Wow! I\u2019ve had some time to reflect on Thursday\u2019s panel \u201cVirtual Vino\u201d at the Italian Trade Commission\u2019s Vino 2010 event. It was standing room only and great to see so many familiar faces in the audience. The feedback we got was extremely positive and clearly reinforced just how important\u2026and controversial\u2026social media is in the U.S. wine market.<\/p>\n
http:\/\/cdn.livestream.com\/grid\/LSPlayer.swf?channel=vino10&clip=pla_24c76476-f548-4517-865c-ce7cafd8e70a&autoPlay=false<\/a><\/p>\n With only two hours for presentations and discussions, it was a pretty big subject to cover, so we were really able to only touch on some of the more \u201csensitive\u201d issues. The overriding theme centered around the implications of the democratization of information created by this thing known World Wide Web or informally as the Wild Wild West. <\/p>\n Fred Plotkin asked the first audience question which led us right into the conundrum of how blogging is impacting traditional journalism and where the line demarcating fact from opinion lies. <\/p>\n I\u2019ve been thinking about all the ramifications of Fred\u2019s question which initially centered on the idea that \u201cauthenticity\u201d was a critical issue to Millennials. He asked how I defined the word. And as I\u2019ve had the chance to cogitate on it I realize there are two definitions that need to be addressed individually. One is in regard to authenticity as \u201chonesty\u201d, and that is more a function of voice of the writer\/blogger. The second relates to authenticity as \u201ctruth\u201d: facts and disclosure about the source of the content.<\/p>\n As to the writer\u2019s voice, the conversation at the seminar revolved around the subjectivity of wine criticism and review. Your \u201cnotes of tobacco, tar and leather\u201d may be someone else\u2019s \u201cbold, assertive and ripe fruit.\u201d No one is \u201cright\u201d and a numerical rating scale is inherently flawed in that it presupposes the reviewer is comparing all wines against the same set of criteria. There\u2019s been a lot of discussion on wine blogs about evaluations focusing more on a scale of \u201cI like it\u201d to \u201cI hate it\u201d. It\u2019s perhaps more of a useful way to rank (not rate) the personal appeal of all wines against what is inherently a complex of personal opinions. At the end of the day, a Parker 94 and a 1WineDude \u201cI really liked Wine A better than Wine B\u201d are equally useful. The former more so from a commercial perspective and the retail price elite wines can command in the marketplace, the latter because I\u2019ve found from personal experience that Joe Roberts and I share similar preferences in wine. (but Joe’s opinion is free, Parker’s you have to pay for)<\/p>\n Regarding facts and disclosure, the operative word is transparency. The FTC has mandated that bloggers must disclose the source of samples. (Interestingly, traditional journalists are not held to the same standards.) Many if not most bloggers have been doing this routinely anyway. But it came to a head with Tyler Colman\u2019s (aka Dr. Vino) outing of Robert Parker and The Wine Advocate\u2019s inconsistency in enforcing its own policies on samples and trips. The original post thread begins here<\/a> and there is also a good summary<\/a> published on Slate by Mike Steinberger. My personal opinion is that we will look back on Tyler\u2019s post as being the point at which the influence of established wine critics and journalists crossed with the influence of the online world. And let me be perfectly clear here. It may have seemed that the whole seminar was saying that Andy Blue’s self-described dinosaurs are going extinct, but that’s not what we were saying at all. The point was the internet has created a new medium that enables regular folks to weigh in, and an audience that respects those opinions more highly than the traditional journalists. The very real problem faced by many traditional writers is how to get compensated for those skills and services they’ve honed over the years when arriviste bloggers don’t expect to make money at all.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll be writing more on this in my next post, but wanted to get this up in response to requests for access to the video archive of the session<\/a>. http:\/\/bit.ly\/9jXwou For those who want to see the slides I presented<\/a>, they can be found here: http:\/\/bit.ly\/bBm6hG. The Vintank report on Social Media in the Wine Industry<\/a>, Tyler\u2019s original post on the Robert Parker Kerfuffle<\/a> and Mike Steinberger\u2019s summary<\/a> of the hoo-haw Dr. Vino created at http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2229518\/pagenum\/all\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Wow! I\u2019ve had some time to reflect on Thursday\u2019s panel \u201cVirtual Vino\u201d at the Italian Trade Commission\u2019s Vino 2010 event. It was standing room only and great to see so many familiar faces in the audience. The feedback we got was extremely positive and clearly reinforced just how important\u2026and controversial\u2026social media is in the U.S. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7k1BV-1G","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bevologyinc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bevologyinc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bevologyinc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bevologyinc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bevologyinc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bevologyinc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bevologyinc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bevologyinc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bevologyinc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}