Wine musings (2) - The world of Twitter, first week impressions

It’s what your communication consultant will tell you nowadays: you should Twitter. I have to admit though, that even when our Twitter account has been in existence for some time, it took me a while to get used to the idea. But we’re tweeting now, finally.

Entering this world as a newby is a series of astonishments. You start by having a look at who the big names are in this world, and end up being very impressed by mega-numbers of followers. British actor Stephen Fry for instance has over 2,5 million. Then you dig into the wine world. Jancis Robinson settles for 65,000, Robert Parker scores a somewhat less impressive 14,000. Twitter also allows you to look at who is following who, which results in a rather striking detail with respect to the two names above: Jancis is following Parker, but Parker is not following Jancis… It makes you think the Pavie 2000 affair was not quite left behind.

But, even when these numbers are fair, the wine world on Twitter looks rather different. The big name here is Gary Vaynerchuk, who scores over 850,000 followers behind his twitter nick garyvee. That includes us, you have join the bandwagon after all. Now, is this garyvee tweeting very special stuff? I don’t think so, but who am I. Many of his tweets concern pretty basic exclamations like ‘great place!’ as to where he’s staying at the moment, and stuff about what they have him taste there. He is pretty opinionated, though.

And yesterday, I witnessed a neat trick to gain twitter attention. It was performed by Randall Grahm, owner of Bonny Doon vineyards in California and, with 375,000 following his tweets, one of the big names here. It used a reference to a blog that featured an article on which wines were served in the various Bond movies, inducing him to open a ‘hashtag’ #jamesbondwinemovies. It invited wine related pun and word play on titles of Bond movies. Ok, I like pun myself, so I joined the fun, witnessing how all this resulted in a huge and world-wide cascade of creativity. I’ll just mention what I thought was the best of all: Tomorrow never Deiss. It got mr. Grahm a ‘Top Tweet’ label (that sounds important), as well as a qualification by one of the tweeters as ‘The Man with the Golden Pun’.

So, what did we tweet ourselves then? We did tweet about our great iPhone App of course, but you cannot just keep spamming all day, apart from the fact that we do think we have a few other things to say. Basically, I sat back, had a look at what was going on, started looking on the web for wine related stuff I thought could be interesting. And I kicked it into twitterspace. It seems we didn’t do that awful. This morning, I’m reading that two of our meanwhile 450 followers put @winewinewine among their top tweeters of this week. For a first week that wasn’t all that bad then, maybe. Even when I also came to realise that it’s your own material and contributions that really count, not just copying that of others. So, I wrote this little piece, that I will soon be tweeting into web existence. Because that’s how the World of Twitter works.

And frankly, I kind of like it already!