The 2010 Wine Blogger’s Conference is nearly upon us. This will be my second and it feels good that I won’t have that freshman feeling walking around campus with a map in my hand and propeller on my head. Nope, no longer a noob. A lot has happened in the past year since WBC09 in Sonoma. We are a long way away from the Murphy Goode job search that had many of us buzzing on adrenaline and the massive Twitter growth spurt in the first half of 2009 (1,448% YOY growth May 2009) is all but long forgotten as the channel is practically a way of life for most bloggers these days. Perhaps more importantly, more and more wineries are engaging in social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, and some recent Twitter Tasting events that have proven there is indeed a focused wine community in the social media realm include #Chardonnay, that went world-wide in May, as well as #WAwine that brought together over 100 Washington wineries with hundreds of tweeters, leading to thousands of tweets and possibly millions of impressions. Be sure to put #PinotNoir Twitter tasting on your calendar for July 15th!
This will be our first time visiting the state of Washington. It will be very exciting to go further east across the state rather than just hanging around the Seattle area like most tourists. Walla Walla, Washington is fun to say and has a certain ring to it providing opportunity for cool rhymes: ”Can I get a holla holla at Walla Walla?” Or not.
One of the first tips I received about the WBC is to bring your favorite wine or perhaps a wine that is local to your area, especially if you aren’t from the host state/region. If you are attending, take the opportunity to meet as many people as you can, share business cards, drink wine and engage. You should be “on stage” at all times because you never know where the next opportunity is going to be and where you will have an opportunity to add value. For readers of wine blogs you will benefit from an explosion of talent, accelerated learning, knowledge-sharing, more wine reviews you can hope to keep up with and witness a strengthening of new media for the wine industry.
What do you expect to be the biggest impact to you as a result of this gathering of the new wine media minds?
looking forward to it…if anything, to sleep
Gotta get to work on #PinotNoir. Gotta get to work on a lot of stuff. So tired, but exciting times ahead!
Joe, don’t worry you won’t get any sleep in Walla Walla either ; ) .. bring your extra liver
RANDOM POST OUT OF LEFT FIELD! I am looking for someone to write a blog post about Walla Walla for me…about 600 words…pay by the word. General travel or any Walla Walla angle. Could be titled, “Top 10 Things to Do in Walla Walla” or “Ten Reasons to Travel to Walla Walla Instead of Napa” … email me if you’re interested! – Kevin
Kevin,
I am sure they may be folks who are interested in your offer, but you did not enter your email address when you posted your comment