
Ep. 902 Historic Perspectives On Wine Blog | wine2wine Business Forum 2021
wine2wine Business Forum 2021
Episode Summary
Content Analysis Key Themes and Main Ideas 1. The Evolution of Wine Communication: Tracing the journey from traditional print media and early wine blogs to the dominance of social media and modern digital content strategies. 2. Democratization and Professionalization of Wine Content: How blogging lowered barriers to entry for wine writers, leading to both a surge in amateur content and a subsequent professionalization driven by monetization and SEO. 3. The Business of Digital Wine Media: Discussion of content marketing, the shift from advertising-based revenue to events and subscription models (e.g., Substack), and the increasing cost of producing high-quality digital content. 4. Impact on Wineries and Industry Communication: How the digital transformation has affected how wineries communicate, the challenges of direct-to-consumer sales in a complex legal landscape, and the importance of authentic, valuable content. 5. Shifting Paradigms in Wine Reporting: The move from authoritative, objective wine criticism to more personal, opinion-led, and personality-driven content, and the implications for investigative journalism. Summary In this session of the Italian Wine Podcast, Felicity Carter, Executive Editor at The Drop, provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of wine communication from the advent of the internet to the present day. She traces the origins of wine blogging back to 2004, highlighting how early blogging software and platforms like WordPress democratized content creation, allowing amateurs to publish and eventually monetize their work through services like Google AdSense. Carter explains how big companies adopted content marketing and how media outlets began relying on unpaid contributors, blurring the lines between professional journalism and amateur blogging. The discussion then shifts to the profound impact of blogs on the wine industry, particularly their role in shining a light on smaller wineries and emerging regions often overlooked by traditional, high-end focused wine magazines. Carter details the subsequent rise of visual platforms like Instagram, which ""ate the wine blog,"" and the emergence of subscription-based newsletters like Substack as new monetization models for content creators. She concludes by noting that traditional wine media has adapted by becoming hybrid companies, relying on events and competitions for revenue, while wine critics have transformed into personal brands. The overall landscape now favors personality-driven content and constant communication across multiple platforms, emphasizing the need for valuable, non-boring content despite rising production costs and conversion challenges. Takeaways * Wine media has undergone a radical transformation, moving from traditional print to a diverse digital ecosystem. * Early wine blogs democratized content creation, giving a voice to previously overlooked wineries and regions. * The professionalization and monetization of blogging led to content marketing and the blurring of lines between amateur and professional content. * Social media platforms like Instagram significantly shifted the landscape from text-based blogs to visual communication. * Traditional wine media now often operates as hybrid companies, with events and competitions supplementing publishing revenue. * Wine critics have evolved into brands, leveraging their names across various media. * Modern wine communication is highly personalized, opinion-led, and requires significant investment despite the perception of digital content being ""free."
About This Episode
The rise of wine blocks and blogging has led to professional crafting and revenue from content marketing, leading to "maandering dials." The shift in media coverage and the rise of " Hot take" and " Hot take" in the wine industry have also led to professional crafting and revenue from content marketing. The rise of natural wine to professional crafts is due to pressure from bloggers to write about it, but the rise is not due to a lack of professionalism or social media. The importance of creating original and original content for social media and the shift in media coverage of " Hot topics" have also led to a shift in media coverage of " Hot topics", with the majority of media companies now creating their own newsletters and event-based revenues. The pandemic has impacted the industry and created a shift in media coverage, with the majority of media companies now creating their own newsletters and event-based revenues. The importance of social media and SEO for converting users to your
Transcript
