Wine Technology Blog @ WineWeb.com

We've been working for the past several weeks to integrate social media into the services we provide for winery websites. We believe that it's important for wineries to publicize their social media groups throughout their website, and we wanted to make it easy for our clients to do that.

Phase 1 of the project brought out the ability to display fan and "follow us" icons throughout the website, including in a page pod (those areas typically to the right of the web page) and a social media web page. While our clients seemed happy with this, we knew that this was just the first step.

Phase 2 approached the integration from the social media-savvy visitor perspective. For example, a visitor is looking at an upcoming event at the winery and decides to tell his/her friends about it. They could login to their Twitter account, start a post, then login to another service that shortens the long website URL to include in that post. Or, as we've just implemented, they could click on the "Tweet" icon on the winery's event page and compose their post. The system creates the short URL and routes the tweet to their Twitter account.

Given that approach, we extended it to other pages on the website, included multiple social media services, and added expanded functionality on the user review pages. We knew our clients would be willing to pay for this enhancement, but we included it at no additional cost to our Enhanced Website Hosting and Premier Bundle clients.

We then added this functionality to the WineWeb.com portal site, including a page pod of our social media sites, a "Post to Social Media" menu option, and social media posting pop-up windows. You can see an example of this by clicking on the Tweet or Ping.fm links below this blog post.

Phase 3? We're not done yet. Let's just say that Phase 3 will involve an iPhone.