Kirrihill Wines sent me some bottles of vino a couple of weeks ago as part of their wine for bloggers program. I blogged about the wine from a social media marketing perspective a couple of times and a lot of people read with interest. In fact, as is the nature of the medium, word spread around the world. A few US wine critics even took notice.

Which is lovely, but the feedback from most comments was “that’s great Matt, nice use of social media marketing, but what did you think of the wine?”

I figured it was about time I told you. In fact, it was pretty good. I sampled half a dozen bottles with friends and gave half a dozen away to co-workers who expressed interest. I wanted to wait a couple of weeks before I wrote anything about the wine so I was working from my lasting impressions, rather than my immediate impressions.

The results are as follows:

• After two weeks I could not remember the exact name of the winery that had sent me the dozen bottles. I thought it was Kirrihill Wine and had to go back and change the title of the blog post when I visited their website just then and realised it was Kirrihill Wines. Not a big deal, but, interesting.
• Of the 10 people in this office who saw the bottles on my desk, the six who professed to be the most interested in wine were given a bottle. None of them can remember the name on the label, although two knew it started with a K and one thought it was Kirribilli. So, including me, that’s 0/11 brand recall after two weeks. They all thought the wine was OK and said that if they saw it in a bottle shop they’d consider buying it again, but none were raving about it. Ouch.
• I sampled the following wines:
  • Chardonnay Viognier
  • Riesling Pinot Gris
  • Sémillon Sauvignon Blanc
  • Garnacha Rosé
  • Cabernet Merlot
  • Shiraz Viognier
  • Tempranillo Garnacha
• I was actually really looking forward to trying the Riesling Pinot Gris and went to the trouble of having a dinner party and cooking a thai-style bbq prawn and macadamia nut salad to match the wine, and it was OK, but it didn’t really stand up against a few of my other favourite mid-range rieslings from Petaluma and Pewsey Vale.
• The Tempranillo Garnacha was fantastic and unusual. I would buy it again. In fact, I would actively seek it out in a bottle shop. If I could remember the name. It would be nice if their website mentioned more about it because it’s such an unusual variety.
• The rest of the range was OK, but to be honest, I wouldn’t go out of my way to buy them again.
• I loved the packaging.

I’ll drop Kirrihill a line in the next few weeks and do a more in-depth interview about how the campaign went because it’s certainly generated some buzz, but for now, those are my thoughts as a wine drinker.

Oh, by the way, if you’re a wine fan and haven’t checked out Project Vino, make sure you do. It’s an online Australian wine community and it’s brilliant.

As a marketing professional and a former newspaper reporter, I’m well aware of how important it is for journalists (and the media organisations that employ them) to fully disclose their commercial interests. Any journalist worth their salt knows that it’s completely unethical to accept undisclosed payments in return for favourable coverage of a sponsor. Serious western media (perhaps with the exception of John Laws and Alan Jones) abhors the practice but in Russia it’s become so common for journalists to accept bribes in return for coverage, they’ve actually invented a word for it: ‘Zakazukha’.

While mainstream media outlets have shareholders and reputations to protect, out here in the blogosphere there’s no code of ethics to abide by and nothing to stop me, or anyone else ranting and raving about whatever we like. If I want to start accepting payments for favourable coverage I don’t have to give a toss about my reputation. The danger is that the Internet becomes a Zakazukha zoo.

This notion became all too apparent last night when Julie from Network PR emailed to confirm that, as an influencer with a blog, Facebook page and Twitter account that all mentioned vino every so often, I would be receiving, via post, a dozen bottles from her client, Kirrihill Wines: no obligation, I just had to enjoy the wine and if I felt like blogging about it or posting pictures of me and my friends drinking it to their Flickr Photostream, then that would be fine. I jokingly changed my Facebook status to “Matt is looking forward to sampling some marvelllous Kirrihill Wine from Australia’s Clare Valley”, with the intention of disclosing my zakazukhing in this blog this morning, but within minutes friends had started commenting on my status and asking about the wine. I have blogged often and loudly about the power of social media marketing, but this was the first time I’d seen it in action like this from a different side of the fence. Kirrihill will be wrapped I’m sure.

One of my friends is a lawyer (and her mother happens to be writing her PhD thesis on ethics in ‘new journalism’) and we started a debate about what, if any, duty of disclosure I had to tell my Facebook friends that I was in fact on the payroll of Kirrihill Wine. The answer seemed to be that I had no legal obligation whatsoever. As this sort of social media marketing becomes more common and more and more ‘influencers’, like me, are brought into campaigns, I think we’re also all going to find it harder to recognise and abide by the moral obligation.

Gyms are notorious for their hard-sell, ‘refer a friend’ tactics and the idea of rewarding people in exchange for a recommendation is nothing new, but now that everyone is an influencer in the eyes of a marketing department somewhere, and everyone has the tools to broadcast their opinion to the world, are we going to have to start asking our friends if their opinion has been paid for? Furthermore, if everyone’s on the payroll, will the power of social media marketing eventually be eroded?

We’re doing some design work with an olive oil producer at the moment but sadly our efforts are going to be in vain because their marketing strategy sucks. Actually, that’s a lie, their marketing strategy can’t possibly suck because it doesn’t actually exist. They have a great boutique little product made from premium Queensland olives but they don’t seem to have put much thought into how they’re going to make it stand out from all the other little premium boutique olive oils on the market.

Everyone is getting excited about word of mouth and social media marketing at the moment but they’re forgetting that without the fundamentals in place, you’re just talking about shit. Social media marketing isn’t a digital thing, it’s a product thing.

Being the first vineyard to put a tear-off tab on the back of your wine bottle makes your product remarkable for two reasons:

1. It’s unique; people haven’t seen it before, so they will talk about it.
2. If the wine is good, the tear-off tab makes it really easy to tell your friends about it. “What was the great wine we had the other night?” “Hang on, I’ve got a little tear-off thing in my wallet… It was a Yalumba Viognier.”

If want to run a successful social media campaign in 2008 it’s going to be a lot easier if your product development team were the ones who started it in 2005.