Italian wine podcast, a wine to wine business forum twenty twenty one media partner, is proud to present a series of sessions highlighting the key themes and ideas from the two day event held on October the eighteenth and nineteenth twenty twenty one. This hybrid edition of the business forum was jam packed with the most informed speakers discussing some of the hottest topics in the wine industry today. For more information, please visit wine to wine dot net and tune in every Thursday at two pm central European time for more episodes recorded during this latest edition of wine to wine business forum. Good morning to everybody. This is a beautiful opportunity that we have to meet felicity Carter. Very, very special person. She's a journalist. She's a editor. She's the executive editor at the drop, the content arm of PIX. Do you know what PIX is? I did a little research and Pix is a a wine discovery platform. What a beautiful way to put in touch consumer, consumers desire, consumer needs, with the wineries. B course more than they are, but maybe felicity with the last more. Previously, if you work at, for mininger for life, Europe's biggest wine and spirits publisher, and maybe we can say that she brought, miningers for a lag as the first publishing magazine and, media, around the world about wine. Miningers had thirty correspondent from many correspondents from thirty countries and uh-uh subscribers from thirty eight different countries. She is a Australian in the origin, I think. She moved to Europe. We are very happy that she moved to Europe a little bit less happy because she moved to Germany and not to Italy, but I'm sure that Philly will have a third life And the third life will be in Italy with us. So she's also an international wine judge. She's a speaker much more better than me. And, she is also consultant for a very, very important wine next change in base in London, which is Libex. So now we are going through our subject. Today, we're speaking about, wine blocks from the beginning, from the oil region to now. So something about historic perspectives of wine blocks. Thank you. Thank you, Felicity. Thank you very much. Thank you for a great introduction. I'm not quite sure I can live up to it, but I'll do my best. So where did this topic come from? It actually came from Stevy. Stevy said I would like to hear about what happened to wine blocks. So, I went off and I do what I always do. I just emailed a bunch of people and said, what happened to wine blocks? And this is what I found out. What I found out is that the rise of wine blocks actually helped, helped construct the new wine media landscape that we have before us, and I'd like to explain how that happened. So the first ever proper wine blog was Aldah Yarrow's wine blog winography, which debuted on eleventh of January. Oh, not two thousand nine hundred ninety five, but two thousand and four. This is the first I know of in the English speaking world. And the He he has a bit of a dispute with Jamie Good of the UK, who started his in two thousand, but he started as a sort of blog about, football and about his family with a little bit of wine thrown in. So Aldez is the first official wine blog in the English language. So I've done a quick overview of the rise of blogs, which I don't think we need to go through. You can read it on the screen. Basically, it started in the nineteen nineties with the rise of the internet. The big thing that happened in nineteen ninety eight was a news paper, did a live blog of a hurricane at the same time. Early blogging software, encouraged people to take charge of websites up until then, you had to code your own website if you wanted to write anything online, and you had to recode every new page. But the new blogging software blogger in nineteen ninety nine opened up the worldwide web for anybody who had opinion. By nineteen ninety nine, there were twenty three blogs and only seven years later, there were more than fifty million. And the big bang in blogging happened in two thousand and three when WordPress released its free software. And now not only could anybody publish their own thinking, rambling thoughts. They could make it look like a magazine. They could make it look professional. And in fact, it became extremely hard for people to distinguish between what was a professional site and what was an amateur. The next thing that happened in two thousand and three was Google AdSense. For the first time people could now make money with their blogs. If their blogs were popular, if they had the right keywords, Google would place ads on their site and give them some of the revenue. And so suddenly people who had been amateurs became professionals and they could make money from it. What happened was it gave a voice to people who'd been locked out of the mainstream. In the early days to in order to make money, many blogs were focused on lifestyle and product reviews. This one do switch I've put up was the most famous of what we call the mummy bloggers. Women at home who began to blog about what it was like to be a stay at home mother. And these blogs started a sort of confessional diary style, diary style meanderings, and pretty quickly they became extremely professional where people began to hire video crews. They began to hire professional photographers. They began to hire professional programmers because they began to make a lot of money from lifestyle and product endorsement But it wasn't just individuals that realized this big company started to look at this and said, this is amazing. There's this whole untapped audience of people who might not be reading newspapers, who might not be consuming television news that we can reach in other ways. So we get the White House begins its own blog, which is still going. And it becomes a way that that other institutions begin to start looking more and more like magazine publishers. Then what you get is this is from Microsoft. Now companies realize that not only can they publish magazines, but they can move into something which is called content marketing. Now content marketing really started at the end of the nineteenth century with somebody called John Dier, who did a tractor catalog. And in that catalog, he would give tips and tricks about farming. And other people in the twentieth century picked up on this. Jello famously