Keeping up with all of the changes on Facebook can be a daunting task, but making sure that your winery is compliant with all of the promotional restrictions, design features and terms of use requirements will keep your page in good standing with the social network.

While the original restriction of involving alcohol as a prize is now lifted, current Facebook guidelines maintain that all promotions must comply with local laws and regulations of the jurisdictions where the promotion is open. The burden of verifying that a promotion is legal is in the hands of the winery and by running a promotion on Facebook, you confirm compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.

As painful as it may sound, loop your winery’s legal team into your Facebook marketing plans before you get too far into your planning. And make sure they are very familiar with Facebook’s promotion guidelines and terms of use.

Below, I’ve highlighted 13 little known Facebook participation requirements that many wineries (and other categories, you are not alone!) are violating on a daily basis. Don’t jeopardize your brand and all of the hard work you’ve put into building a relationship with your fans, by making these easily fixable mistakes.

At the end of the article, I’ve also included the link to the Facebook promotion guidelines, should you want to read and share them with your team.

1. 3rd Party Applications Required
   • Facebook requires that all promotions are run on 3rd party applications.
     • Facebook’s definition of a promotion is: “a contest, competition, sweepstakes or other offer” that includes a prize of monetary value and a winner determined on the basis of skill or on the basis of chance.
     • Either randomly choosing a winner or having them perform a task to win requires a 3rd party application hosted off the social network.
2. Facebook’s Native Features & Functionality Are Off Limits
   • Brands may not use any native Facebook features or functionality for promotions.
     • For example, you cannot have users “Like” your page to enter into a contest— the entry process must be performed within the 3rd party application and include a registration separate from the act of simply “Liking” your page.
3. Connecting with Winners
   • Brands can’t send a winner via a message, chat, or wall post alerting them to their win.
4. Use of The Wall
   • Many wineries are using the wall as the way to run a promotion. For example, “Comment below to win…” is not an acceptable way to run your winey’s Facebook promotion.
5. Voting
   • You cannot use the “Like” feature as a method of voting. Again, this type of functionality must be contained within a 3rd party application.
6. Secure Socket Layer
   • Although this won’t result in Facebook suspending your page, it will result in your custom tab(s) not working. Basically, they will be invisible.
   • All custom tabs must be hosted on a secure server. This means you will need to purchase a Secure Socket Layer certificate for your web server if your site doesn’t already have one. Make sure that any Facebook application developer is compliant with this requirement.
7. Age Gate Restrictions
   • If you have a wine, beer or spirits Facebook page, it must restrict users to 21 years or older. Any Page administrator can fix this in less than 5 minutes. Follow these steps:
     1. Go to your winery Facebook Page
     2. Click on “edit page” on the right hand side of the page>
     3. On the left, select “manage permissions”
     4. The “age restrictions” menu is a pull down menu. Scroll down to “alcohol-related”
     5. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and select “save changes”
     6. That’s it!
8. Third Party Advertising
   • We’ve only witnessed this once, but a restaurant displayed an advertisement on a custom Facebook tab for a spirits brand. While we think this is clever, it’s against Facebook’s terms of use.
9. Privacy Policy
   • If you collect information from your fans, you must gain their consent and tell them how their information will be used with a posted privacy policy. For example, if you run a promotion on the required 3rd party application and collect information, you must tell them what you are going to do with that data.
10. Personal Profile Page Used As Brand Pages
    • We are still seeing wineries use their personal accounts as their label page. An example, instead of using their name “Willy Winemaker” they use Willy’s Pinot Noir” as the name. Just create a brand page for your winery. It has a ton of advantages.
11. Violating Copyrights
    • Do not under any circumstance post content that has a copyrights that your winery does not own. Be careful of YouTube videos in particular because many times even though the video is under a creative common license, the maker may have not received permission to use the music. If you post the video, you are violating the music copyrights. Not something you want to have to explain to your winery’s legal council.
12. Promoting Underage Drinking
    • This rule applies offline as well, so it should be relatively easy for your winery marketing team to enforce. The best way for your winery to avoid any hint of impropriety is by placing the age gate on your page.
    • However, when it comes to photos of consumers drinking that you place on the page, be very aware of how old they look. We know you all do a great job of making sure no one is under 21 in your tasting room, but we’ve recommended to some of our wine clients that they remove photos from their Facebook page just to be safe.
13. Photo Tagging
    • Although a well-known brand used Facebook’s photo tagging feature in a genius way to reward consumers who tagged the item in the photo with their name to win the item, the page was shut down for violating the promotions terms and conditions.

