Hughes blog post: Twitter strategy brings cheer to Cellar Door Wine Festival

This article originally appeared in The Advertiser on 20 March 2012.

SOCIAL media strategies for a wine festival made it a top 10-trending tweet in Adelaide for a weekend.

Hughes PR analysis of the festival held last month showed its dedicated hashtag, #cdwf, and username @cellardoorfest were used in almost 1500 separate tweets during the event.SOCIAL media strategies for a wine festival made it a top 10-trending tweet in Adelaide for a weekend.

Digital and media consultant Kate Potter said the agency calculated that event publicity reached more than 98,000 people on Twitter and created more than one million impressions.

Ms Potter said the figures were boosted by the Convention Centre marketing team installing a giant projection screen to create a Twitter wall at the event that showed tweets in a rolling feed.

“You could see it from anywhere at the event so that whenever people mentioned the cellar door handle or hashtag their tweet would come up on the Twitter wall,” Ms Potter said.

“It created this huge traffic at the festival and then to all of the followers of those tweeting.”

The carefully orchestrated digital and media strategy started with a specific hashtag being chosen for the event so it had a clear Twitter and Facebook conversation that could be followed.

Ms Potter said after this, each winery involved with the event was contacted to ensure it used that specific hashtag when tweeting about the event.

This included about 90 of the 150 wineries involved who were already on Twitter.

The next prong in the marketing approach was to invite recognised social media “influencers” to the launch, those who have large followings and those who were well-known wine bloggers.

“We needed the initial boost from wineries and social media influencers to push the hashtag to the top of the Adelaide Twitter conversation,” Ms Potter said.

There was also a dedicated website and a Facebook site.

The convention centre used the Facebook site to run competitions and it provided an avenue for social pictures of the event so people could tag themselves and share the photographs.

“People could also go onto Facebook and ask for information or provide feedback,” Ms Potter said.

The same hype is being created around other big events during March with Ms Potter saying at various venues around town there were constant tweets to follow, helping festival or fringe visitors choose their next event.

“At Womadelaide you could see a tweet from someone saying they had just sat down and the artist was awesome … there was a big conversation happening in real time,” Ms Potter said.

“For these events it’s word of mouth, when you hear something is awesome from one person and then another you think `they must be awesome’ and you go across to that stage.”

Photo by Simon Casson