would give recipes about how you could use Jello. The Michelin tire company moved into what we now call content marketing with the Michelin style guide and the Michelin review guides. But it wasn't really until the early orts that people began to merge this magazine style, writing with commercial prospects at the same time. So this really became a very big deal. And the big thing was big media, somebody looked at it and realized that so many people were blogging, they could stop paying journalists. They could get people to write for free. And unfortunately, audience members could not any longer tell the difference between who was a professional journalist and who was an amateur blogger because they all came under the same branding. So for for example, has a whole content farm of hundreds and hundreds of contributors, who are not paid for it, who are who are amateurs in a sphere. Many of them are journalists have decided as they wanna do it as a way to build their brand. But it all goes under the prestigious forbes label. So by two thousand five, two thousand six, it's become much harder to tell who is a professional person and who is an amateur, and there's a a lot of crossover beginning to happen. Halfington post took this to new heights, it founded in two thousand and six, and it didn't pay anybody. All it was was a collection of blogs. And then in two thousand and nine, we get the film, Julie, and Julia. Now, this was a story about a girl called Julie, who was a food blogger, and she decided to blog as she constructed all the recipes of Julia Childs, the art of French cooking. And eventually, her blog became so popular that she eventually got to meet Julia Childs, and there was a film made out of it with Merrill Street. So this sent the blog a fear into the stratosphere as everybody began to realize that blogging was now not just something that you did to blow off steam or write your diary. It was something that could get you a Hollywood deal. So what did all of this mean for wine? Well, as Aldah says, a lot of the early content was people just giving their thoughts about stuff. It was this is what I had to drink last night. Wine bloggers began to realize that they could get samples and press trips. There were a lot of people who began to do advertising for, unwittingly for wineries because they they were getting nice in itations and so they would write write nice things about what the winery, would say. There was also lots of, squabbles between bloggers. Bloggers would spend a lot of time commenting on what some other blogger had written about things. There was there was the rise of what we now call the hot take. But as Alda says, people who survived began to get more and more professional. They began to go to conferences. They began to learn how professional writers do things. They began to understand things like search how Google promotes things through SEO. And Google promotes things if the content is what's called authoritative. The better quality content that you can create, the higher in the Google rankings you will rise. And so bloggers began to look very much like professionals. Like Gray is a professional journalist to work for the San Francisco Chronicles. He now does a lot of work for wine searcher. He's also a blogger. And he told me the thing that blogging did that really turns the world of wine upside down was because editors were no longer in charge of what was being discussed Now wine magazines up until the mid orts were pretty much controlled by people who were either they were either newspaper columns who were controlled by editors who didn't know very much about wine and generally didn't care that wine was just something that was the filler of the back with the astrology column and the the gardening column and so on. And so it was really whatever the the wine correspondent wanted to write. And sometimes there wasn't even a wine correspondent. It was somebody on the paper who wanted to get the wine samples who would write it. The magazines were controlled by people who took wine very, very seriously, wines that tater to Canta, whose whose view of the world was really shaped by the high end of wine by burgundy Tuscany, Bordeaux. But what bloggers did, which completely smashed that system, was they started taking notice of small things blobbers would go and visit their neighboring wineries. They would write up a small winery. They would take notice of little things that were going on. And it turned out there was an audience for this, and the rise of some new regions can really be put down to fact that bloggers began to pay attention to them. Blake also thinks more controversially that natural wine could not have risen to the heights that has if there wasn't an army of bloggers who were writing about it because it is true that in the early days natural wine was kept out of mainstream wine locations because wine editors simply didn't think it was very important. As a wine editor to myself who was going through that period, I have to say wine bloggers faced a lot of the anger that Instagramers get now, which is a lot of wine writers felt very angry. They felt they were being undermined by people who were writing free, which is actually probably true. They also felt that they had spent years developing their wine expertise, and suddenly there were all these amateurs coming along. Sometimes you were printing false films because they didn't know any better. There was a lot of people who were just recycling talking points from