Boomerang Your Business

Soooo it’s not just a toy? A Boomerang is a fun video feature that you can create on your smartphone. This app shoots video clips and plays the footage forward and then backward 5 times all under 4 seconds…just like a GIF!

Let’s Begin!

1. First things the first, download the free app. The app icon looks like the one below.

Once you are there the app will go through a quick explanation of how it works.

2. Select which camera you would like to use. You can choose the front or back camera.

3. Touch the round white button at the bottom center of the screen. You do not have to hold it down.

4. Ta-da! You made your first Boomerang!

5. Save your Boomerang by clicking “Save” in the top right corner

6. To upload your Boomerang right away click on the social media platform (or just leave the boomerang in your camera roll to upload at a later date)

Let’s see your Boomerangs! Tag us and use our hashtag, #winedecadence. Happy social media-ing!

 

Wine and Cheese Pairing

National Wine and Cheese day is July 25th this year and we want you to be prepared.  This is seriously delicious business. It’s also all about balance and really, at the end of the day…it’s about what you like. Shall we begin?

 

Sparkling Wine & Dry Whites: Creamy buttery cheese such as brie is a great match for sparkling wines like Piccini Prosecco and Dry Whites like Lincourt Courtney’s Chardonnay. The bright acidity of these wines do not complete with the richness of soft cheese like sweeter, smoother wines would. Brie pulls out the layers of flavors in the wine emphasizing the vivid tastes.

Crisp Whites: Goat Cheese is delicious with crisp whites such as Sauvignon Blanc. The fruity dry whites wonderfully compliment the tangy cheeses. Feta and Four Graces Pinot Gris push and pull sweet and savory tones.

Fruit-Forward Reds: A smoky cheese like gouda brings out the deeper flavors of rich pinot noirs like the Firestone Pinot Noir. The wine’s earthy quality supports the cheese’s richer taste while the fruit accents brings out fruit tastes in the cheese as well.

Dry and Bold Reds: Sharp, cheddar cheeses are great matches for bold Cabernet Sauvignons such as the Three Rivers Cabernet Sauvignon. Merlot pairs wonderfully with blue cheeses as well. If you’re looking for zest and tang, this is the where you should be!

Check out this detailed chart for more information!  http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/features/wine-cheese-pairing-guide

 

YOUR Wine

If you haven’t heard, the Novella wines were made just for YOU. That’s right, Wine Decadence tailored. The Novella Symphony, Dolce Blanco and Dolce Rosso are exclusive and customized…Where else does that happen?!

Wine Decadence works closely with the team at Foley Family Wines to select the best, most unique and amazing wines possible. We scour the extensive list of wines available from more that 70 wineries around the world to bring our customers exceptional wines at exceptional value. Foley Family Wines produces high quality wines that exceed expectations at every price point. At Wine Decadence, out goal is to carry wines that excite our customers and are harder to find. While occasionally, one may see a wine that we carry at a local retailer, at Wine Decadence, we typically avoid the larger production wines that are heavily distributed to the masses at retailers across the country. Our wines fall into the following categories:

Exclusive

Wine Decadence Exclusive wines are wines that we worked with the winemakers and team at Foley Family Wines to leverage a Foley Family Wines Brand, while developing wines specific to our customers’ tastes. The wines are developed by Foley Family Winemakers using grapes hand selected from select Foley Family Wineries to create the flavor profiles specific for our customers’ palates. These wines are only available through Wine Decadence.

Our current Exclusive wine brand is Novella and include:

Novella Symphony 2016

Novella Dolce Blanco 2016

Novella Dolce Rosso 2016

Allocated

An allocated wine is a wine that is created by Foley Family Winemakers as part of their regular annual production. A combination of confidence in the future of Wine Decadence and the enthusiasm for these wines allowed Wine Decadence to obtain a commitment that these wines can be committed to only Wine Decadence. Once a wine isallocated, no one else may purchase these wines. This could be a specific vintage or the entire varietal from that winery. When first allocated, the wine may be seen for a short time in select locations, but they will not be able to be restocked by anyone except Wine Decadence. Sometimes, these will be limited time offerings.

