Allan, Author at Zephyr Conferences

Tri-Cities, Washington Hosts the Perfect Excursion

January 14, 2019 By Allan 2 Comments

At our three media conference we always offer pre-conference and post-conference excursions that allow attendees to engage with the local wine, beer, and food industries.

At the 2018 Wine Bloggers Conference (now the Wine Media Conference), I participated in the “Explore the Heart of Washington Wine Country” put on by Visit Tri-Cities. 17 of us spent a full day visiting this area and a perfectly planned excursion.

Excursions are essentially like media “fam” or familiarization tours. Like any fam tour, local organizers are tempted to pack in as much as possible, with visit after visit to local producers, restaurants, and highlights. But our conference participants much prefer a more leisurely pace that allows them to ask in-depth questions, take notes, post on social media, and truly get to know the area.

Visit Tri-Cities did this to perfection. Our agenda looked like this:

Travel by bus from Walla Walla where the conference took place to the Tri-Cities area.
Morning visit to the Goose Ridge Winery & Estate Vineyard. While everyone on the excursion had been to dozens if not hundreds of wineries, this visit was interesting because Goose Ridge is a large production winery that has an area focused on small batch production. We were able to see both the sides of the story, from watching trucks dump grapes into the bins to small fermentation barrels with glass tops for viewing. Timing was perfect as this was the only stop scheduled for the morning, so we had plenty of opportunity to ask questions of key staff.
Lunch and tour at J. Bookwalter, which is both a winery and restaurant. It was no coincidence that the lead winemaker, Caleb Foster, was an extremely personable and photogenic guy. Caleb spent a good hour with us, touring the facility and answering our questions. Again, this was an experienced group and so the key for us was not seeing the facility but engaging with Caleb. The restaurant staff put on an amazing meal for us, consisting of a photo-worthy buffet of small plates, each of which was identified by a small sign that called out ingredients and potential conflicts with dietary restrictions.
Again in the afternoon we had only one visit scheduled, a sit-down guided, blind tasting at Terra Blanca Winery. This was a fantastic item to schedule as it engaged the attendees and educated them on Red Mountain AVA wines. The level of discussion was extremely high, as befits a group of wine media professionals.
After checking into our hotel, which was courtesy of Visit Tri-Cities even though that was not part of their responsibilities, we went on a wine dinner cruise on the Columbia River. Visit Tri-Cities had invited some of its staff and board members to mingle with attendees. The CEO made a few comments but, otherwise, the cruise was a fun social event that wrapped up the day.

Tri-Cities knocked it out of the park. For future excursion hosts, here are a few hints:

Don’t over schedule. It is better to have a limited number of in-depth encounters.
Provide access to key people, ideally those who are interesting and engaging.
Account for individual eating restrictions.
Communicate! We suggest emailing your list of attendees at least twice in advance of the excursion to make sure they are attending and know all the logistics. We also suggest a follow-up email immediately after and another one three to six months later.
Provide photos. You don’t need to pay for a professional photographer. But it is nice to have someone there taking photos and providing access to the top 5 – 10 photos after the trip.
Provide social media handles, both yours and your meal and tour providers, in advance of and during the excursion.
Most importantly, remember these are professionals who know their stuff. Challenge them with advanced information and expect great questions in return.

Why and How to Engage in Influencer Marketing

November 26, 2018 By Allan Leave a Comment

“Influencer Marketing” is all the rage. It is popular – and should be – because influencers can affect how people perceive your brand and, ultimately, whether consumers purchase your product or service.

Who Are Influencers?

Influencers are anyone who tends to set the opinions of others. This could be your Aunt Jane when it comes to how to create a dinner party. We talk about “early adopters” in the world of technology who are the first to purchase new products. More recently, the term influencers has come to be correlated with those who have online communities of followers in a specific subject area: bloggers and social media users.

There are three must-have attributes for an influencer:

An audience or community of people who listen to the individual
Expertise or at least perceived expertise in a subject matter
Credibility or the belief by the audience that the influencer is speaking the truth

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Traditional marketing is you telling your customers why they should purchase your product or service. Public Relations is different, in that someone from the media tells your story for you – ideally in a positive way but this is not in your control.