wineries. So there's a lot of feeling of protect about the wine sphere. But it is true, and Blake is quite right that what wine blogging did was it opened up wine to new audiences, new writers, new communicators, new communication styles. Then you also get the professionalization of blogging, which happens around two thousand and eight. So this happened simultaneously in Europe and the United States is that people decided to have conferences where bloggers could get together and meet one another. In Europe, it was two Americans, Gabriela Opaz and Ryan Opaz, who, moved to Spain and founded the European wine bloggers conference. They hooked up with Robert Mackintosh, Brit to make it more professional. The first conference they had in two thousand and eight, which only had about thirty people. A year later, in two thousand and nine, they had a hundred and forty. The United dates was the same. They started with a very small number of people a year later. It had exploded. The wine conferences, actually began to implode under their own weight for a a good reason, which is that because people started to take it very seriously. A lot of people who were very good at wine blogging actually moved into the profession. They became social media managers. They became communicators. And what was left was people who wanted to go and they wanted to do the tastings and were less interested in the nuts and bolts. So conferences became bifurcated between the professionals who were beginning to disappear and people who were just turning up for the tasting and the socializing. But Robert says in the very early days, nobody took social media seriously. I remember people literally laughing at me, people who are now making money from it. We helped the wine trade take it more seriously. Then in two thousand and ten, we see the start of Instagram, and and now we're moving from words to visual. A lot of people who were already involved in blogging who understood Google, who understood social media immediately jumped into Instagram. A lot of other people left because it's very hard to have the the the stamina to write every day. A lot of other people had gone professional in Instagram didn't make itself felt for a little while, but a couple of years later, Instagram had eaten the wine block. Now in two thousand seventeen, we have a new technology substack, which is only now building momentum. Substack is really interesting. As the media sort of collapses, deck is a company that allows people to create their own newsletters and charge money for it. It's a subscription model. And more and more mainstream journalists who are getting sick and tired of how poorly they're paid, anyone who's built an audience is moving to newsletters where they can start charging a monthly fee. And in wine, one of those is Aaron Acekoff, who's a writer about natural wines, and he's got a, he started with a blog called Not drinking poison in Paris, which he said he was unable to do because he was working for a fashion company where he didn't work very hard, so he'd sit at his desk and blog. But once he moved to substack, he's now making enough money that he's almost got enough money to live on. So the stampede to substack, is accelerating. But in all of this, what happened to traditional wine media? Well, this is an old graph now. It's a very famous graph. This shows what happened to specifically newspaper advertising up until two thousand eleven. I didn't put anything more recent than that because it's just too depressing, but just imagine that line at the bottom just keeps going to about here. So advertising revenue has really collapsed on anything that started as a print model. So what this has meant is that the wine media that has survived and a lot of wine media did not, particularly on the continent, has ceased to become wine media. So those that have survived have actually turned into hybrid companies that where the the print part of it or the magazine part of it is like the sort of the engine that pulls the train and the train is made up of wine events competitions, spin off products like that, and that is where companies are now making their their money. And this is true of all of the big wine media companies. The the print publication is where they get their prestige and their their credibility, but the events, the competitions, the trade shows, those of things is where they're actually earning the the majority of their revenue. Wine critics have seized the moment and they've turned themselves into wine brands. And we've seen this across the world that anybody who, had a name for themselves has now turned themselves into profitable media company. We've got, James Suckling with he's not just a wine critic. He's also an events company. A name you may not have heard of James Halliday in Australia. James Halliday is a very famous wine critic who now has a a deal with a company called Hardy Grant. They put out a magazine under his name. He has the wine companion. He has a wine podcast. James Halliday is now a brand. The same is true for Robert Parker. The wine advocate now exists separately. It's under a different editor, Lisa Parete Brown. It has a whole team of reviewers. But lest anybody think that they're not as important as they were in Robert Parker's Day, I've done, work for LiveX, the fine wine exchange in London. And I I laugh now when people tell me that scores aren't important because I've been in the system and watched what happened when scores come out and suddenly merchants all