Washington Wine Commission: Get social with your media: #WAwine charts new territory

When you hear the words “Washington wine,” what image comes to mind? If you were to describe Washington wine in one word, what would that be? How does Washington as a wine region fit on the global scale?

The approach of Washington State Wine, as the social media megaphone for our grape state, is very much a co-mission: to help fill in the blanks to your questions and quests with fresh ideas, with the ultimate hope of expanding your experience with #WAwine.

A unique challenge for our social media program is that nobody is following us per se — and here, I don’t mean me, little old Brett — but the Washington State Wine Commission. Our social media presence is in service to our industry: we wouldn’t exist without them.

For individual brands, let’s say one winery, the end-goal is for people to follow you to a bottle of yours, and so if we zoom out, that becomes our collective purpose: to help consumers discover new #WAwine, and deepen their knowledge of what they already know. Since this has everything to do with the direction, attention, and traffic, we see ourselves as an air traffic control, but one that’s a little bit more hip and personable.

For the past decade or so, our social media strategy focused on growth. We spent years creating elbow space in the cyber-sky for Washington state wine, and we now have the sixth largest wine social media following in the world. But at some point, you have to outgrow growth, and dedicate your energy toward engagement. What good is it if someone knocks on the door and you’re not there? Imagine a cul-de-sac of kids on Halloween who ring the doorbell of a brightly lit home that is empty. Chaos. You would be egged for years for the false promise of sugar and sweets.

When it comes to digital storytelling in the era of apps and other quick clicks, there is a necessity for new ways of thinking and seeing, and not for posterity’s sake, but because the shape of social media changes with the weather.

Facebook is no longer a college network; it skews significantly older (80 percent of our 101,000 followers are between the ages of 35-54). No surprise, then, that they acquired Instagram, where 80 percent of our users are between the ages of 24-35. Facebook reclaims youth again, but only for now. What does the future of social look like, we ask our wine.

In the meantime, we remain energized. We live in the age of the image, and social media is nothing more than visual storytelling (dba digital marketing). We get to express the joy and journey of #WAwine through different mediums, pouring you a fresh glass of passion with each post. If we were to pose five ideas to you, things we are currently hooked on, they would be:

1. We’re in a growth spurt. We’re one of the fastest-growing wine regions in the world. Every month, we welcome four new wineries to Washington state.

2. What makes us so humble, adept and approachable is the agricultural backbone of Washington State. We’ve always been great at growing fruit, and while we’re in our nascence as a wine region, what we’re doing out here in terms of wine science is going to be legendary.

3. We have character. We’re geologists, aeronautical engineers, rock stars, jazz musicians, quarterbacks, oceanographers, families, professors, cattle ranch hands, climbers, and master sommeliers.

4. We’re making history because history made us. There is no other growing climate like ours. We’re on the same latitude as the great regions of France, and we have longer days of sunlight than Napa, which is why we’re a best of both worlds.

5. We make world-class wines, and we’re just getting started. And we’re not the only ones saying it:

While having the sixth largest social media wine presence in the world might be an impressive-sounding-bite, we let our wine speak for itself. One sip at a time. Which brings me to our last point: We want to hire you full-time. As our taste bud. The benefits, I assure you, are amazing.