Twitter Search

If you do a Twitter search, you may find that people are talking about your wine:

How do you respond to questions or issues they raise?

Alas, you *can't* DM (direct message) someone who isn't following you.

BUT... 

Even though you can't DM someone who doesn't follow you, you can @reply to them. (see http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/14023)

If you use Twitter's search function directly (from the right-hand pane of your Twitter home page, a relatively new feature), you can see that each result has a "swoosh" (reply to) button (mouse over each reply to see it). Clicking the "swoosh" button starts a new tweet with the "@username" already filled in for a reply.

(Note: using some third-party search notification applications, like Twilert, doesn't appear to offer this functionality.)

The resulting tweet will show up under the @username section in the right-hand pane of *their* home page.  Hint: you may want to look at @yourname on your own Twitter profile.

Alternative/Complementary approaches:

• If they have a hashtag in their tweet (e.g. #smithmadrone), then you can add that hash tag to a tweet of your own, so that it will "group" with those tweets. Presumably, if they tagged it, they're following results.

• You can follow them, and hope they follow you back, at which point you can address their question. If your twitter name is "SmithMadrone", it's likely they will follow you (in this case).

• And, of course, you can visit their profile and see if you can locate an e-mail or blog address. Time-consuming, though...

Obviously, you don't need to sign up for Twitter in order to see what's being said about your winery (http://search.twitter.com does the trick, and you can create an RSS feed for that search query).  As pointed out above, using a recognizable name for your "official" Twitter account can help.

Thanks to Smith-Madrone Vineyards & Winery for serving as my example, and Julie Ann Kodmur for asking the question that promoted this post.