over the world start buying and selling stock based on scores. Genesis Robinson, which recently sold to an American venture capitalist is another person who has turned herself into a wine brand. So these these wine critics have become greater than they they started. As for wine media itself, we've now got something that is content marketing. It's what called hybrid wine media of which I work for one of them. We've got seven fifty daily in the States, which is a magazine that is taxed on the front of a system which is for, the wine trade, which is about distribution. And we've got the drop, which is the magazine, which again, which is at the front of PIX is the real business of PIX is a search engine, and the magazine is to attract people to the search engine. What's really interesting about content marketing is that in some ways, the magazines of content marketing are more independent editorially than the old school magazines because we don't take the drop doesn't take advertising out. We we stand or fall on whether the search engine works. And because we don't take advertising, we can say whatever we like, whereas that's not true in old school magazines. You gotta be a bit careful about who you offend So what did the wine blog mean for wine media? I think the person who says it's best is my colleague, Erica Ducey, who's the chief content officer of Pics. She used to work for seven fifty daily and wine pair. And she says blogs have now eaten magazines. There's no longer any separation between between blog writing and journalism. As she points out, the biggest change has been that magazines and online magazines have turned to the personal voice. We've turned it away from the authoritative person who is telling you what you should think about wine, and said people are giving you their impressions and their emotions around it, their opinions, very opinion led. This wasn't true a decade ago. Consumers like personality driven writing, they like to know that somebody the writer is a proxy for the for them standing in The other thing that's happened, is that professionals can no longer make money doing, doing deep dive reporting. There's just been a job advertised for the San Francisco Chronicles where to for a wine writer who will probably earn about sixty five thousand dollars which is almost impossible to live on in the San Francisco Bay area. And although there is more wine writing than ever before, and there is more wine publishing than ever before, we are going to see less and less, investigative reporting, less and less deep dive reporting, less and less third and objective reporting. So the future looks about a lot of personality around wine. So what are the takeaways? Well, today's wine media is much more open to the small story. It doesn't matter who you are or where you are, somebody will take an interest in you and write about you, blog about you, put you on Instagram. Wine writing doesn't exist anymore today. It is wine communication across a whole range of media blogs, Instagram, newsletters, content marketing, traditional media. They're all in the mix now. And three, what this means is it's easier for wineries and wine people to be noticed than ever before. And that's it. Thank you very much. Is a very, nice presentation, the one that you did. And, if you don't mind, felicity, before starting to to make a do a little talk, I would like to make a, just understand who who is the audience in this, a beautiful I'm in this beautiful room. How many wine bloggers or wine journalists or wine writers are there? Can you raise your hand? Okay. So maybe one third. How many wine producers are here? Okay. So fifty fifty. No. No. It's it's it's fine. It's good. It's good. So I I I wanted to to go a little bit deeper in, into a felicity presentation just a few minutes and then maybe we can, give you the word and the past you the word and, that you ask directly to felicity. Felicity, there's was a a couple of things that I wanted to, to ask you and that, really, make me very curious. So The first blog, you said it was nineteen ninety four. It was a student. He wanted to tell about his life. He wanted to tell his opinion, about, what he was studying, what he was doing. Okay. Nineteen ninety four. Then political blogs started, and they have been increasing, and there are still very, very strong White House as a blog. Trump as a blog. Yeah. One of the one of the big things in in blogging, which I didn't mention, was a guy called Matt drugs used to have a newsletter, and he started blogging. He was con he is a conservative writer in the United States. And the drudge report, grew to be such a important media property that he can now affect elections. So so blogging and the thing about blogging is when it started, nobody took it seriously, and that allowed people to come out of nowhere and, and connect with a huge audience in a way that nobody had expected. And, little by little, the content of the blogs, the content of that wine communication on the internet in a in a wide sense, get nearer to wine. There's a moment you, in your presentation, you speaking, which is talk about aspirational content. So I think that wine is exactly inside this, subject. Well, this all comes down to the grubby topic of money. So what happened early on is that it was really the mummy bloggers that started writing about what it was like to stay at home. And then people realized that they were really good advertisers that if you put your product, in a mummy blog, you could reach thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of women across America. And so very quickly, mommy blogs became monetized. People realized they could make money from doing that. Now as soon as money is your goal and marketing is your goal, what you do changes? Because now you're into public relations and marketing rather than just writing and thinking about stuff. It becomes less original. But is it still possible? This is a question that I ask for the wine writers and wine bloggers here in the room. Is it still possible to make money, having a wine blog or working for a wine blog or something like that. What's the way? Because there's also some lows that have been changing. Actually, that's a really that's a really good question. And I I it's something I should have said. One blog's in the United States really slammed to a halt in two thousand and seventeen because Google AdSense stopped sending advertising revenue to blogs. And so people who had been making money suddenly lost their, lost their ability to make money. So a lot of blogs disappeared and people moved to Instagram simply because that was where they could start making money again. And now Let's speak about the hot topic. Not today of our era. Social media, disruptive event for journalists, for brands, for newspaper, traditional media were really shocked by what the brands could do in terms of communication using social media. What do you think about this? And what do you think about pandemic and social media? Well, just, just to talk about me for a second. It was very good for me because I got a job with an American company. And because of the pandemic institutionalizing working from home, I can work a full time job for America from my office in Germany, and I I don't even think that would have been possible before the pandemic changed things. That's the social media. I'd like to throw that question to you since you've got a very famous winery. Why don't you tell me about how the pandemic changed social media? Well, Donna Forgetta has a long story because I think that we started really at the very beginning, maybe two thousand with the first website. And, and we started immediately when, Facebook and, Instagram are open there, opportunity to us. We are learning a lot from the people who is following our social media because the idea is a little bit also to get an interactive relation with the users. It's not just showing off what we are doing, but it's really, trying to reveal some of our secrets. We like to post photos from the inner side of a vine and maybe show the the wine lover a special moment of the Viticulture cycle. And we know that, we need to, follow a certain tone of voice. We need to have, an identity, a very steady identity, the winery Donna forgot a winery is like a person must be coherent in every moment in every type of communication, the social media, the packaging, the wine. The quality of the wine is every time under my point of view communication. The quality of the wine probably is the first and most important type of communication, but You know that packaging is really important. You don't know the winery. You don't know the wine. You get in a you get in a shop that label must must stand out. And I hope they don't have forgotten this with our, orders labels. Social media is the same. We must try to tell a unique story, a personal story. Well, it works on me. I've actually got a cupboard full of Donna Figara wines at home, but I didn't buy them because of social media. But, yeah, I just just about social media, one thing I'll I should talk about is because I'm really interested in talking about money, which I think we never talk about enough wine, is that social media costs. There's this big lie that everything that you join the internet is free, and you can just go online and you can you can make things happen. But actually more and more as the space gets more crowded, to do it properly, you've gotta have professionals and it costs money. There'll always be very talented people who just do the right thing at the right time and it takes off. But more and more, social media and and digital publishing is very expensive to get right. Can I tell you something? You you got to the point as you are used to. Okay? The real problem is that The costs are rising and rising and rising because the contents must be more and more beautiful. The videos, the photos, the text, the every content must be studied, and to produce it, it takes time, So being competitive on social media, it's not easy, it's not economical. It it costs a lot. Conversion. This is the word. Okay. My consultant came to me and said, okay, Okay, Jose. Jose. Don't worry. This costs a lot. You must make conversion. Okay. What's conversion? Conversion is that you need to sell wine. Fantastic. You need to sell your wine through the social media. Can you tell us something about how the low permit wineries to sell wine through social media? I have to make such a lot of bunches Okay? Because I'm speaking about the wine. I'm showing a label. Then I send you to my website, then maybe my website in certain countries is allowed to get to the e commerce in other countries not What conversion? What kind of conversion can I do? I I, I'm slightly reluctant to answer this because my my area is really sort of media and communications rather than social media. But if we can get a microphone there's a lady up the back who knows the answer to this, we have we have a big wine expert in conversion in the room. Can we get