The 2nd in our series of slide mondos, this time we take a perspective on what’s happening with the hospitality marketplace. If there’s one industry that’s been transformed by digital branding, it’s travel. When it comes to where they’ll stay, consumers expect digital tools to take them someplace before they ever go there. And now the trend is moving further into the purchase cycle, by taking digital with you when you go, as mobile devices integrate into hospitality research and booking, but into the hospitality experience itself.

What role does digital branding play in wine marketing? There are many ways to answer that. But here’s 20 slides with one important perspective: digital done right is always as much product development as it is traditional marketing. And the experience of wine is very much driven by expectations. So if what you’re doing online doesn’t actually make your wine taste better, then it’s probably falling short.

Anchor Brewing Company is one of America’s oldest breweries. The San Francisco icon is credited by many for launching the movement toward locally-brewed, hand-crafted beers that have surged in popularity in recent years.

In the spring of 2011, Anchor contacted FINE Design Group about developing a new website for their beer brands and distilled spirits. As discussions continued and evolved, social media became a key component to the digital strategy, leveraging FINE’s Big Daylight division, and part of creating a complete digital ecosystem for a legendary brand. Here’s a glimpse into the process and results.

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In our work with The California Endowment, we’ve come to understand what it means that health is not something that happens in a doctor’s office. It’s something that happens in neighborhoods, schools, and all the places where we live and work. The starkest evidence of that is how much life expectancy changes depending upon where you live. That’s why you’ll increasingly see a groundswell behind the notion that Health Happens Here. In Neighborhoods. In Schools. And with Prevention. And you’ll increasingly see the signature pin-drop identity we created to support the concept.

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Originally posted on our Big Daylight division blog, this post takes a look at the frenzied social media response to the Komen funding issue.

Disclaimer: This a post about social media, not politics. There are plenty of social and political lessons to be learned here on both sides, but the power of online communication and engagement applies to both sides of the argument.

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From Chateau Montelena to Chateau Ste. Michelle, FINE has designed and developed winery websites for archetypes throughout the industry. When FINE acquired Big Daylight in 2011 and established a search engine marketing division, the immediate opportunity was to move beyond building glamorous online destinations and focus on directing traffic to them. We’ve learned much about how to best approach SEO and online marketing for wineries.

One of the first revelations – many wineries simply do not own results around their OWN BRAND online. This goes above and beyond the name of your winery, and extends to every type of wine and release date featured on your website. It’s not that you don’t want wine.com or snooth.com to mention your product, it’s that ranking more highly allows you to tell your story first, especially if you also sell your wines online. With that in mind, here’s a taste of some frequently asked wine and search questions:

What should I do about age verification?

When it comes to SEO, the home page is all-important. So what happens when you are required to slap an age-verification on your homepage? We certainly don’t want Google to think your site is about “You must be 21 years of age or older to enter. Please select your date of birth below.” Your homepage also must resolve at http://www.yourdomain.com, and not redirect to http://www.yourdomain.com/ageverification.

FINE has handled this by creating a clever pop-up screen that allows the user to enter their age, while still providing plenty of search-engine friendly content directly on the homepage. You can see this in action on several FINE websites, including this Napa Valley winery.

Do I need to create a unique page for every type of wine?

YES. Don’t make the mistake of listing various types of wine on one page, instead of creating a page for each type. It may be hard for your 2007 Chardonnay to position if you haven’t really devoted a page to it. Other online retailers selling your own wine (along with tons of others) could beat you!

But I put all my tasting notes in PDFs! It’s so much easier to link to all of these from one page!

You’re right. That is easier. But sometimes building a SEO-friendly site takes some time and elbow grease. We guarantee it will be worth your while to take that fabulous PDF content, put it in a real HTML page instead, and then also continue to offer PDFs for download and printing. Some SEOs might advise you to use robots.txt or other methods to block the PDFs from being indexed since they would be duplicate content to the main pages, but honestly, Google is smart enough to figure this out on their own.

I want to position on Napa Valley Winery. And also Napa Valley Wines. How do I do that? Give me the secret…
Honestly, that is going to be very hard. This is what we call a “Vanity Term”. It’s an instance where you are not only competing against other wineries, but information sites, tour sites, and even hotels.  It looks so attractive and shiny, but remember that every rose has its thorn. If you want to position on that term and currently are nowhere even in the top 30, be prepared envision someone working on this 8 hours a day for an indefinite amount of time, building content and links. Probably 2 people.

Instead of focusing on on vanity terms, we suggest you focus on keywords specific to YOU. You will find these terms in the long tail, and the long tail can bring you more traffic than any vanity term ever would. This superb chart and SEO article from SEOMoz (we encourage you to subscribe to this site) illustrates this in more depth:

I want more people to come for wine tastings, and perform better in local search.
Local search is one of the best places a winery can work to optimize your brand and website. See this separate article we wrote, all about Local SEO. Also, don’t forget the huge power of Online Reviews. Also consider linking to your Google Places page from the footer of your website.

