How To Make $$$$ With Twitter

Here's the secret.

Hey, what did you expect?

Having just attended the Direct To Consumer Symposium (DTCS) on Tuesday, I can say that everyone wants to know how to forecast the ROI for social media.  It seems pretty clear that it's hard to measure (although there are definitely things you can measure, it's not easy to equate them with hard dollars in your bank account).

The big issue for wineries, large and small, is that Twitter (and other social media venues) takes time, which means a person.  And that person costs money.  And that has to get paid for, somehow.  Which brings us back to ROI.

Fundamentally, you either have to believe in social media, or you have to be big enough to afford the experiment.

I tend towards the view that social media has value, but it's primarily the sort of value associated with having a pleasant, competent person answering your phones.  

On the other hand, Rick Bakas of St. Supery gave a case study of using Twitter (plus a landing page) to sell 250+ cases of their 2003 Merlot (at $150 a case, including shipping, it was a terrific deal).  Of course, he also pointed out that two subsequent offers didn't garner as strong a result.  It appears that offers need to be spaced out to avoid "offer fatigue."

(Disclaimer: I bought one of those cases.)

So, how are you trying to make $$$$ with Twitter?

Comments

[rick]

Go listen to this great rant on marketing ROI from David Meerman Scott: http://www.webinknow.com/2010/01/roi-rant.html and check out the PDf he links. David makes this point in various places on his site, but the ROI argument is usually an excuse to not do things vs a real argument.

[April Damron]

Hi Mike- I'm still jealous over the bottle of wine you won at DTCS! Thanks for keeping the conversations going. I would also like to know how tweetups fit into the mix? The wine industry knows how to execute events, but has anyone had success with an exclusive tweetup winetasting? How do you get your winemaker and management to participate? How is a tweetup different than any other wine tasting event?

[Jazmineb]

DIGG.

[Maureen Nolan]

Here is an example of a winery tweet-up held January 10th at Alexandria Nicole Winery in Woodinville. http://nwwineandrealestate.com/2010/01/10/alexandria-nicole-cellars-winery-tweet-up/
It was organized in a week through a club member of theirs. Invites were sent via twitter by the organizer to established local wine tweeters. The winery tweet-up was held during normal tasting hours. A local restaurant paired food (good PR for the restaurant).
The winery investment ~ wine! Additional staff was not needed, there were no additional hours, no food costs, and no staff twitters for the winery (although, they are active on twitter at @ancwines they left the event up to the club member and others on twitter to organize)
Here is what the winery received:
1) 10 people twittering out the virtues of Alexandria Nicole wines.
2) Of the 10 invitees most have at least 1,000 followers. So, in a matter of 2 hours over 10,000 people could have seen Alexandria Nicole's name stream over twitter.
3) A few extra days of the event received “shelf life” on various blogs and additional twitter conversation between invitees and their followers.
In summary, it is hard to quantify ROI and twitter because it is a new kind of business relationship. A good place for a winery to start their social media investment and understanding of this relationship is to host a “tweet-up” with local wine tweeters. To get real mileage at the “tweet-up” use it to launch your wineries entry into the world of twitter. If you are concerned about the long term costs and lack of quantifiable ROI you can use @ancwines approach and have the winemaker’s wife tweet.

[Mary Baker]

It's also possible to "pipe" a Typepad blog to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Every time I post on my blog or on Facebook, Twitter automatically publishes the first few words and a link. How easy is that??

ROI: 1/2 hour setup = Effortless Tweeting.

[Jack]

Hey very cool site, great info on here.

I do agree offers need to be spaced out to avoid fatigue. Well in most cases they do, especially in the case of wine.

You have to figure a lot of the wine buyers already bought a case of wine the first time you set up a campaign on twitter. Then you hit them again so soon but they are not in, they are out of the buying cycle for a case of wine at least. You may be able to hit them again soon, for a wine rack or some other sort of accessory.