How our wine tasting can help your twitter strategy

This past Saturday, 15 of the top women in Orange County on twitter took a trip to Temecula for a phenomenal wine tasting trip. It included a limo ride out, stops at three wineries, over 200 tweets, pics and FB updates and finally, a whole lot of wonderful pictures and memories. It was also entirely planned through the use of social media, with companies who wanted social media exposure, and were willing to work with our group to make it happen.

The planning of the event started almost 5 months ago, as a tweet between a few of the women who attended, mentioning that it would be fun to do a wine tasting trip out to Temecula. I loved that idea, and started doing some research on how to make it happen. There are over 15 wineries in Temecula, most of which were on twitter. Unfortunately, most of the accounts weren’t managed well. Of those that were, I started sending tweets, talking about our idea of a wine tasting trip. A few of them immediately brushed it off, worried about what we might tweet or how their winery would ‘look’. But, three wineries did pay attention, and were willing to take the risk, @leonessecellars, @robertrenzoni & @oakmountainwine. They all offered half price wine tastings, and Joel Reese of @winehostTV who works with Leonesse Cellars gave us a behind the scenes, amazing tour, of the winery.

In addition to recruiting the wineries through twitter and later, through facebook, the rest of the event was also planned through social media.

The limo (ULC Limos) was recommended through twitter and has now been convinced to start an account soon.

All the messages to organize the trip were sent via facebook or twitter. This made it simple to track, and easy to follow

Almost everyone who attended originally met through twitter, social media networking events or blogging events.

Everything that happened on Saturday was sent via tweets, status updates, whrrl stories and twitpic.

Anyone who didn’t attend could track our tweets, photos and conversations via the hashtag #twwt.

The minute we all got home, we uploaded photos to facebook, became fans of the wineries on facebook, promoted them to our friends, and made sure we were following them all on twitter.

So, how can our wine tasting help your business? Because this type of event will happen again! And next time, your business could take advantage of it. Small twitter networking events are popping up all over the place, and it doesn’t take a big hoopla to make them happen. This event was only 15 women, but the hashtag was followed online, and the conversation spread to over 100 in just short moments. Your business can plan the next small event with just a few simple steps:

1. Pick a date that works well for your audience. Our group was a lot of mom’s and small business owners, so we needed a weekend event.

2. Find an easy way for the attendees to get there. We chose a limo because 15 women + 3 wineries = bad idea for driving. It also kept us all together, so we tweeted more and shared more pictures.

3. Make it fun! We were not met with sales pitches and business strategy, we just enjoyed the wineries and had a blast with each other. This meant we were much happier to tweet about our experiences and were actually having fun!

4. Remember you can’t control the conversation. There was no way for the wineries to know what we would tweet, so they made sure to show us a great time so that our tweets would be positive.

So the big question is…will your business take advantage of an event like this?

Or will you be like @scwinery, who told us we couldn’t visit because they were concerned what we would tweet?

Related posts:

1. Combining Twitter and Real Life
2. Style Week OC – Twitter, blogging and fashion
3. A beer tasting at a Brewery? Go Figure!