. Share photos on Twitter with flic.kr, Twitpic or YFrog. Flickr feeds directly into Facebook, WordPress and other platforms. Make sure to tag correctly for SEO and ease of navigation via your profile. You should also organize images into sets, i.e. “Wine Tasting event 9.15.09″, “Lessons in winemaking”, “Wine bloggers conference”, etc.

Media distribution services like Pixelpipe will save you a ton of time by feeding your social networks, blogs, photo and video sites (this way you only need to upload media to Pixelpipe). For a job as media-heavy as that of the Lifestyle Correspondent, this tool will be essential to optimize social media tasks, saving time and therefore money. You can even feed your photos (and soon videos) via the iPhone when on the go.

Engage, share and interact:

So what do you do with the conversations that you are listening to and the fresh content you are creating? That’s when you take the Goode word to the social networks. I am only going to get into a few most important ones here.

Tools you should be using:

Twitter is fantastic for immediate real-time interactions that can occur between several users at once. It is not a walled garden, and unlike on Facebook, you can engage with anyone you find in the “listening” step, regardless of a follow relationships. I have talked about Twitter enough on this blog, so I won’t repeat myself. The one thing I will stress is that it’s important to have a mixture broadcast messages, @ replies and retweets (RTs) in your stream. You don’t want to come across as a “30 second spot”; you want to interact, while still providing value and original content. Also, when you find something valuable, don’t be afraid to retweet.

Facebook: You can feed selective tweets into Facebook via “selective Twitter”: a Facebook app that feeds tweets into Facebook if they have a  #fb at the end of a tweet. If you tweet a lot (which the Lifestyle Correspondent would probably do), you should respect your FB friends and not assault them with 50 daily updates. Oooops, I am personally guilty of that You can also feed your Facebook account and fan page with Networked Blogs (to add your blog content to FB), Friendfeed and other applications. Other external applications like Mashable and Eventbrite allow you to publish your stories to Twitter and Facebook, and you should use them as needed. If you are attending or hosting a wine event, for example, you should publish that you are attending via Eventbrite, for an opportunity to connect in-person with your fans (read my article on why it’s important to connect in real life).

Tumblr: if Twitter and WordPress had a baby, it would be Tumblr. Tumblelogs are short blogposts that are friendlier to multiple media support, easier to update on the go (via email, SMS, IM and RSS from your other blogs). This is going to be key for the Lifestyle Correspondent. Tumblr is social in that you can follow and be followed. Tumblr is appropriate for short, media-heavy posts, but it’s not the right platform for a long text-heavy blog post like this one.

 Delicious and StumbleUpon are social bookmarking sites that you can use not only for discovery of content around a particular wine-related topic, but you can also to bookmark your own content, eventually driving traffic to your destination. You can share your bookmarks with your network and publish them to Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.

 Friendfeed is a lifestreaming service that allows you to aggregate all of your social networking content and activity into one place (and consume friends’ activities from one place). Like any other social and blogging platform, you can participate in discussions, create discussions and float up to the “Best of the Day” section if you get enough traction. Reading this section just once a day helps you surface any big events, as curated by your friends: what your friends created, commented on and favorited. You can also feed Friendfeed into Facebook. Just like with Twitter and Facebook, you can separate contacts into groups, in an attempt to better manage the “social media firehose”. 

P.S. With whatever you do, remember that social media is simply an extension of your offline brand. Make sure everything is consistent in voice, branding, personality. Use the same color schemes, easily recognizable logos and trade dress.

If you like my social media plan, please consider voting for me here for A Really Goode Job!

A Very Bad Date – Episode #4

Here’s the final installment of the “Very Bad Date” miniseries. Have you ever seen a guy so annoying that the woman was tempted to take desperate action… like a restraining order! Please share some humor with us!

Get out there and meet people

Social technologies are awesome, especially the open ones. When I say open vs. closed, I mean Twitter vs. Facebook. On Twitter, you don’t have to mutually opt-in to a relationship, and frankly neither person has to follow the other one, in order to connect and share ideas around a common interest, concept, product, or event. On Twitter, anyone can listen, participate, add and derive value. On Facebook, it’s a little tougher, because you can only have that exchange if both people are connected as friends. As awesome as all of this open participation and communication is, it is no replacement for in-person contact.  Tools like Twitter and BritghtKite allow you to connect with people at the same location / event as you, so you can meet them in person. Countless times, I would be twittering from a conference, and interacting with someone who is at that conference, only to have that person come up to me and say “You are The Maria, right?” (this is why it pays to have an avatar that actually looks like you, and to have a short and memorable handle). In short, social technologies should ultimately help you meet people IRL (in real life), not lock you up in a room with online friends and no IRL contacts.