Whether you manage your winery’s Facebook page or have hired a social media agency, it is important to be fully aware of the limitations and features of Facebook Pages.

Click on the highlighted text to read the Facebook promotions guidelines. ]]> http://www.inkfoundry.com/2011/11/warning-13-ways-to-get-your-winery%e2%80%99s-facebook-page-suspended/feed/ 0 http://www.inkfoundry.com/2010/11/your-restaurant-doesn%e2%80%99t-serve-spam-why-should-your-facebook-page/ http://www.inkfoundry.com/2010/11/your-restaurant-doesn%e2%80%99t-serve-spam-why-should-your-facebook-page/#comments Tue, 16 Nov 2010 16:00:07 +0000 CarinaOst http://www.inkfoundry.com/?p=1919 By Carina Ost

Your restaurant’s Facebook page is an extension of your brand and a great way to interact with your guests outside of the dining room.  This social media dos and don’ts article will help keep your restaurant’s Facebook page a spam-free zone. Your fans deserve better than that!

Here are the five things that you must avoid on your restaurant’s Facebook page.

Do You Make These 5 Facebook Mistakes?

1. Feeding your Twitter posts onto your Wall. Twitter is a great tool to promote your restaurant, but Twitter and Facebook require radically different approaches.  Ideally you want your patrons and fans to follow you on both. It’s okay to do some duplicate posting, but it can start to look really tacky, and you will lose your fans’ attention by patronizing them with second hand posts.  Make your fans “like” you by providing them with original content.

2. Bombarding peoples’ newsfeeds. 1-3 times a day for wall postings is a good number. Any more than that will increase the number of people who hide your feeds from their friends. Post your specials, new cocktails, fresh ingredients just added to the menu, and lots of photos! Fans devour photos.

3. Talking only about your restaurant. Yes, people “like” and follow your Page to get updates about your food and events, but to really position yourself as an influencer and thought leader, you should be sharing interesting things that are happening in your neighborhood, among your colleagues, and local suppliers (breweries, vineyards, farms).

Talking about food scraps and waste may not be the most scrumptious thing to post about, but Camino restaurant in Oakland posted an article on the subject on their Facebook page.  They simply wrote, “This is what happens to our leftovers!” and linked to a feature story about an Oakland machine that turns food scraps into energy. It is informative, engages the community with the restaurant, and is an excellent example of going outside yourself on your wall.

4. Ignoring the people that “like” your Page. Nothing will make people feel like they are being fed spam more than ignoring their comments. Always respond to people that legitimately post questions or comments on your wall. If you allow people to comment and they never actually hear from you, then what is the point of having a Facebook Page? One-way conversations are for your restaurant advertising, not social networks.

5. Impersonal offers, discounts, specials, coupons, and contests. Don’t get me wrong, we all like specials but when it isn’t targeted, people automatically think spam. Think your ideas through a bit. Perhaps a photo or comment contest or a trivia question. Also one special I always like is: “For every 100 “likes” we get, we will randomly give a $100 gift card to our fans.” Make them glad that they “liked” you! Show them that you care and value their patronage and loyalty. Think of your FB fans as brand ambassadors who have the power to spread great word of mouth.

By avoiding these pitfalls, people will be happy to “like” you and will be excited to try all of the wonders that you feed them!

Hopefully, you’ve read our article on How To Set Up a Restaurant’s Facebook  Page.  And let us know if you need any assistance, we’re here to help.

Share your best restaurant marketing on Facebook best practices in the comments below!

