Voting, Networking and Wine Business

March 25 2008

I am offering another quick reminder that voting is ongoing for the 2008 American Wine Blog Awards.

I am pleased to be nominated in two categories—Best Blog Graphics and Best Wine Business Blog.

My site is, presumptively, the dark horse in both categories. The Best Blog Graphics is likely swinging towards an upstart and the Best Wine Business Blog is amongst stiff competition against three legitimate businesses. It is flattering for me, but stiff competition regardless.

Your vote is important—not necessarily for this blog, though that would be nice, but for all of the finalists.

You can see all of the nominations summary style at Fermentation

And, you can vote for your favorites at the voting mechanism found here.

Some brief commentary, in my mind, 2008 is a critical inflection point for wine blogging. No, not blogging in general, that much has been decided, but specifically for wine blogging.

In a few short years, and particularly the last two, the increase in mindshare and influence wrought by wine blogs has been tremendous, but the rubber is starting to meet the road and in order for wine blogging to become something truly valuable to the wine industry we need to continue to tick up in exposure, go pro so to speak.

It is an interesting notion that wine message boards wield an equal and commensurate influence as blogs in ‘08 and likewise it is unfortunate that Wine Spectator keeps their blogs behind the subscription gates, almost despite the loosening up on content at media power brokers like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, but then the wine industry moves at its own genteel pace.

That said, your vote is a vote for progressiveness. A huge turnout in voting is a validation for wine blogs in and of itself. Go. Do. It. Now.

As a sidebar to my blog being nominated in the Best Wine Business Blog category, I started a “Wine Business Network” group on the professional networking site LinkedIn a few weeks back. If you are not on LinkedIn, you need to be pronto. It is becoming THE rolodex tool for the new millennium. Well, I started the group very innocently and seeded it with six or seven people. Quietly, passively, it has grown in number about 12X and I am getting 10 – 15 requests to join daily.

If you are on LinkedIN, are related to the wine business and you would like to join the group, please view my profile here, or just go straight to the link for the group here.