Influencer Marketing is sort of a combination of traditional marketing and traditional PR: brands engage influencers (ala marketing) to tell their story for them (ala PR). This engagement can take the form of a sponsored post on the influencer’s site, an endorsement, social media (written, photo, or video), or other forms.

There are multiple ways to engage with influencers but I’ll divide them here into two main strategies:

Work With the Stars

Some brands have decided to work with the stars. This could include those with national fame, like Kim Kardashian who has 120 million Instagram followers. But it could also include the relative “star” of the niche you are pursuing – that wine blogger whom everyone labels as the cream of the crop. This method involves quite a bit of work:

Identify potential influencers
Calculate the size of their audience
Determine the “quality” of their audience as it relates to you
Contact influencers you believe are a good fit
Create a working relationship with those influencers (ie pay them)
Provide them your product or service
Reinforce their social media postings with your own social media accounts
Follow up to ensure they do what they say they will do

Micro-Influencers

Another strategy is to worry more about an influencer’s niche and less about his or her reach. So, in the wine world, rather than that star social media influencer, this strategy would suggest pursuing a number of wine bloggers with less reach but who have great credibility with their audience. Forbes Magazine suggests this strategy is the Marketing Force of the Future.

As an example, consider a wine blogger who has 200,000 followers and who writes about the wine industry in a fun, snarky way. His readers might or might not read every blog and social media post and might or might not pay attention to his recommendations. On the other hand, consider a wine blogger who has a following of 20,000 but who writes only about Pinot Noir. Her followers do not follow her unless they are interested in Pinot Noir and interested in what she has to say.

Engagement as a Metric

Size of the audience does matter in influencer marketing. But marketers are now looking at more than just audience size. They are looking at engagement: open and click through rates of emails; likes and shares on social media; and comments or replies to posts made by an influencer.

An influencer who has an engaged audience and who writes about a subject relevant to you is very likely to have real influence over his or her community when it comes to your brand.

Media Conferences

At our three influencer conferences (Wine Media Conference, International Food Blogger Conference, and Beer Now) you can pursue both strategies but the second is the most relevant. Yes, the stars attend and you can make relationships with them. But the real benefit of a blogger or influencer conference is to bring hundreds of micro-influencers together in the same room.

We do not limit attendance to our conferences based on their reach. (Although we do get some powerful influencers – see this post about 20 top influencers at IFBC19.) Instead, our attendees are self selected because they are passionate about their subject and it is this passion that makes them credible with their audience. As a sponsor, you can then serve your product or present your message to these folks without having to spend the time and money to analyze, segment, and narrow down to get what you hope will be the right fit. And when you have access to hundreds of influencers at the same time, if your message is good then good things can happen.

Beer Bloggers Conference and Wine Bloggers Conference Renamed

November 9, 2018 By Allan Leave a Comment

We at Zephyr Conferences have talked about rebranding our blogger conferences for years. Eleven years ago when we started the Wine Bloggers Conference as one of the first niche blogging conferences in the world, blogging was new and hot. But even back then, change was in the air as the most debated subject at that 2008 event was whether this new thing called Twitter was going to die a quick death or change the way people communicate.

Fast forward eleven years and we are proud our wine, food, and beer blogger conferences are still going strong. Blogging, despite its many death announcements by pundits, is not going away.

Rebranding of the WBC and BBC

Yet we all recognize blogging is only one form of communicating and that our conferences also attract non-blogging writers and social media users. For years we have discussed changing the name of these three conferences and have now made major steps by rebranding two of our events.

We are rebranding the Wine Bloggers Conference as the Wine Media Conference and the Beer Bloggers & Writers Conference as Beer Now.

We have two main goals we are trying to achieve with these name changes:

Better Represent Our Attendees: Almost all our attendees not only blog but also use social media. Many write about wine or beer for print publications or on contract for businesses as well. So calling the conferences “blogger” conferences is not really accurate any longer.
Be More Inclusive: There are social media users and writers who communicate about wine and beer but who do not blog. While we feel the conference content is applicable to social media influencers and non-blogging writers, we want names that reflect that.

