Talk is anything but cheap
The Thinkup Community assembles on the second Wednesday of the month to talk about our favorite project. Join us live sometime!
Thinkup Talks #2 January 12, 2010 by Thinkup
Gina Trapani, Andy Baio and some developers join me to talk about Thinkup App. You should try it soon.
Internet visibility.
Talent, musicianship, soul, creativity… whatever it is you want to put out there, it has to be visible on the Internet. As I look around at all my creative and talented friends, I see that very few of them are able to easily point to their work on social networks like Twitter and Facebook or even in an email. Here are a couple on concrete free suggestions to fix that. If you read what follows, there’s no excuse for not having a significant online presence.
Your tunes.
Youtube is huge, but unless you have video or a good with slide show-type presentations, it won’t be your best vector to point people to. If you’re a little geeky, you can find a free player to put on a site, like this one. However, I think the best way to go is to stick to your music and find a site that shows it off best. I have used two sites I think are excellent: AudioMicro.com and Soundcloud.com. My current favorite is Soundcloud because it has some cool extra features. For example, people can comment at a specific spot in your song. It’s social so you can actually discover new music and have other creatives discover yours. Let’s say for a moment that you take my advice and join Soundcloud.com free.
Soundcloud
After joining and adding some profile info, you’ll upload a few tunes. Each song has a lot of potential info like exact tempo, key, genre and license. You can choose from a restrictive license to “do whatever you want”. I like to use the creative commons license that specifies credit for use, but who knows if people respect that? You have to realize that there’s a huge amount of music out there and by putting it online, you’re giving some of it away.
Posterous
One dead easy way to put stuff out as an artist is Posterous.com. All you do is join the site, choose a setup and publish. You can publish by sending an email to an address they furnish. The impressive part is that if you send an email with an mp3 song attached, Posterous will publish the text of your email and add a player for the tune automatically. The site I refer to above, http://sugarcane-harris.com is on Posterous is shown.
Posterous will also automatically publish a little gallery of photos you post. If you are a performing band or artist and have gigs and photos of those, this a great way to go, it’s easy and still free. Most importantly, you do not need to pay someone to help you because anyone, even drummers, can use these sites.
There are a lot of free ways to be present online, including Facebook – which I personally abhor – but also Tumblr, WordPress.org and a zillion others for the more or less geeky.
Summing up
If I had one piece of advice, it would be this: go join Soundcloud.com, put up about three songs. That whole thing will take you about 15 minutes, cost nothing and require an average IQ. If you want to go further, get a Posterous site and post stuff there. You can post a link on Facebook to a single tune on Soundcloud.com.
To find out more about the AVIN please visit http://AVIN.cc
The AVIN code is a unique technology that solves an enormous challenge facing the wine industry, clean data. Andre Ribeirinho, of the website Adegga.com, has been working for 3 years to create an open standard for wine information and has recently achieved the milestone of having 30 million wine bottles labeled with the AVIN.
Like an ISBN for books, each vintage of every wine is assigned a unique number that consists of 13 digits preceded by the letters AVIN (ex: AVIN6452997073019), which includes various data points including wine name, region and varietals. This unique code is currently free for wineries to register and is guaranteed for life. The key benefit to using the AVIN is that there is no longer need to dispute the wine’s origin, spelling of the winery name or various other key factors.
“The AVIN is poised to change the wine world as the ISBN did the publishing world. Ask any book publisher whether they can survive without the ISBN. I highly doubt that you’ll find many people believing they could” says founder Andre Ribeirinho.
By becoming a central repository for information, AVIN helps to address internal wine trade issues as well as having customer marketing benefits. Over 25,000 different wines from around 7,500 wineries have already had an AVIN registered.
Wine retailers, importers, writers and also competition organizers can resolve numerous inventory queries by confirming wine details against the single information source.
The AVIN also has consumer marketing benefits. Wineries can print matrix barcode on the labels to create a dynamic and interactive wine buying experience. For example QRCodes permit smart phones to scan and extract information from the wine label itself, displaying this information on the customer’s phone but also with the possibility to link to awards, articles and stockists.
“Wine buying has always been a confusing process for the consumer. Today with the AVIN and QRCode technologies consumers can access information about the wine they are thinking about buying without having to guess” explains Andre.
The AVIN is currently setting up a Board of Directors to both manage the project and ensure the data remains free and accessible to all users into the future. Currently, any winery can head to http://www.avin.cc/ to create an AVIN code for their wine within minutes. For developers and individuals interested in using the AVIN in their wine related businesses, go here: http://www.avin.cc/api-documentation/ for more information.
