Open that Bottle Night: The perfect excuse to raid the cellar…

It’s been a rough start to 2012. On 5 January, my beloved dad passed away. He’d fought various cancers over the past few years, but sadly, the day after he’d been released from hospital he had a tragic accident at home as he pushed all boundaries trying to explore his newfound freedom.

The loss has really rattled me, and made me reassess what’s important in life. Dad was a passionate man, humble, rather shy (yes I did not get that quality from him) but always up for a good time with his friends. So with a new perspective on mortality, and a philosophy to live every day as if it’s your last, it’s appropriate timing to get behind Open That Bottle Night on 25 February, to raid the cellar and share wines that have sentimental meaning (not necessarily the most expensive, but ones I’ve been wanting to try).

What’s Open that Bottle Night all about?

The concept is not a new one. In fact it was invented over 10 years ago by former Wall Street Journal columnists, John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter as a way to share the many great wine anecdotes they heard from their wine loving readers. The first OTBN stories were printed in their wine column and proved to be hugely popular with their readers. Every year, the event grew and soon OTBN parties were being held all over the world. More info on background

Dorothy and John

Since John and Dottie left the newspaper in 2009, OTBN has lost some momentum so a good friend Liz O’Connell and I (with blessing from the founders John & Dottie), got behind it again last year and were thrilled to see such momentum. The USA is already organizing parties and madly tweeting using #OTBN, let’s hope the momentum can grow even more this year using social media to spread the word.

The wine could be a special vintage from the cellar, your dad’s favourite wine, the wine you enjoyed on your first date or one you bought on a memorable visit to a winery. It doesn’t have to be expensive, just a bottle that means something to you. Or if you aren’t saving a wine (wine is meant to be drunk after all!) OTBN is a good excuse to go out and buy a bottle and treat yourself!

Personally, we tried some interesting and surprising examples at our dinner party last year – some old Rosemount wines that we’d bought on our first trip to the Hunter when learning about wine (all under $10 priced) and then a Mountain Blue Shiraz 1996, A Mt. Panorama Winery Chardonnay that a friend had bought on a trip to Bathurst, d’Arenberg Lucky Lizard 2006, Tyrrell’s HVD Semillon 2005, Carlei Cabernets (last bottle from our wedding),  1995 Plantagenet Mount Barker Cabernet and 2000 Seppelt Drumborg Riesling (the first Brand I’d managed when working in wine) just to name a few. There were plenty of stories and great discussions and it was the perfect reminder why wine can be such a great part of a social setting.

Looking forward to hearing your stories about the wines that will be opened.

Some tips on how to get involved:

• Join the OTBN Facebook page and share your favourite wine stories, photos or videos

• Follow OTBN on twitter  and use #OTBN in your tweets about wine that you could potentially open

• Organise a dinner or OTBN party with wine loving friends or family and ask people to bring along something special for dinner

• Wineries – this is also a great opportunity to open up conversations with your wine club/ mailing lists and encourage them to open some old your wine that they may have stored.

• Retailers/ Restaurants – a good promotion for some of your older vintage wines to be on promotion for the night – share your stories on why people should open those bottles.

• Wine Writers/ Bloggers – help us spread the word Down Under and advise your readers – this is something everyone can get involved in regardless of their understanding of wine.

The 9 things you MUST do to succeed online

This is a guest blog by Craig Wilson – doing great things with the NLYZR product that’s worth checking out to provide solutions for effective search engine results for your website. He’s a go to source for online information, so thought would be useful for him to share a few tips…

The advent of the web, search engines and social media networks has revolutionised marketing. While once we had to rely on outbound tactics like advertisements and direct mail, now we can utilise the more measurable and effective inbound marketing approach.

Here are the nine steps we use at Sticky for a successful inbound marketing plan:

1. Create content

Content is central to any good social media plan. You don’t attract traffic, comments, support or donations if you don’t have information or content as the lure.

Original content is material you might create in-house. It could be a news story, information piece, blog post, video or images. It doesn’t have to be lengthy material, in most cases shorter is better. But it does need to be regular material.

2. Post content

Your website should be the main location for posting content. Regular content drives regular traffic to that site. It creates return habits and subscriptions.

3. Optimise content

Every piece of content is another potential search result on Google, Bing and Yahoo. Optimizing each post, news item, image or video provides you with another opportunity to be found in relevant searches. By optimizing all your content for your target keywords you can substantially increase traffic. I believe so strongly in the importance of search engine optimization I launched a new business, www.nlyzr.com, dedicated to making it as easy as possible for small business owners.

4. Promote content

Once content is published and optimised on your chosen site, it’s time to promote it to your social networks. Word your message carefully. Use strong descriptions, emotive language and ask for action. The right wording can drive very strong responses. If you get a poor initial response, review the wording and try again.

5. Enable social sharing

Its crucial to make it as easy as possible for viewers to share your content with their followers and friends. Embed Twitter ReTweet and Facebook Share buttons on each post on the website. Consider other social network share options at the bottom of each post on your website (there are dozens of them) to make it easy for people to spread to their favourite networks.

6. Ask for action

If you don’t ask, you rarely receive. Depending on the nature of the content you are promoting you could ask for comments, feedback, to sign-up as supporters, to share your information or even (drum roll please) to purchase.

7. Monitor traffic and comments

Once content has been published and promoted you must ensure that you follow the ensuing activity, especially in the initial period when traffic will be highest. This is the time to engage with your audience and build the relationships.

8. Study results

Study the analytics of all your sites and social networks to see what works and what doesn’t. This will help inform future efforts. Your online efforts must have goals and these results are the way you measure them.

9. Repeat process

The most important thing is to be consistent and have a long-term view. Good inbound marketing has a cumulative effect and requires regular attention.

Repeat these steps frequently.

BIO:

Craig Wilson is founder of Sticky, a digital agency based in Newcastle, Australia and new Website Optimization System NLYZR.

Craig is a contributor to the collaborative series of world-wide marketing books The Age of Conversation 1, 2, 3, recent contributor to the Australian Govt’s National Cultural Policy and is often called on by media to comment on industry news.

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