A couple of weeks ago I joined the Facebook of (Wine Biz facing) Social Networking sites, Open Wine Consortium. It was bound to happen (not me joining since I was strongly urged by the CEO of my day job) that there would be a site similar to Facebook for all of us roaming wine types.
I had my doubts - I'm not so fond of the emails every other day from Facebook that inform me that one more stranger wants to add me as a friend. Very Six-Degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon but not something that will get me to log in and visit my ... wall. Open Wine Consortium saves all your buddies until you log in (which seems so much more grown-up) and kinda like a surprise party or a high school reunion for oenophiles. The other day I reconnected with someone I used to see in a small SF neighborhood restaurant. He was a fresh-faced wine geek (barely 21) then - now he's a seasoned winemaker. Go figure.
I've been hearing some good stories coming out of this. My client and friend, Tessa, joined OWC and started to make some connections that will really help her business along. The first day she made an on-premise placement and created some buzz for her brand. I have also seen bloggers shamelessly fishing for wines to review - something I am seriously thinking about doing since I am will go broke if I buy the kind of wines I'd like to write about.
This post sucks but, Open Wine Consortium doesn't. Joe Bob says check-it-out!
Suenarita - hey, thanks for the writeup! The site is only 1 month old and already carries just south of 600 wine trade folks (the target for the network). There are lots of success stories like Tessa's.
Just to give a little more color, we established the OWC site (as we like to call it b/c I picked a long name :) so that the wine trade had a place to network and expand connections and re-connect with forgotten ones. Wine being so naturally social it only made sense to create a social network online for the wine trade. OWC was established as a non-profit organization (I'm still banging through the paperwork) with the mission to advance the use of technologies (such as the online social network) in the wine trade. The Internet is becoming a medium for social interaction and with community building being so important in almost every aspect of the wine trade we decided to help educate on how to leverage this technology (which ultimately impacts almost every corner of the wine trade).
Long story short, the social network is the first step and already its proven to help many expand their horizons! The future is bright indeed!
By the way, there is a LARGE blogger group on OWC that you may want to join. We just had a LONG conversation in one forum discussion about the lack of woman wine bloggers!
Cheers!
Posted by: Joel | March 22, 2008 at 09:10 PM
Hey Joel:
Thanks for checking in. You're doing a very cool thing for the wine industry and I will continue to point fellow wine lovers in the direction of OWC.
Posted by: Suenarita | March 23, 2008 at 03:47 PM