Moreover, people connected on Twitter are always organizing “tweetups” to meet together and converse over some food and drink. The benefit to knowing someone on the Internet first, and meeting them IRL later, is that it can lead to a more fruitful conversation and a stronger connection, because you already know some factual information about each other. However, even though you know about each other, doesn’t mean you know each other. There are obviously some intangibles that are only experienced in person – perhaps a little bit of chemistry, ability to observe body language. By  the same token, social technologies allow to strengthen existing weak ties. If I only know someone tangentially, but enough to know that I want to be connected on Facebook and Twitter, everyday exposure to that person’s lifestream, thoughts and analyses, will strengthen our connection, even though we may see each other once a year.

I think in our pursuit of technologies, we have come full-circle. Prior to Web 1.0, we were social IRL – we called each other on the phone and hung out. Then with online chatrooms, IM and email, we retrieved to our separate corners. Now, with tools like Twitter and its surrounding ecosystem, we are using the social web to drive us closer together IRL. Brands and venues that understand that, will ultimately win. For example, the Roger Smith Hotel, the social-media-friendly hotel in NYC (where my Murphy Goode video was shot) understands this and has pioneered Twitter-friendly content, discounts and events. Many conferences, networking breakfasts and post-conference events are held there. Folks can even get discounts on rooms by following @RSHotel and discounts on food and drink by tweeting pictures of food (check with them first for current discounts, of course). These guys are (at least local) pioneers in the space and have become a de-facto watering hole for the NYC (and out of town) “Twitterati”.

A Very Bad Date Saga Continues

We are still having fun with our “A Very Bad Date” mini series. Enjoy episode #3: “Have you seen this guy?” Girls, I know you have seen this sleazebag in a bar / club: 

Five Goode Reasons Why I am the Best Candidate for A Really Goode Job

I love trying out new things in Social Media, presenting information in a fun, engaging way. I decided to try out a fun and informative approach to talk about why I am the best candidate for A Really Goode Job, and hopefully win my readers’ votes and ultimately the position from Murphy Goode. So I decided to put together The Top Five Reasons why. I wrote up a separate blogpost about each reason, and am providing a summary below. Please click on each reason to learn more about it:

Reason 1: I have the social media chops

Reason 2: I am a holistic marketer

Reason 3: I am a wine newbie, eager to learn and take you on my Goode journey

Reason 4: I am a hard worker

Reason 5: I am a great cultural fit 

If you like any of my reasons, please take a minute and vote for me here.

On importance of cultural fit – Reason #5

In any job or any professional relationship, a cultural fit is extremely important. All too often, things don’t work out between client and provider, or employee and employer, not because of lack of relevant skills, but rather due to a bad cultural fit. One of the tenets that Murphy Goode holds near and dear is: taking wine-making seriously, but not taking themselves too seriously. 

We love making wine. Flat-out love it. We’ve won plenty of awards and plan to win a whole lot more. That said, we also love football. And family. And laughing till we can barely breathe. You see, the same passion we have for wine, we unabashedly bring to everything we do. We live every day as if it were the best day in our lives. And who’s to say it isn’t.

This fits into my personal mantra perfectly. I am very passionate about and committed to my career, marketing, branding and social media. However, having a really good time is key. I do not take myself too seriously, and as you can see from my “Very Bad Date” videos, I enjoy laughing, enjoying my time with friends, and do not hesitate to make a fool out of myself. I am a “people person”, which allows me to build connections quickly online and IRL (in real life), and makes me extremely relate-able.

This concludes my “5 Reasons why I should be the Lifestyle Correspondent for Murphy Goode. Hopefully, these reasons will help you figure out why you should vote for me, and why Murphy Goode should ultimately select me. To vote, please click here! I appreciate your support.

She Works Hard for the Money… Reason #4

The reason #4 for why you should vote for me (and ultimately select me) for the position of Murphy Goode’s Lifestyle Correspondent (A Really Goode Job) is simple: I work very very hard. I started this blog on June 1, 2009, and have since then produced 22 blogposts and a mock commercial, in addition to writing my regular blog, attending several conferences and working a full-time job. I am one of the few applicants for A Really Goode Job who has started a separate blog and Twitter account specifically for the Murphy Goode project. My blog shows my versatility across media types (text, photo, video) and subjects (from serious marketing and branding issues to lighthearted “Very Bad Date” mini-series.

If chosen as the Lifestyle Correspondent, I will apply the same work ethic, tenacity and natural curiosity to everything I do there.

To vote for me, please click here. Thank you for your support!

“Very Bad Date” becomes a mini-series

We had so much fun making the “Very Bad Date” video that we decided to make it into a mini-series and shoot it during networking events during the course of the 140 Characters Conference. Here Bif and Maria run into each other after their “Very Bad Date”. Bif is eating pizza the whole time! It is so rude to talk with your mouth full. Definitely not classy!

We hope you enjoy our silly mini-series. Amidst all the serious blogposts, we wanted to remember that we don’t take ourselves too seriously. Enjoy!