Lynda Abbott: October 2010 Archives

As Director of all things IT here at Dry Creek Vineyard, part of my job is to keep the winery up to date technologically speaking.  I attended a Wine Industry Technology Symposium a few months ago and came away with some fascinating information and a new avenue for utilizing technology here at the winery.

Some of the facts presented included:

• 59% of the population has a mobile device
• 75% are over the age of 24
• Largest group of users is age 35-54
• 35% watch videos
• SEARCH is the #1 activity on phones (mobile search point of sale)
• Majority of visits “in store setting” using phone to shop (get information, pricing)
• By 2020, 50 BILLION devices will be wirelessly connected to the Internet
• By 2015 there will be 119 Billion in sales from the Mobile Web
• There are over 200 wine applications for the iPhone

As a business, the implications are obvious and can't be ignored.  While I can handle the creation of a mobile website, the mobile device application creation is much more complex.  We started the process of meeting with companies to talk about building an application for Dry Creek Vineyard.

As a family owned and operated winery, we quickly realized that there are other goals to be considered in developing our wine application that were important to us:

• Engage loyal customers
• Engage our customers at the point of need
• Be where our customer is
• Customer relationship management
• Provide something of value to our customers

Having figured all that out, we were feeling pretty good about our progress, until we started trying to define what "something of value to our customers" would be!  Obviously, having information quickly and readily available to our customers via their mobile device was a plus, but what could we provide our customers in an app that would make it worthy of download and continued use?

We all agreed that we needed to come up with an idea for our application that would make it valuable and useful.  We talked about food pairings for our wines.  Or, maybe the application would include recipes for our wines so our customer could buy wine and dinner accoutrements on the fly from the convenience of their phone.  The more we talked, the less sure we were about what we could do to make our app worthy of creation.

Then, I had a brainstorm.  I thought, why not ask Wilma's audience?  Surely, they would have some cool ideas about what they might find useful in a wine app.  So, readers of all things Wilma, now is your chance to "sound off." 

Lynda Abbott, Director of IT Services