Francois Druel spoke at the Université de la Vigne et du Vin in 2011 in Ferrals-les-Corbieres.  This is a synopsis of his talk and my reaction to what he’s saying.  This is one post in an ongoing series about the Universite de la Vigne et du Vin.

Francois introduced himself as a consultant who has been working on the Internet since before the web existed.  He gave a very brief glimpse of a few simple tools and included some of the usual impressive statistics.  Over x-hundred messages per second on Twitter, and if Facebook were a country it would have the third largest population on earth, that type of thing.

He showed us a graph of the diffusion of innovation curve.  He talked about how mobile was now the #1 way to access the Inernet.

I was hoping that this presentation would be an amazing call to action that inspires winemakers to use free online tools to communicate their stories with the entire world.  I’m afraid I came with the wrong expectations.

Francois Druel explained there were three possible strategies (see my comments on oversimplification during Rigaux’s talk).   Branding, Dialogue and Prospection.  Here is a summary according to my notes on Druel’s talk:

Branding is about communication and instant recognition. And brands tend to be community-owned.  Once you put a brand out there, it will be co-opted and that’s a powerful tool.

Dialogue is about listening to what’s being said, involving clients in the conversation, and hoping that your efforts go viral (?).

Prospection is about presales, creating buzz, communication (I thought that was for Branding?) and it is generally less suited to wine.  He cites examples like every time a new generation of iPhone comes out, there are months of speculation, waiting in lines, etc.

He has a slide about the wisdom of crowds.  Another slide about information sharing, using coyote as a prime example of how quickly good products spread on the web.

So then he did a “case study” of Chateau Leoube.  Unfortunately, I guess he was pressed for time because he didn’t really get to conclude this.  He explained Leoube’s goals to triple sales by making good wine, developing their brand, and doing premium branding.  But I don’t really know which online efforts resulted in the tripled sales.  Or any metrics they used to know how much of it was traced to their internet efforts as opposed to their conventional efforts.  Or even the nature of the internet effort according to Druel’s three options.  Was it branding, dialogue or prospection (Francois’ own methodology?).  I left this talk a little confused.  Which is a shame since you know I get excited about this subject.

At the same time, it should be mentioned that Francois has a difficult job.  A lot of people in the audience have no idea what he’s talking about and the sort of news headline statistics like the ones I mentioned above might be the best way of getting people interested.  So he can’t appeal to everybody in the room.

But you know it might have been much more effective to just look at a few individual case studies from the region and show what they do online.  Obviously, I’d like to flatter myself and say that I’m a decent example.  He could talk about other wineries that use the Internet effectively in the region.  Or alternatively, if you want to stick to delivering statistics, at least make them relevant to wine.  Does that make sense?  It’s obviously impressive that tons of tweets go out every second.  Maybe it’s more impressive to mention how many specifically mention a wine brand name each day?

Maybe I’m too harsh because I’m jealous!  I wish I could have spoken to a room full of winemakers and shared my hopes and dreams.  Of a region united and represented online!  Think if just 1 percent of our winemakers and grape growers wrote something online once a week, we’d flood the Internet with Languedoc branding.  We’re such a big region that we could accomplish nearly anything with a little collective effort.

Oh, incidentally, Chateau Leoube, the case study in this talk, is in fact using a lot of internet tools.  Follow them on Twitter for constant updates about their own wines.  Or get your groove on to youtube videos about the domaine:

Yes, the internet is a marvelous thing.