Photo Credit to Ishibakasama on Flickr

The website Yelp is a user generated site for reviews on anything and everything. If you are a restaurant owner Yelp reviews may be your top fear. You may let out a sharp short cry yourself with the idea of one Yelper writing a bad review and ruining your restaurant’s reputation forever.

That is a legitimate fear but Yelp does not control your restaurant, you do! You can monitor, respond, post offers, events, and photos for free but you can’t edit what people say.

Also, and this is a big no-no, you can’t post positive reviews from fake Yelp accounts nor can you ask your employees or your public relations agency to do so. Not only are fake posts unethical and against FTC Guidelines on Adequate Disclosure but it is also desperate, pathetic, and the readers will know right away.

According to Yelp, 83% of users rate a business 3 stars or higher. That is not bad odds. As a Yelper, experienced food blogger, and professional restaurant reviewer, those statistics mimic my review history.

It pays off for Yelpers to write a lot of reviews, it helps their chances of achieving Yelp Elite status which includes private invitations to parties with free food and booze. Also, it can be gratifying for some Yelpers to write a negative review to an untouchable and perfect restaurant; call it human nature.

You must understand that negative reviews come with the territory and if it is genuine feedback take it and learn from it. If it is something completely absurd like, “I hate this restaurant because the waitress looks exactly like my ex girlfriend….zero stars” Just laugh. There is nothing you can do. A smart Yelper will read a positive review, a negative review, and the most recent and read them all with a grain of Kosher salt.

A San Francisco restaurant, Pizzeria Delfina, has been very smart about utilizing its negative reviews and turning them into positives.  As quoted from the New York Times article Restaurants to Yelp Reviewers: Bring It On:

Pizzeria Delfina, a Mission District institution, is flaunting Yelp reviewers’ mean-spirited, one-star reviews with pride. The restaurant made T-shirts quoting bad reviews and gave them to employees to wear on the job.

Obviously, this may not be the right public relations strategy for every restaurant but the point is that a negative Yelp review is one person’s opinion and it is not the end all be all.

Yelp is only part of your marketing communications mix that helps to build your restaurant’s reputation. If you tweet and treat your customers well, engage with them on Facebook, have a great website, restaurant, and food, then a few bad Yelp reviews really won’t matter.

As a longtime twEATer, I live to both eat and tweet. Most of the people who I communicate with on Twitter are other foodies, restaurants, food and wine bloggers, wine enthusiasts, and wineries. After years of successful Twitter engagement, I know what types of activities will help your restaurant or winery  build an engaged Twitter following.

Now that your restaurant or winery has a Twitter account, what’s next?

Hot tip for building great Twitter relationships:  You must communicate consistently to make a big impact with those you follow and those who follow you all in 140 characters or less!

Here are the 8 Best Tweeting Tips to build a rabid fan base of food and wine followers:

8. Retweeting (RT) is the easiest way to communicate on Twitter because you do not have to think up content. You can either copy and paste or simply click the Retweet button. Look for things that are newsworthy or useful to your followers. If you have a winery perhaps retweet a news story about how the weather is affecting the vines this season. Use this technique often, but not too often. It should supplement your original tweets, not be the only information you push out.

7. Participate in Follow Fridays (#FF), this is another easy tactic that requires very little effort. Simply make a tweet of your favorite tweeters and tell your other followers to follow them. A little description with only a select few is more valuable then just a list of people. For example:

#FF our favorites of the week that made us laugh: @Foodie1 @Foodie2

6. Involve other local business in your tweets, especially if they are complementary. If you are a winery, mention (@) the bed and breakfast down the street in your tweet and recommend them. The B&B will then, most likely, mention you and you will become a twitter team and an unofficial strategic alliance.

5. Post pictures on Twitter of what you are working on: a new dish in the kitchen or a glass of wine you just opened up. Write a short description to accompany it so people know what they are opening. TwitPic and Plixi are the 2 big photo uploaders for Twitter.

4. Post specials and promotions. This is something simple that you can and should do everyday. If someone wanted to know your specials in the past perhaps they would walk in and look at your chalkboard or wait for the waiter to remember to tell them. Not anymore: post it on Twitter.

