Taking the World by Storm With Social Media

Jason Korman makes wine. He's made wine his whole life.

That's how he knows it's a terrible business. Success in running a small winery is pretty close to impossible. There are thousands of new wineries all around the world. Distribution is challenging. Awareness tends to come from magazines like the Wine Spectator, where it can take months to get a review - if you're lucky.

So when Jason Korman started his winery, Stormhoek, in South Africa in 2003, he knew he needed a different approach to reach people.

Jason realized the key was to concentrate on the experiences wine is a part of, not the wine in the bottle. "Wine is a social lubricant," he says. "While we care passionately about wine quality, we really believe that wine is about what happens after you open the bottle."

Jason's approach was to encourage people having a good time with his wine to talk about it. That's why one of his first strategies, in June 2005, was to send bottles of Stormhoe vintages to 185 bloggers in the UK and Ireland. "Try our wine," he told them in a little booklet that came with the wine, suggesting they write about it if they liked it, or even if they didn't.

The result of all this activity was that by the end of 2005, 305 blog posts mentioned the wine. Stormhoek had created a new meaning for "Wine buzz."

One key to this success was the connection Jason made with Hugh McLeod, an American blogger who draws devastatinly sarcastic little cartoons on the back of business cards and posts them regularly on his blog at www.gapingvoid.com. Hugh partnered with Stormhoek. The assets Hugh brought were his international following, his catchy graphics (which now grace many of Stormhoek's bottles) and his intuitve feel for what works in the groundswell. Hugh's little pamphlet that accompanied the gift wines gave the whole experience cridiblity and authenticity, which prably led to the wine being featured in so many blog posts.

Two years later, Stormhoek's $1million wine business has grown to a $10 million business. Jason has continued to build on the success among bloggers with Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Flickr - he suggests you post momentos of your "geek dinner" with Stormhoek's wines, or a photo of yourself outside the local Tesco food store with a bottle you just bought). All this activity has generated a cloud of publicity, with mentions on CNN and Advertising Age. Stormhoek even managed to get Microsoft employees interested in a private label vintage featuring Hugh McLeod illustration with the words "Change the world or go home," a sentiment many Microsofties embrace.

Jason  and Hugh have created a company firmly embedded in the social fabric across multiple countries, and it's not some ethereal start-up - it sells a real physical product that takes sweat to produce and comes in bottles. Jason is not a stubble faced internet entrepreneur either - he's forty seven.

Jason's tactic taps into cutting edge technology which is now cheap and easy to create and improve. He tapped into the internet advertising economy and used social media to connect people who naturally want to connect.  The net result of this accelerating activity is that we can now embed products into every activity  in the real world - not just  on computers but through mobile devices.

Twitter has faciliated the transition to mobile monetization.

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