Our current allocated wines are:

EOS Hermes Valley Port

Foley & Johnson Rose

EOS Central Coast Rose

Grove Mill Pinot Noir

Guenoc Lake County Cabernet Sauvignon (also allocated to Ruth’s Chris)

Foley Johnson STEEL Chardonnay

Direct to Consumer (DTC)

A Direct to Consumer wine is a wine that is created by Foley Family winemakers with the intent to only sell at the winery’s tasting room or through the Foley Food and Wine Society Club Membership. Because of the confidence in the future of Wine Decadence, we are allowed access to some these wines that our customers have specifically requested. These are intentionally small production wines and we are honored to have access to these.

Our current DTC wines are:

Sebastiani Symphony

Two Sisters Pinot Noir

Kuleto Rosato

Merus Cabernet Sauvignon

Sebastiani Cherryblock Cabernet Sauvignon

Firestone Proximity 26

 

Past hits from the Direct to Consumer Category include:

EOS Muscat Canelli

Sebastiani Dolcino Rosso

Firestone Gewürztraminer

Regional

The remainder of our wines fall into the regional distribution category. These are Foley Family Wines that are typically only available in select stores in select regions of the country. We monitor this closely and work with the team at Foley Family Wines to bring these wines into living rooms across the country.

 

Strawberry Lime Dessert by Lisanne Gray

Ingredients:

Strawberry Lime Desert Mix

Sour Cream

Cool Whip

Nilla Waffers

Strawberries

Instructions:

Mix together the Stawberry Lime Dessert Mix with 1 cup of Sour Cream and 1 Tub of Cool Whip in a bowl. Line circular and shallow serving bowl (a pie plate works best!) with Nilla Waffers. Add Dessert Mix. Line the bowl with Nilla Waffers and add sliced strawberries on top.

YUM! Thank you so much for your recipe, Lisanne!

 

 

Facebook Analytics

How do I know if my posts are working? Who am I reaching? How’s my strategy? One word, analytics.

Facebook is wonderful in that it provides you with the analytics tools for free. Be warned, that it doesn’t keep all of the metrics over extended periods of time…at most 28 days! If you want to keep tally, make sure you store those numbers in a safe place.

Where are these analytics?

Once you set up your Facebook business page, you can find this whole new numbers world by clicking on “Insights”.

You will now see a column on the left side of the page. The following metrics are listed:

Overview: This section is a general summary of the following metrics.

Promotions:  Holds information about paid advertising and promotions.

Followers: This metric states exactly what it says, your number of followers.

Likes: The likes on your page and net likes (people do unlike!)

Reach: The number of people your posts were served to.

Page Views: The number of people who have looked at your business page. (You can even see demographic information in this sections!)

Actions on Page: What your audience is clicking on.

Posts: The Golden Ticket! This metric shows how each of your posts are doing and even when your audience is online.

Events: If you host events on your page, you can see the reach your event earned.

Videos: Check out your video views in this section.

People: The demographic information of your audience is located here. Find out where your audience is from and how you can best sell to them.

Local: What people are like near your business.

Shop: What people are buying.

Messages: Conversations people have had with you!

Knowledge is power…post on!

 

 

Social Media Calendar

First things first, you all are doing an amazing job with social media. Your posts are engaging and fun- they’re also unique and match your personalities! You deserve a MAJOR cheers to that!

Before this “posting life” gets overwhelming, we want to give you some tools to be proactive. There are many resources online but it never hurts to start with the original and one of my favorites, the Calendar.

Interested in creating a digital calendar? It’s great to have one for social media because it will travel with you. You can create your own using Microsoft Excel. I especially recommend that trusty friend. With Excel you have the freedom to create a calendar for all of your channels. You also can add notes and write as much as you want- not just the limited number of characters that you may be given. Check out this website for help:

http://www.wikihow.com/Create-a-Calendar-in-Microsoft-Excel

Using a google calendar is a great way to stay connected with your email and work. You can also share this calendar with multiple people. You need a google email to access this. Don’t have one? Here’s a link to start:

https://accounts.google.com/SignUp?service=mail&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fmail.google.com%2Fmail%2F&ltmpl=default

Once you have that set up, click on the 9 boxes on the right hand corner. Find the calendar in the third row and third column. You can create multiple calendars with Google! Here’s a link that can help you begin:

https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37095?hl=en

Side note, having a second email is a great way for you to keep organized with work. Maintaining your gmail account for Wine Decadence information only will help lesson the clutter of those unnecessary emails like family updates and bills. (Just to clarify- that was a joke. Please talk to your family and pay your bills)

Set up goals for yourself. Challenge your strategy and experiment. As much science as there is behind social media marketing, there’s a lot of gray area. Be genuine and sell wine. Cheers!