3. Let your followers be part of the restaurant and winery process. Most people are not entrepreneurs or restaurateurs but they would like to be; they are curious about the life. Post things about the kitchen meals, working on getting your liquor license, or any of the other behind-the-scene processes. Also ask your followers for help, but only if you are willing to accept it, don’t use it as a marketing ploy.  For example:

What would you love to see on the menu this season?

2. Have real conversations with people on Twitter. Read the Timeline and participate. If someone asks a question in the Twitterverse, you should be the person to an answer it. When someone asks a question about wine pairings, consider it your golden opportunity to shine. Answer the question. Mention them (@) and don’t be the first to end the conversation. If they say “thank you” then you should respond:

You’re welcome @winequestions, let me know if you ever have any more wine pairing questions.

1. Provide  real contests for your followers with prizes. Bridge the connection from a virtual relationship to an in person relationship. Tweet something like this:

The first 10 people to come in the winery and say the word “Riesling” get a specially crafted Riesling flight on us.

If you tweet it, the food and wine tweeters will follow!

Side note: You should be sending a minimum of 10 tweets a day, trust me, once you start you will become addicted and want to do more. The more you do, the better! Remember, you are still a business so only use abbreviations when you are in a character crunch and  try to make these wink and happy face free tweets.

Photo Credit: Webtreats on Flickr

In many organizations the search engine optimization and the public relations teams don’t work together. And this is a huge missed opportunity since 75 percent of search results are due to the activity that happens off your website. Public relations tactics such as press releases, blogger engagement, guest blogging, forum commenting and other external communications efforts can, if strategically executed, dramatically impact your organic search rank.

The first introduction consumers and media have to your company are your Google search results. Generally, searchers are not typing in the name of your company, they are searching for terms such as “steakhouse”, “restaurant”, “Great Napa wine tasting room” and other category keywords. If your competitor comes up ahead of you, most likely the click will go to them and not your company.

According to recent research from the Chitika, an advertising data analytics firm, the first page, first position result is worth double the traffic of the number two spot.

But don’t despair, even small search rank improvements can make a big difference: moving from the first position on the second page to the last position on the first page will see a 143 percent jump in traffic. For a highly competitive industry like fine dining restaurants, this could make the difference between staying in business and having to close your doors.

In addition to helping with your search rank results, search optimization can drive referrals, word of mouth recommendations and establish your company’s expert status in a category, as well as, provide many other benefits.

PHOTO CREDITS: Google photo – ManFrys; Despair Finger - Juliana Coutinho

In alphabetically order:

1. David Armano – http://twitter.com/armano
2. John Bell – http://twitter.com/jbell99
3. Diedre Breckenridge – http://twitter.com/dbreakenridge
4. Chris Brogan – http://twitter.com/chrisbrogan
5. Rod Brooks – http://twitter.com/NW_Mktg_Guy
6. Idil Cakim – http://twitter.com/idilgh
7. Walter J Carl, Ph.D – http://www.chatthreads.com/
8. Stacy DeBroff -http://twitter.com/MomCentral
9. Todd Defren – http://twitter.com/TDefren
10. Tony DiResta – http://womma.org/diresta/
11. Frank Eliason – http://twitter.com/frankeliason
12. Jason Falls – http://twitter.com/jasonfalls
13. Steve Farnsworth – http://twitter.com/Steveology
14. Maggie Fox – http://twitter.com/maggiefox
15. Shel Israel – http://twitter.com/shelisrael
16. Dave Kerpen – http://twitter.com/davekerpen
17. Peter Kim – http://twitter.com/peterkim
18. Gabriel E. Meister – http://www.linkedin.com/pub/gabe-meister/0/b60/bb7
19. Scott Monty – http://twitter.com/scottmonty
20. Jeremiah Owyang – http://www.twitter.com/jowyang
21. Robbin Phillips – http://twitter.com/robbinphillips
22. Paul Roberts – http://twitter.com/PaulRobertspar
23. Andy Sernovitz – http://www.twitter.com/sernovitz
24. Brian Solis – http://twitter.com/briansolis
25. Greg Verdino – http://twitter.com/gregverdino

PHOTO CREDIT: Webtreats My Site My Way

Agency president, Carin Galletta and Angelsmith president, Eric Oliver were introduced to Romililly Pinot Noir during a “meeting” at a local Marin County bar. After tasting the luscious 2006, the partners vowed to obsessively track down as many bottles as possible resulting in a negotiation for Romililly’s last bottles in its library. The agency partners lost that battle, but won the business.