a microphone to Poly? Okay. So you've just run into the biggest issue that we face in this topic that that Felisti has shared with all of us Like you said, it's very expensive and and it's also very misrepresentative because as you say, there's this belief that because we all have access to it, that it's been democratized, and we should all be able to make money from it. But, compliance issues, the three tier system, export laws create a ton of issues for the wine industry. And one of the biggest ones that we see has to do with the contracts that we have in place or in many cases we've had in place prior to the rise of digital communications. Because if you're an Italian winery and you go through a multi step export process to land your wine in America, you lose all access to your data You lose rights to communication. You lose, in many cases, actually your own tone and voice. So now we're looking at very expensive metrics, very expensive business practices. The things that we simply don't practice for many small to medium size independent wineries, but, you know, setting up, we just wanna make good wine. So how do you do this? The first thing is the Grubby Money topic, we have to charge more as an industry. I'm just gonna take that right off the bat. All of the all of our wineries who are charging too little Steve agrees, you know, you need to start building these things into your margins. And I remember Felicity saying many years ago that the wineries that succeed are the wineries who have started with a spreadsheet. And what that means now is that you have a spreadsheet that actually costs all of these elements of communication. So first step, getting past the belief that it's cheap and easy, second step, knowing that we have to have a way to pay for it, and prioritizing that. That's Poly Hammond from Fire Forest. And the growling you here is her dog Steve that she's brought along. Felicity, about conversion, more about conversion because is it this must be the real goal of being on social media, not only Brenda Wuorness and Burn Building, which is okay. One very important goal, but is not the only one. Felicity, I I read some of your, interviews, and, speaking about conversion and the different step, the many step that the consumer must do from the social media to the e commerce. Okay. There's a problem of concentration. The problem of time. When we were reading newspapers, we knew that we had a half an hour with a newspaper on our knees. No. We knew. Okay? Then we got to the desktop and maybe on the desktop We we had a big video and we can stay quarter of an hour on the desk. I see my my husband has a big iPad like that. Maybe, two third of a newspaper. Any looks fantastic, no, you'll read the newspaper. But now nowadays, we're using mobile. Mobile means fast. Yeah. This is this is a really interesting point, and ever since I've been involved in communication, so professionally, which is from the late nineties on. I've heard this over and over again that attention spans are short and fragmented, and that's absolutely true. But what's also true that people will read something if they're really interested in it So we had a really great social experiment, within the last fortnight. I don't know if any of you read this. The New York Times put out an article called The Bad Art Friend. And it was a an amazing story full of twists and turns, but the story was ten thousand words. That's a novella, but people read it. Social media exploded with people talking about it. People will always come and read something if it's interesting. The problem is that you can't waste people's time and too much of what's being produced. It's just not very interesting. Yeah. It's important to select. It's important to have the ability to filter the great opportunities that we have. I don't want to, interrupt the public if they want to make question there's somebody of you that want to make a question to felicity before we go away. Please wait wait for the micro microphone. I'm Ciao. So it's nice to make a question here. I want to ask about, like, the language barrier in terms of blogging. But for example, I'm Chinese. So in terms of one blogs, like, if I write in I write in Chinese, like, how, like, the landscapes in terms of one blogging to see the language. Of course, China is more than just the language. Also, they vary in terms of the forms of social media. A lot of things. But I would like to hear from, Felicia Carter about how your opinion on this. Oh, well, this is a this is a question that is, obsessing a great many companies in wine at the moment. So we we call it the language Paywall, the, the thing that you can't get over. The best thing to do is simultaneous translation using Google. Google now has plugins that will allow you to produce your content in multiple languages at once And actually, it's very, very, it it works very, very well. Now the only thing is is when you're writing for the international market, you have to keep some things in mind. One is that you have to use your language, your language has to become simpler than it would be if you were writing to your own country. It also means you have to stay away from anything that references something that only people in your country know about. So I see a lot of people who don't get traction because they're they're taking it for granted that people will know about local issues or local politicians or local people, you have to explain absolutely everything that a local won't know. And you have to