We did not make these changes in haste, nor without great consultation among our communities. The new names (and websites URLs) will be more accurate and more inclusive. We have also kept our existing graphics, the megaphone man and beer man standing on kegs, which keeps our ties to our original name.

Let there be no mistake. We love bloggers and believe blogging has drastically altered the landscape of beer and wine writing. But with these name changes, we hope to continue our support of beer and wine bloggers while opening up our conferences to others.

Wine Country Fires and Meeting Planners

October 23, 2018 By Allan Leave a Comment

Smart Meetings Magazine recently did an excellent article on the wine country fires from the perspective of meeting planners. The article covered our decisions at Zephyr Conferences in addition to stories on the Silverado Resort, Safari West, and the Napa Valley Film Festival.

Here is the portion of the article about Zephyr Conferences:

In the Words Of A Planner

Allan Wright

Allan Wright, owner of Zephyr United, organizes the Wine Marketing & Tourism Conference annually on behalf of Zephyr Conferences. This year, it takes place Oct. 23–25 at Flamingo Conference Resort & Spa in Santa Rosa, which has 170 guest rooms and almost 15,000 sq. ft. of meeting space. He described his post-fire return to wine country.

“We had two meetings scheduled in Santa Rosa for November 2017, a month after the fires: the Wine Bloggers Conference and the Wine Marketing & Tourism Conference,” he says. “A few days after the fires started, we started getting emails and phone calls from our attendees, asking if the conferences would be canceled. Quite a few of the messages we received implied it would be risky and even inappropriate to hold our meetings, since the locals were having to deal with the crisis. We discussed canceling both meetings.

“However, every local we spoke with—our hotel, Sonoma County Tourism, locals on our advisory boards—provided us a united message that Sonoma County was not closed for business and, in fact, wanted us to come and support them with our conferences.

“We made a public statement a few days after the fires started saying that our meetings would proceed as scheduled, which they did. We did experience a drop in registrations, which had a big impact on us, but nothing compared to what the locals had to suffer through. [We] ended up addressing the fires in our content at both conferences. I remember one person in the audience coming up after a session on the fires and crying because he had lived through the fires and was so emotional that we were addressing it.

“We decided to return the Wine Marketing & Tourism Conference to Santa Rosa this year, in part to support the local area again. One year later, one would never know the fires had even happened.”

Five Tips to Make the Most of Your Sponsorship at a Blogging Conference

October 14, 2018 By Allan Leave a Comment

Interested to sponsor a blogger conference? Here are tips for sponsors on how to maximize your investment, based on our 11 years of running the Wine Bloggers Conference, Beer Now Conference, and International Food Blogger Conference.

Set Your Expectations Properly: If you sponsor a conference and expect immediate movement of the dial (sales or something else) you will be disappointed. Your goal is to make connections and create relationships that pay off over the coming days (social media), months (blog posts), and years (ongoing interaction and reposting of the quotes and reviews you receive).
Attend and Interact: One of the best things sponsors can do is actually attend the conference and participate throughout the weekend, not just for the time slot you are sponsoring. This allows you to make connections with attendees and determine with whom you would like to work in the future. Plus, attendees who see sponsor reps throughout the conference will be impressed.
Take Advantage of Your Benefits: It is amazing how many of our sponsors do not take advantage of the benefits they receive. For example, many sponsors have the option to write a post that gets published on the conference website but a good portion never take the time to do so!
Don’t Self-Promote Too Much: All companies have the tendency to want to promote themselves. That is what traditional marketing is all about. However, influencer marketing is about making relationships to get the bloggers or others to like you and your product. Be real. On the other hand, make sure you do clearly provide your social media handles and contact details. It is amazing how many sponsors forget to do this.
Engage on Social Media: We see many sponsors sit back and watch the social media activity, which can be extremely robust. Much better is to engage with attendees: follow attendees, respond to their social media posts, and write your own posts that are not simply self-promotional but are of interest to attendees.

We think these tips will help you fully appreciate your investment in a blogging or influencer conference!

Tri-Cities, Washington Hosts the Perfect Excursion