What is a Twitter follower worth to a winery? What is a blog post worth? What is its cost? What does a comment signify for your brand?

As a firm believer in the power of social media as a way for my proto-winery to create relationships with folks who might one day buy my wine, I’ve been disappointed at the lack of rigor many in the industry are applying to their social media efforts.

Even the guys who “get” it, the software and web developers who are enabling wineries to track the online chatter and engage, aren’t building into their systems an easy way for wineries to measure social media’s ability to meet objectives.

Some of the objectives are la-la woo-woo, granted. How do you measure brand affection? No clue here either. But owners and marketers drool over the type of brand affection that, say, Apple has because of one thing: it sells products! And they know it sells products because they measure it.

And you can too. It’s easier than ever to do it online.

Instead of boring you with theory and formulas, let me just tell you my story.

Pinotblogger and the Bankers

I recently presented my business plan to a Senior VP at a local bank specializing in wineries. The economy is in the crapper, uncertainty is high, and so you might be forgiven for thinking that now is the worst. time. ever. to spend a lot of money on a capital intensive process like building out a winery.

But you’d be wrong. Dead wrong. Prices on materials are the lowest they’ve been in a decade. Interest rates are the lowest they will ever be (the Fed can’t go below zero – at least I think they can’t). The SBA program has waived all their fees for the year, and you can roll capital purchases (tanks, presses etc.) into the building loan if you qualify. Demand is there, and quantifiable, due to Capozzi being a social media success in the wine space.

By the time construction is completed, say next spring fall, we’re still 18 months from a release. By the time we are ready to sell, my bet is – and most other economists are with me on this – we will be well into the recovery phase of the downturn.

Or maybe you believe Obama is actually an alien sent here to sate the masses into socialistic complacency and to pave the way to the complete enslavement of the human race by a new ruling class of martian overlords.

Either way, its still a darn good time to make tasty drinks that make you feel funny.

Now is the perfect time to build a winery.

The Narrative and the Numbers

The above is the narrative, and it’s a very good one. But it’s still just a narrative. And in terms of how wineries go about measuring the value of social media, that’s about as far as they go: a narrative of how interactions are happening. We’re on Twitter! And we have followers!

What is missing is a clear enumeration of the objectives. Me, I want to sell wine. Since I haven’t yet, I use other metrics to help me determine how successful my Adventures in Social Media have been. They aren’t complicated, but they require me to know what I want to measure, to actually measure it, and to do an analysis of what works and what doesn’t.

Here is a simple, but very illustrative example. We’ve had over 1200 sign-ups to our inaugural vintage mailing list. Growing this list is my single most important objective online. I’m going to be going direct after all. There is nothing else that even comes close.

This is my 349th post to pinotblogger. That means, on average, each time I post I earn 3.5 potential customers. Taking this analysis a step further (and I have) I can project how many on the list will buy, and what their average purchase over a year will be. I take this number, multiply it by 3.5 and – boom! – thats how much a post to pinotblogger is worth, on average. Subtract my time (which I can choose to value however I want, since I’m not paying anyone to write for me) and the monthly hosting fees and I have a pretty clear picture, much more than just a guess, of what kind of value I’m getting from blogging (note: there is much more to this – lifetime value of a customer, building loyalty etc.).

Word of mouth should be treated the same way: you must walk back the cat – all the way! – to an objective. It could be a speaking appearance at a conference, it could be a consulting gig, or it could be part of a strategy to ratchet up coverage of your winery to more widely read media. And then the process starts again for each of those intermediate objectives. What did you want to accomplish? Did you meet those objectives?

If you aren’t measuring and tracking your social media, then you’re treating it like advertising. And advertising is all about the number of impressions. If you do view things this way it leads to two key implications due to the limited reach of social media vs. mass media, neither of them good:

1. It will take a long time for your social media advertising to build up enough intent in your target audience for you to see any lift (forgive my slack-jawed decent into 20th century advertising jargon).

2. You’ll become the worst possible thing in the entire marketing world: a spammer. You’ll be pounding your keyboard in some neanderthal attempt to get lift by increasing impressions on a small group of viewers. Your followers will hate you, you’ll hate yourself and eventually you’ll want to take your toaster in the bath.

There’s more to say, but not right now. Right now I have to get back to polishing my business plan. But if you found this post useful and want more, feel free to drop me a line. josh@pinotblogger.com.