Author Archives: Julie Ann Kodmur

How To Turn Harvest Into PR “Gold”

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Harvest. It may well be the biggest, sexiest and most emblematic time of the year for a winery. And that means enormous opportunities for smart PR programs.

Wineries are farmers, right? Your product has spent a year growing and maturing and now at its peak is being brought to the winery to be transformed. These are enticing thoughts. The magic of ripe grapes in all their different colors and shapes and smells. When were the grapes picked? At night? Into small lug bins or bigger gondolas? The appeal of funky old trucks or the gleam of new huge shiny trucks….

Harvesting Grapes

Then of course, there the many ways grapes are sorted and crushed—whether with state-of-the-art optical scanners or by hand, by people. There’s the smell of the must in the air; what happens to that must at your winery? Does it go back into the vineyard?  Is juice being separated by vineyard block? Yeast? Leaving juice on the skins? And so unfurl all of the nuances of winemaking!

Using the harvest season as content for PR is almost Rule #1 in our world. You need to figure out to take advantage of what you’re already doing in a way which will attract attention from new eyeballs and build on your relationships with media and customers who already know about you. Maybe you have new varietals you’re crushing this year? Maybe you have new equipment on the crushpad? Maybe you’re sticking with what you’ve done for 20 years—and you know why it works!

So what can you DO? Here are some ideas:

  • Bring fresh grapes into the tasting room for guests to try
  • Bring fresh juice into the tasting room
  • Have a grape stomping party or offer grape stomping as a part of the winery visit
  • Post lots of details and photos on your social media outlets
  • Use harvest as a theme for a sales eblast
  • Offer a morning of grape picking as a raffle prize for club members
  • Offer to include guests or customers in harvest crew lunches or dinners
  • Shine a light on any traditions at your winery—-maybe it’s what’s served at pre-harvest or post-harvest celebration dinner (in the Champagne region there’s a specific stew)
  • Does your winery make tshirts each year for the harvest crew?
  • In general, take lots of photos and video if you can; this will be great material to pull from throughout the year. Even better—put those photos into a weekly harvest album or journal which you can send to your mailing list customers and keep on your website
  • Also very important: keep very precise statistics so you are a credible source about this year’s harvest versus last
  • Most important of all: identify what is unique to your winery at harvest time and make sure to share that message in all of your materials and outreach.

Happy crush!
Image credit publicdomainpictures.net, Karen Arnold

Lighting the way…or are you visible?

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LIGHTS! CAMERA! ACTION!

Sometimes ‘public relations’ or publicity begins with so-called little things.

For example, driving through the Napa Valley at night, I’m always fascinated by how many wineries choose NOT to light their signs or their entrances. Seems so obvious, right? You’ve gone to some trouble to have a great sign or a meticulously designed entrance, framed by flowers or sculpture. But. Not. Why?

The world doesn’t close down at dark. People drive, people go out to eat dinner, people go to events, people look out the window, people chat, people literally grade your image as they speed by. That sign, that entrance—it’s a vignette, a snapshot of what lies across the parking lot.

At night, through the darkness, that winery entrance is a tiny stage set—your graphics gleaming, your name popping out of the blackness to make more of an impression than it may do during the bright sunlight of daytime. Shine a light on it! Make it glow and pop or just warmly and brightly communicate your personality. That means your well lit entrance or sign could be a memorable snapshot, planting a seed for people to plan to come back when you’re open for business.

Your winery might not be a Chateau in the Loire or the Chartres Cathedral staging son et lumiere spectacles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTZSs0qXdD8

but see what you can do….!

 

 

 

Post-quake PR

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Toppled barrels at B.R. Cohn Winery.

B.R. Cohn Winery / Personal Photo

The term ‘crisis pr’ is today’s term, no question. You’ve seen the news of Sunday’s early morning earthquake. We send our wishes of support to everyone coping with the aftermath.

Here is a checklist and overview of what a winery should be considering in this situation.

One thing which is clear from the early coverage of the Napa earthquake is that the outside world might not realize that many wineries don’t have power or electricity or Internet access. Keep that in mind as you reach out to communicate.

There are several communications to send out. Keep in mind that anything you send out “internally” may make its way to the media, so don’t disclose anything too proprietary or personal.

All of these pieces are equally important:

1)      Be in touch with your employees. Update them with how the situation has impacted the business, whether you will be open, how to reach each other if phone lines or computers or power are down.

2)      Be in touch with your partners: that would mean non-full-time employees, people who work intimately with you such as your computer website maintenance team or sales fulfillment company.

