setting up a blog about wine for my dad
My Dad is 56. He works as a field marketing manager for a wine company and has done for about five/six years. He’s got a Mac, loves them. He’s got a great knowledge of wine and often does tastings. I accompanied him to one at Burton on Trent wine society last week and on the drive back to London we got talking about how he loved doing tastings, attending wine events etc but that he lacks a focal point to bring people back to. Sure, he has his business card with an email address and a phone number but nothing to document all the wine knowledge in his head, the tastings he’s done, the massive wine events attended and the trips abroad to see vineyards in action.
My social media brain was whirring and I thought this is a great opportunity. My dad has something interesting to say, a subject he’s passionate about and he does interesting things with that subject. I need to get my old man blogging.
We sat down on Sunday morning with a piece of A4 paper and we planned it. First of all I showed him some blogs and how they worked, he was impressed. Then I asked him a series of questions:
1. What do you want to call the blog?
2. What is it going to be about?
3. How often are you going to update it?
4. What sort of content will you be putting on?
After that we went back to the web and we looked at some other wine blogs to get a feel for what they were doing. Some were really impressive while others seemed very out of date.
Dad decided that he wouldn’t be able to update his blog that often, due to work commitments but that he would have some regular features. We chopped his content up around categories (reds, whites, roset, sparkling, wine of the month, tasting reports, insights) and he started to plan his content for the next month or so.
We got him a wordpress blog to start off with, didn’t buy a domain or hosting as he needs to get used to it all first. He put in his first post about his wine of the month, he cropped a picture and uploaded that. “This is pretty easy”, he said. After that he wrote up a tasting report from the Burton wine society tasting and he learned how to link directly to another website (in this case we were linking directly to Tesco, Laithwaites etc where you can buy the wines that he used for the tastings).
In the first 48 hours of operations the blog has had more than 50 views, Dad was astounded. Also if we put ‘walkers world of wine’ into Google it was in the number one spot. We also got Dad a twitter account and linked it up to his mobile, so now he can twitter about wine or twitter about wine events that he’s at (like all the big trade tastings).
In the space of a weekend, my Dad now has his own website and can update it easily and regularly. Of course I’ve got a log-in as an admin in case he’s got any problems, but he should be fine. He can start creating content about a subject he loves and sharing it with the world. It made me wonder, how many other experts are there out there who aren’t sharing what they do?
View Walker’s World of Wine blog or follow my old man on twitter
November 25th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Thanks for this great post, Ed. I am inspired into action.
I tried to get my Dad to engage with doing something like this, but without success. He’s an expert antique restorer and it saddens him that many of his tricks of the trade will disappear when he’s gone, because neither of his two daughters are going to carry the business on. He wants to share them with like-minded others, so they live on.
Now you have inspired me to try again, this time by getting him set up and putting the tools in his hands - as opposed to talking to him about it. He already uses a forum regularly, so it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for him.
I can’t believe that after organising NFPtweetup with a view to creating a space where nonprofits could explore social media through experience (i.e. see how others are using it, see apps in action, exchange views actively), I have overlooked the fact that I should be taking the same approach closer to home!
November 26th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Sounds like your Dad could have a lot to share, could do some excellent skills videos with him and post them up? Like ‘How to restore some very old and ancient thing with old a spade for help’!
I took the sit with him and set it up with him approach, we sat down first with a blank sheet of paper, I asked him some questions and then we set the blog up. He seems to really like it - but you need to be there on the end of the phone when he gets things wrong! Or have an admin log-in like I do so I can log-in, fix it and tell him where he went wrong.