“We believed that the AVIN would prove to be a good tool to make it easier for our customers and consumers to search/ to find online information about our wines, in this age of information.” Carrie Jorgenson – Cortes de Cima Winery
What do social media and the Vegematic have in common?
Ron Popeil would say, “How much would you expect to pay for lessons in social media? $500? $800? More?” More, apparently. I see one about to happen, offered for close to $1,000. So, what do you get for $1,000?, Well, you’ll listen to talks, the content of which is largely available free. You’ll hear pitches for companies presented as “talks” or “tutorials”. You’ll get to hang out with a few people who know what it’s all about, but most of the people there will be the marks, the punters, people who have paid $1,000 to hang out with you.
I was at the wonderful Clos Pepe yearly event this August. I am thankful to our gracious hosts, Steve and Cathy for the invite. Ironic then, that the following experience took place at Clos Pepe, whom I’ve already mentioned as doing a great job communicating on the net in their own way, notably via @clospepe and @weshagen on Twitter. I was happy to chat with Wes again and we left with a couple of bottle of his wine.
Communications skills are a must for wineries. I recall the Lavinia manager in Paris saying they had over 12,000 wines in stock. Pushing the name out there starts with communication. A man came up to me at one of the tasting tables and asked if I was French because he saw the Palmer t-shirt I was wearing. Yes, this shirt is the perfect conversation starter. We got to talking and it turned out it he is a French winemaker who moved to California some years ago. It sounded like a classic “immigrant” success story with the added interest in that it was about wine. He was right to come and talk. He told me his wines were made in the old world, not the California style. I asked him for a card, and when he handed it to me I noticed there was no email address on it, so I asked him to write that on the card. (There was a web site URL, so perhaps he was wary of being put on a mailing list?)
Well, as our vacation progressed we were thinking this fellow might make an interesting subject for a column or an interview. I emailed him on August 9th, 2010, asking if he’d be interested in telling his story to the world. No reply to date.
I mentioned the winery name to a friend who was coming to our mid-August wine gathering, he was kind enough to bring a bottle of the wine. I liked it, it was 100% California, fruit forward (which is not always a bad thing IMO) 15%+ alcohol (which isn’t always bad…). I can like it, I can drink it, but I can’t call it “European style”.
Bottom line, the wine was 100% new world, the online presence 100% old.
It’s particularly interesting for me to observe what Clos Pepe is doing on Twitter (@clospepe), because we’ve been to their amazing annual events at least twice. Wes Hagen and his wife Chanda are both charming and hospitable people, and they make a more than decent (some might call it cult) Pinot Noir, too. The folks at Clos Pepe are so nice, that even the 1997 web site design doesn’t dim my great feelings of their barbeque/tastings at their Sta. Rita Hills home and winery. In fact, I think their Twitter feed is more enjoyable to follow than going to the site which has, among other turn-of-the-century features, centered texts and multiple Quicktime videos on auto-play.
Take a look at what Clos Pepe is up to on Twitter:
If I were living in the area (or even in a location where they could ship me their wines), I’d prefer to be following this Twitter stream than to have the same events and announcement arrive in my mailbox. This seems to be an ideal way to get news of Clos Pepe.
Using Twitter in this way goes against traditional wisdom of “engagement”, aka “Don’t Blurt!”. In the Clos Pepe example, I know Wes has his own Twitter account as well, and we can see plenty of personal engagement there. I know that the winery’s production is small enough to require you to be on an allocation list if you want to buy some. This is an enviable position for any winery to attain. I wonder how many people who are on the list are also on Twitter? I know at least one person. I wonder if he follows @ClosPepe?
Eve disagrees with me on this one, I think of Clos Pepe as a brand. What do you think and why?
| Brand | Mentions | |
|---|---|---|
| Merlot | 440 | 
|
| Chardonnay | 438 |
|
| PinotNoir | 240 |
|
| Riesling | 234 |
|
| Shiraz | 215 |
|
| Malbec | 187 |
|
| PinotGri | 133 |
|
| SauvignonBlanc | 114 |
|
| CabernetSauvignon | 111 |
|
| Syrah | 110 |
|
| Zinfandel | 84 |
|
| Tempranillo | 40 |
|
| Viognier | 39 |
|
| Sangiovese | 33 |
|
| Grenache | 14 |
|
| CabernetFranc | 13 |
|
| Nebbiolo | 9 |
|