Any other tips I should know about?
Be sure to give every page on your website a unique Title Tag and Meta Description Tag that contains important keywords while also sounding great for users. Ideally you will write these by hand yourself, but if not, then create intelligent rules that auto-populate tags to make them as descriptive as possible. Back to that 2007 Chardonnay – if you created a page for it, but didn’t optimize the title tag or description (which instead only say the name of your winery), you’ve really reduced overall relevance for that page.

Also, if you sell your wine online, be sure you have registered and submitted a Google Merchant Feed.

Of course, from URL structure to website navigation, there are a variety of other factors that encompass creating a search-friendly website. But for those who run winery websites, these considerations may help guide you toward the traffic you so richly deserve.

They started in San Francisco 115 years ago. Since then, they’ve inspired what is now known as the craft brewing industry. Those who know them may know only of their signature brand, Anchor Steam. But Anchor Brewing is a brewcraft icon and innovator on many fronts, with legions of loyal fans. And their web and digital environment goes a long way to showing it as never before.

The Anchor Brewing Website
Like their beer, this site combines rich history and traditional process with some state of the art touches. Dramatic imagery from Anchor’s archives is used throughout. A drop-down “beer shelf” helps you navigate between beers using the bottles, a “Beer is Social” tab integrates to/from social media channels to make the brewery website a hub of activity. It’s all constructed using the latest technology brewcraft, some fancy javascript, which allows you to do things like navigate between images by pushing buttons or just scrolling.  A new blog is set to roll out in coming weeks, to house more history and brewcraft content than ever. Behind it all, a content management system helps keep the words and pictures fresh across the site and social media channels.

Social Media Management (Facebook, Twitter)
Anchor’s social media strategy has already tapped into significant latent demand. It turns out Anchor already has thousands of fans on Facebook that have been waiting patiently (on sites setup independently to celebrate Anchor Steam and Anchor Brewing) for Anchor to jump in. Anchor’s Facebook and Twitter presence inspired thousands of new followers in the first 2 weeks after their first ever post (“Anchor Brewing started in San Francisco 115 years ago. Then we started in social media 107 characters ago.”) Now, Anchor’s set to socialize with Anchor fans everywhere through both channels, and sharing a steady stream of FINE-generated Anchor updates and content including a calendar of new content and promotions. A new Facebook tab will be launching within a couple weeks.

In all, the Anchor digital presence is a significant step toward bringing this venerable brand to life online in multiple ways (with their distilling and corporate sites to follow). Put simply, it sets the standard for Anchor’s industry, just as they’ve always done with their products.

It’s safe to say that FINE knows and loves the wine industry, having done perhaps more custom winery sites than any company on earth.  It’s an interesting mix of the old – dusty bottles in a basement, wooden barrels made by hand, revered traditions – and the new – vineyard management with satellites, online marketing, the chemistry of oenology.  Squarely in the “new” camp comes a story (originally from The Guardian) that I recently came across about Greenbottle, a UK firm that is set to start selling a paper wine bottle.

Photo: Felix Clay

Certainly, there’s many questions to be answered.  Would this package allow the wine to age properly, for one.  But 10% of the the carbon footprint of a traditional glass bottle in manufacturing and shipping?  Compostable? And keeps the wine in pristine condition?   What’s not to love?

Regardless of the benefits of this new development in packaging, I think this story emphasizes something even more important – the real test is whether or not it takes hold with consumers.   Is it really that important to consumers to have their wine poured from glass, or is it matter of comfort and expectation?   Does a paper bottle make the wine seem like a commodity, rather than a premium product?   How can wineries (and their partners like FINE) help move the needle of consumer preference for a technology (glass bottles) that has been around nearly as long as people have been making wine?

{Each week, our own resident technologist “Dr. Brisko” scours the Interwebs to find examples of the arcane and interesting. They are first shared privately in the inner FINE sanctum, where we retain some as pure trade secrets. But we switch a short list public to give you just a taste, from technology deep dives to design to the, well, unclassifiable info that just may be the cure for what ails you.}

Lytro – the light field camera
Images you can selectively focus after you have shot them! Arstechnica overiew linked above or go directly to the website.

Localize or Fail
Translations are not enough.

Billion Tonne Comet May Have Missed Earth By A Few Hundred Kilometres in 1883
So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth …

There is only one cloud icon in the entire universe
I knew I’d see this icon somewhere before.

List of Detroit startups
Not dead yet! Not with these phoenix’s rising from the ashes!

Amazon rewites the rules of publishing
Who needs a publisher when Amazon can do it all for you.

Mobile UI patterns
I nice library of mobile site design approaches.

Commit logs from last night (NSFW)
because real hackers pivot two hours before their demo

By now you’ve probably had a chance to check out the latest round of changes to Facebook’s user interface – and likely read/heard plenty of opinions about the new look. Facebook’s quest to display content relevant to users’ interests and usage patterns has resulted in yet another update to the News Feed. The resulting design is a bit more, shall we say, busy, for a service that’s never been too strong on design.

But for a moment, let’s put aside purely aesthetic considerations – things have gotten much more cluttered on Facebook. And let’s go with the question we’d ask as digital marketers: “How does this effect brands and their ability to engage?”

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