For more information on the young Sonoma County winemakers, check them out on Facebook.

Since 2006, DoubleTake Marketing has transformed baggage carousels at 23 North American airports with its patent pending AdSpressive Graphics and a variety of creative, out-of-the-box campaigns for clients including Toyota, Harrah’s, and Overstock.com.

In addition to reaching nearly one million travelers who check bags daily, the DoubleTake Marketing platform offers a breakthrough advertising placement that provides a potentially interactive experience for the viewer. A creative Harrah’s campaign transformed a baggage carousel at Kansas City International Airport into a larger-than-life roulette wheel, prompting travelers to bet with each other on which number and color their bag would land.

DoubleTake Marketing was created when one of the company’s founders, Michael Gleeson, was waiting for his luggage and realized that everyone was staring at the carousel. DoubleTake Marketing was created to capitalize on this dull waiting time by introducing vibrant, moving ads directly into consumers’ lines of vision, offering travelers unexpected boredom relief and advertisers prime access to an ideal, affluent demographic.

For more information on DoubleTake
LinkedIn
• Zack Clark, co-founder and CEO
• Michael Gleeson, co-founder
• DoubleTake Marketing
Flickr
• All Photo Stream

YouTube
• Durability
• Fox News
• Baggage Carousel Advertising Install Process

Facebook
• Facebook.com/DoubleTake Marketing

After more than four years of working on joint client accounts, Angelsmith, Inc. and Ink Foundry have created a strategic alliance. The companies will marry Angelsmith’s design and technology expertise with Ink Foundry’s marketing capabilities to create a powerhouse team.


Effective immediately, Eric Oliver, President of Angelsmith, will assume the role of Chief Technology Officer for Ink Foundry. In this new role he will advise clients on technologies that add value to their brands; develop websites, blogs and applications to help clients better access social networks; and recommend and build solutions to expand a brand’s digital footprint.


The strategic partnership allow Ink Foundry to offer a wide range of cutting edge, technology-based social media solutions to its clients including website development, platform-specific application development, banner ads, ecommerce, and comprehensive email marketing campaigns.


Oliver is a huge proponent of using open source, low cost, high quality technology to power small business websites.


“It doesn’t need to cost an arm and a leg in order to look professional and function properly,” states Oliver. He adds, “For example, we can use the free WordPress blog engine to power corporate websites, which makes it easy for businesses to manage their sites, sets them up for future scalability, makes them visible on mobile devices, streamlines the search engine optimization process, and allows us to rapidly deploy in a matter of days.”


Founded in 2001, Angelsmith has a wide range of category experience, excelling in gaming, entertainment, travel & tourism, and restaurant industries. Some of the company’s clients include THQ, Disney, Namco Bandai Games America, and Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Eric’s Bio

Please vote for the person who you believe deserves to get their social media career started as the next Ink Foundry team member.

We reduced the list down to three from our initial intent to have 10 for you to vote on.  In the past we’ve received hundreds of email resumes; but when we ask individuals to create a video resume, the applicants dropped significantly.  Our take on it?  When you ask people to do something exceptional, like create a video resume, only the exceptional step up.

Deadline: Voting will close at midnight on Friday, Feb 12.

Round up your friends, professors, family, fans and followers and get them to vote with you!

Lauren

Rachel

Tyler

PHOTO CREDIT: April Zosia

If you would like to know more about Ink Foundry’s social media marketing employee hiring process via video application, check out our original post, The Resume Is Dead. And let us know if you have any questions.