Sandy from the Australian Wine Society of Toronto blog posted a comment to my first posting about Stormhoek’s Blogging Success. She points to a post she did this past November which quotes an email exchange with an Australian winemaker who shared his terror of blogging:
It would be going too far to say it’s a mystery to me (I have even read a blog a few times when someone I knew was doing one) but the idea of doing one ourselves fills me with horror. We are at full stretch to put out a (printed) newsletter a couple of times a year and are just about to put out a brief electronic update a little more frequently, so another “chore” isn’t what we want.
Sandy goes on to make some great points about the differences between print and blogging and how much easier it is to get people to read your RSS feed than gaining permission to send them your email newsletter, but I would have probably just said that blogging is the cheapest market research you will likely ever see. That’s because blog readers respond in near real-time and are likely to talk about your wine on their blog and off-line with friends. Understanding, and courting, these potential evangelists is one of the benefits of blogging.