stay away from metaphor. All of the the sort of vibrant, florid language will never translate. So you can be sophisticated. You can be elegant about it, but that but you have to you have to think differently, and you have to imagine that the person that you're writing to knows nothing about you or your culture. And actually, if you do if you do it successfully, it works really well in your own language as well, but Google Translate is your friend. Fantastic felicity. More question from the public. We have three more question. There's one over there and one on the on the about content, usage What I'm observing, lately is a change of what I call the search culture of going to the Google and, as something to what I call a browse culture that is the way that people use, in, Instagram. What do you think about, if these changes actually happening and how it will affect the way people, use content and shared content? Okay. So this comes down to why I'm saying that content is actually good social media and content is more expensive than people think. So, at the big publications, to try and make sure that they're always got things in front of you, you know, the big publications now have headline editors who do nothing but search for SEO for the correct thing for that headline. And they'll they'll test the same headline multiple ways in rapid succession. And this is why it becomes very, very, very difficult for the individual to sort of, you know, I think of Google like this Fertility god. And and you've always gotta keep sacrificing it. You've gotta propitiate the god. And the way you propitiate the god is you get your SEO right. Like, you get your rituals of Google right and then Google will reward you by pushing you up the rankings. It it it really it really is we've all become slaves to the algorithm and so on the one hand, you can spend lots and lots of money to make that happen and to get past all of this. But the other thing to do is just be really interesting. I I just my rule in life is my rule of content is don't be boring. And and too much one content actually violates that rule. If you're just really interesting, it doesn't matter if people are browsing, it doesn't matter if people are using SEO, you'll get right to the front of the queue. Amy gross with wine for me. It's great to see you. So back on your comment about conversion, and thinking about social media, what we have found is that whenever you can take those social media posts and turn them into visits to your website, then you're able to, own that relationship better and follow your users better. So, Felicia, I don't know what your thoughts are on how would you agree that the goal is get that get them off of the social media onto your sites. You can own that relationship and start tracking do you think about that, Bruce? Okay. So so so I need to make two things clear. One is that when it comes to social media and SEO, I'm not an expert in this, and you really need an expert to answer that. But I can I argue from a media perspective? So if you're running a blog, a newspaper or a magazine, your ultimate goal, is to be sticky. Right? It's to get people to come and read you as the first thing they do in the morning. You want them coming back time after time after time. So in in that case, whatever it is that you're doing, whether it's a newsletter, whether it's social media or whatever, your goal is to get them on your main web and get them in a habit of reading your main website. But that's a different answer from the question of how you use social media for other types of conversion. Last question, maybe, because it's time. Okay. So I'm gonna jump in on that one really quickly. We found that the best thing that you can do with you that one link that you're given, especially on Instagram, is direct them to subscribe to your newsletter because it's your greatest asset. It's the one place that you can really segment according to interest, awareness, language, geo, whatever it's gonna be. So that's just, you know, if you're not If you're not tackling a lot of strategy, that's just one really good change that everyone can make. But, actually, I want I'm glad that Felicity talked about sort of content farming in a way, and I'm just going to jump in with something that I think is really important for us in the wine industry to remember which is the internet cost energy. And we are at the forefront of issues, right, in terms of climate change and energy awareness. And it's incumbent upon us as an industry that instead of producing what used to be popular, which is a lot of not of very low value post just for the purpose of staying in someone's face that actually we are preparing valuable content and that whether it's a ten thousand more long form content or whether it is short and sharp information that people need, but those days of just throwing stuff out on the internet, it's not something that we as an industry can continue to do. So thank you. He has some Steve agrees. Yes. He agrees. So thank you so much. I'm gonna, close-up this room, felicity. Thank you so much for doing that overview. I will cherish it forever. What a great two sessions, Robert Joseph and Fors Dakota back to back. And, of course, Jose Ralo, and ladies. Thank you for being color coordinated with wine to wine this year. I love it. You know? This is why I love these We only think of you, Stevie. Yeah. Do we have a photo altogether, Stevie? Yeah. It's a fantastic. Okay. 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