3)      Communicate with your distributors: let them know if the situation is impacting shipping or availability of wines (if you know this yet) and most importantly, give them contact information if they have an urgent question.

4)      Consider reaching out to your mailing list customers: if they’re fans of your winery, you can bet they’re eager to hear and may be monitoring your Facebook or website home page for news; hearing directly from you would be very meaningful to them.

5)      Have a statement ready for the media. This can be very brief, even one or two sentences. It should be sent to any employee who might answer a phone and be asked to comment. You could literally put a copy by every phone in the winery. It should go on to your Facebook and website home page and other social media channels if possible. In intense professional and personal times of hardship, it is VERY important to have a position and ‘stick to it,’ so that the winery’s image is consistent. This sounds callous, perhaps, but the craft of image-making is very, very delicate, composed of so many strands of detail and personality—an off-hand comment to a journalist can easily undermine all of your marketing efforts over a long period of time.

The use of photos: Crisis situations aren’t different from normal life in that the power of a great photo can easily trump lots of words. Just remember—before sharing and posting photos of damage—that there is the communication of news and then there’s the long-term presence of those images.

We send everyone who was impacted by the earthquake our warmest wishes, and hope these ideas might be helpful.

 

 

What To Do When They Get It Wrong?

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THEY GOT IT WRONG!

Recently I have refereed several situations where writers with online outlets made numerous factual mistakes in an article. Gone are the days of fact checking. It’s such a vivid image, though—can’t you picture the grizzled editor with the night shade slipping down his forehead, cigar clenched between his teeth, roaring his disapproval at a misplaced comma….?! No longer.

What to do? The winery/client is upset. Why didn’t the writer get it right? Names of wines are wrong. Names of types of wines are wrong. The wrong job title was used. A name was misspelled. People will be confused. And so it goes.

FIND A FLAK JACKET

This actually introduces us to a bigger area: it’s the publicist-journalist-client interface. I often talk about providing a flak jacket for my clients; it’s something I really should do (an army surplus store? Where do you find flak jackets today?). So here’s the message: Do Not Take It Personally. Repeat as often as necessary. The journalist isn’t out to screw you. They’re scrambling to finish their story and rush off to the next one. There’s no personal animus. There’s no intent to ‘ding’ you. There’s just Real Life. Busy. Distracted. No time to check. On to the next.

So once the winery and publicist have vented to each other and calmed down, there are a few options. As in almost any situation in the practice of PR, do you have a “real” relationship with the writer? Will they be amenable to hearing about a few inaccuracies…which means they might be open to making some corrections?

If you have a green light there, then by all means contact the writer and graciously ask if some correcting or updating might be possible. Be ready that it might NOT be: some online formats are very complicated and the inputting may not be entirely in the purview of the writer.

If the writer is amenable, then don’t prolong the conversation. I suggest that you copy the text into a Word file, make the corrections using editing software and then send it back. This makes it very easy for the writer to 1) see the mistakes (or corrections) and 2) to input the material. Another alternative of course is to delineate the changes referring to specific lines in the article.

JUST THE FACTS

A word of caution: this doesn’t apply to philosophical differences or turns of phrase: this only works when the ‘mistakes’ are fact-based—-a vintage, a name, a spelling, a release date, etc.

If you don’t get that green light, then console everyone with the old PR adage: INK IS INK.

Click Bait or What Winemakers Won’t Tell You

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CLICK BAIT

There’s ‘click bait’ and then there’s serious journalism. There’s been a fair amount of wine country water cooler discussion of an article on The Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch which appeared August 3, titled 10 Things Winemakers Won’t Tell You. Take a read: it’s instructive and may even get your heart racing: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/10-things-winemakers-wont-tell-you-2014-07-31

As of August 12, it’s attracted 110 comments online. Let’s deconstruct it wearing publicist goggles:

1)      The writer has selected controversial aspects and elements

2)      The writer has enriched each of the 10 “Things” with supporting statistics and quotes

3)      It’s easy to be negative and stay negative—that’s always more interesting than ‘platitudes’ about how wine might enhance meals or moments with family and friends.

Good news isn’t news—that might be another way to digest this article. You’re being taken advantage of! It isn’t what it seems. You’re paying too much. Wine is bad for you. Wine has terrible and unhealthy components….right?

In reality, although this seems to be an article about wine, it may really be a discussion about  marketing, with its numerous implications of how the public is easily fooled about wine. Wouldn’t we all love to sit down with this writer and taste the wines we’ve made and tell her their stories—notwithstanding the isinglass or Mega Purple….?!