 

 

 

 

More than Selling

“I’m stumped and I don’t know what to post.”

Poster’s Block- we get it. Keeping up with social media has its highs and its lows. Some days you’ll feel like you’ve achieved it all and you know your audience like your best friend…other days you’ll wonder who your audience really is.  What to do? Be true to you! You don’t always need to be talking about wine… GASP! It’s true! Post about your life or your other interests. You can bring new people and customers to you that way.

Post Ideas That Are Not About Wine:

1. Your Pet
2. Decorating
3. Outdoors
4. Vacations
5. Adventures
6. Sports
7. Hobbies (sewing, painting, chess…etc.)
8. Aspirations
9. Funny Quotes
10. Beauty
11. Technology
12. Recipes
13. Just how you feel!

 

It’s important to do this for two main reasons. One: you customers won’t get tired of seeing wine selling photos after wine selling photos. Two: you won’t get tired of social media. Remember to use relevant hashtags and to get creative.  You’ve got the power!

Hashtags 101

If you’ve checked out the other articles on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram you have a general feel of what hashtags do and how they operate. We want to condense this information into one blog so you can read and reread this as many times as you’d like. We’ve been told it is an enchanting bedtime story.

Hashtags are a search engines’ best friends. They link documents/posts/text/photos together. When you type “#morewine” this categorizes that post/comment with every other post/comment with that same hashtag. When people are browsing the internet and searching for that hashtag- there you are! We encourage you to create your own hashtag. Maybe something like, “#yournamewine” or “wdyourname”. This makes it easier for you to find what customers/followers want you to see. Don’t forget to use general or broad hashtags too. You need to get discovered somehow! Timing is important. If you have an old post and edit it to have hashtags, you will not be doing yourself any favors. If you want to add hashtags do so in the comments. Your post/photo will no longer be relevant with the edited caption.

Different platforms call for different hashtags…here we go:

Twitter: Sprinkle your hashtags on Twitter! You do not need to use many because Twitter uses all of your words in its search engines. Want to tweet about wine but don’t have enough characters to hashtag all that you want? Don’t sweat it. Your “unhashtaged” words will be picked up anyway. Limit your hashtags to 1-2 per post.

Facebook: The moderate hashtag platform. Using hashtags on Facebook is more effective than Twitter but don’t go crazy. Having an overload of hashtags looks messy and doesn’t mean that your post will be ranked best fit for the certain hashtag. Ranked? Just like Google Searches, the pages that come up after you click enter are ranked in relevancy. In short, be creative but keep it genuine! 1-4 hashtags is a healthy range for Facebook.

Instagram: Hashtag Heaven! This platform works amazingly for hashtags. The best number floating out there for each post is 11. Experiment and test out some new ones every post. You never know what someone will be searching for.

Do not overload on hashtags- your rank will drop in searches!

GIF it a Try

Have you seen those moving picture on Facebook lately? I just can’t help but to watch those when scrolling through my feed. Those GIFs really capture that instant communication and gratification for social media. There are two main ways you can sprinkle GIFs on your Facebook. To set your status or to just to post one you need to copy and paste a link. Check out the screenshots below.

A great accessible site is:

https://giphy.com/

Click on “Copy link”.

Copy the “GIF Link”.

Head over to your Facebook and paste the URL to post.

Delete the link and keep the image!

TADA! You have a great GIF to share with your friends and customers.

Now…how to respond with an even better GIF. To do so, scroll and get ready to make a comment on the post. Click the GIF image on the right. (It’s shaded out in gray).

Now search the kind of GIF you would like to send.

Click and post.

Well done my friend, well done.

What’s a BITI?

BITI stands for Buy It to Try It. Did you know that as a Wine Decadence Consultant you get amazing monthly deals on BITIs? It is the perfect opportunity for consultants to purchase selected food and/or wine items at a great discount.

BITIs are available every month and are discussed during Consultant calls, usually the third Monday of the month. The purpose of BITIs is for you to get familiar with your products and to better sell them- sell products that you believe in.  Also because they are offered at a discounted price, what better time is there to experiment? One of our favorite ventures was the Chocoholic Brownies with the substitute of Discoveries Cab for water. Really fulfills all your cravings! Take advantage of these specials. Only one per consultant can be purchased.

Buy it to Try like it’s your job! Well you know…an awesome part of your job!