Eve posted posted about China and the growth of the luxury market, including wine about two years ago. According to the luxury lifestyle blog Luxuo, “China is expected to be the world’s seventh largest wine consumer by 2013 as the nation’s thirst for vintages continues to grow amid an economic boom.”

A new challenge has presented itself in the past few months. After over 15 years experience on the web, I though I’d solved a lot of problems, but we have never had a reason to attempt to serve content into China until recently. After a Chinese-language site opened, we were getting reports of loading times so slow the sites were completely unusable. We visited Shanghai in May 2010, and it’s true that almost everything you look at it is abysmally slow from the average DSL connection. A site that uses Flash and video is not likely to load enough to be seen.

Recently, I did some tests in this area and found more complexity than I expected. The Internet in China, I’m told by one Chinese company, is not interconnected in the same way (peering) that most other countries employ. This means that even if you have hosting in Hong Kong (which you know is considered to be outside the mainland Internet) or in a single city like Shanghai, it still does not ensure decent delivery into other Chinese provinces.

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) exist for this reason, so we did more tests with 4 different CDN and found they all worked very well indeed – except in China! We tested Amazon Cloudfront CDN in Singapore and found it was no better than their US-based servers in delivery to China. There are specialized CDN for Mainland China (Akamai, ChinaCache, but these can be very costly. Most of our smaller producers whose wines are distributed in China will not be able to afford a five-digit monthly invoice to be present there. Even the less modest ones gasp when apprised of the costs involved.

We’re currently working on assembling specialized resources as a solution to this very real problem: Getting a wine web site to be not only visible, but usable. Even non-Flash, non-video heavy sites have a serious speed problem in Shanghai and other provinces, even if they show decent performance in, say, Hong Kong. Other complexities include licensing from the Chinese government, Chinese domain names (.cn,.com.cn), Chinese DNS and a presence of some kind at an address in China. We expect prices to drop significantly in the next two years, but until then, getting your web content into China will be tough going.

But what web site, what for and what use? My last post on “Does a winery need a web site?” generated interesting and well thought out comments from wine educators, winery owners and other readers.

First of all, it seems everybody thought a winery needed a web site. Some said a web site was the “brick and mortar” piece of their communication. I would call it a “click and mortar” but let’s not digress on semantics! The web site is usually seen as the place to send wine consumers, wine critics, educators and web users from Facebook, Twitter or any other social media to get information. I agree 100% on that point. But a web site can’t be “static” or it looses all its strength and usability. A “static” web site will lose visibility on any search engine if it is not regularly updated. If a once a year update is considered the norm, let’s forget about having a site. The site needs to be energized by news, tweets, videos and/or blog posts linked to social media.

Second, I didn’t get any comment on what kind of web site is needed. As for content, we usually see on most web sites a short presentation of the winery, the wines, a contact form and a news page (sometimes rather dated). It’s all good and well but what’s the point for the consumer? If a consumer knows and likes the wines, or if he heard about the wines from a friend or a forum/blog post, he’d like to be able to find and buy them. No information on the web site of the winery is no help. He’ll have to rely on the new search tools, like snooth.com, wine-searcher.com, cellar-tracker.com or cruvee.com. What about if he/she is not located in the country of the winery? What about if he/she is not familiar with those tools? All those questions are raised by the way most wineries’ web site are designed. They’re not consumer friendly. Most wineries design the site they want, not the site they need.

What I meant when I asked: “Does a winery need a web site?” was: if a winery has a web site, it has to be designed to help the consumer, not to look pretty or carry only information. A web site has to create a link between the winery and the consumer – through history, presentation of the team and description of the wines, of course – but also and mainly by helping the consumer to be a part of the life of the winery. Not only by giving him/her the way to buy the wine, but also to keep in touch with the winery and its team through the web site, the blog and all social media available. A web site has to address the consumers’ needs in order to fulfill its purpose. If it doesn’t, why invest in a web site?

For many years, the success of a communication strategy on the Web was measured by the traffic on the site or the click on a banner. It might not be still true. Because of the growing importance of social media, blogs and micro chats, it is more important for a winery to be present on the Net through all those channels.

I was talking to a winery manager a few weeks ago. He was complaining that all his actions on Facebook, Twitter and other social media didn’t bring much traffic to his web site. We looked at the mentions his winery was getting on the Net and we agreed it was more important to be talked about than to get traffic on the web site. Why is that? Consumers are all over the Internet. They might not keep in mind a specific brand. but when this brand’s name appears on the Net in their favorite blog or forum, or is mentioned on Twitter, it reminds them of the brand. Q.E.D!

What does it mean for a winery? It means… a lot of writing. It’s not an easy job when you are supposed at the same time to harvest, make the wines, sell them or present them at Pro-Wein or Vinexpo Hong Kong, to be also blogging, interfacing on Facebook, filming your latest event or chatting on Twitter. But it is worth the trouble. It is rewarding and a lot more efficient than a simple site.

A well-established winery could be considering it doesn’t need a new web site as long as the current one is kept up to date and running smoothly. What’s wrong with such an idea? First of all, the winery itself evolved along the years: brands are created or changing, images are evolving and drinkers are moving on other wines or even countries. Then, the technology itself changed drastically over the last two or three years: the rise of social networks, the technological progress with the easy access to video and audio, the will of the consumers to become actors of the industry are important parameters to include in your communication and marketing strategy. Last but not least, a winery needs to heard seen and heard in order to sell its wines.

But what kind of web site should be designed? The first consideration should always be for the target audience. Are there age, cultural or national factors to take into account? Does the audience use the Internet frequently or are they going to be reading your site as a printout from an assistant?

What are visitors looking for? How obvious is the path to various features of the site? The usual print wisdom is to present information in a “who, what, when where” format. Naturally this has to be attractive, adapted to the “web space” and use an original approach. Straying too far from the expected navigation logic will limit and frustrate visitors.

Sometimes company graphics need to be modified to work well with electronic media. Only a specialist can determine if this is needed and how to do it. Specific localization can also be color-dependent. The obvious example are sites in China which look nothing like their American or European counterparts. At the regional level, sometimes colors are associated with a team or a well-known existing local brand.

In 1995 it was enough to be on the Web. In 2000, sites became more dynamic and today, interactivity and evolutive content have become part of the user’s expectations. On the other hand, web visitors have also become more wary about leaving their email or other data on sites they visit. Also impatient with unwanted advertising or useless information, they are installing filters that remove most of these. The user wants to be master of the experience, not be led around on a guided tour.

How do we know what the user is looking for?

Experience has shown that a number of basic principles apply whatever the subject matter or target audience of a web site. However, no one can foresee all the possible combinations of a visitor’s experience, computer hardware and software and connection speed. This is why we use traffic analysis and post-production usability testing. These and other tools help us evaluate how successful we have been in meeting visitors’ needs.

Beware of trying to transpose your own vision of what a site should be and concentrate on your audience. Success on the web comes from matching or exceeding the visitor’s expectations, presenting engaging content in an agreeable looking and easy to navigate manner.

Are there many web sites answering to those very basic principles? I’d be interested in hearing from you who go regularly on wineries’ web sites: what do you like? What do you dislike? What could be improved?

I just read the paper of Joe Ray on “Wines: Is”made in France” enough?” for brandchannel.com. It started me thinking about wine brands in relation to quality – which seems to be the basic rule, according to Ray, for becoming a French wine brand. It happened I just had dinner in a very traditional French restaurant in Paris and was served 4 rather unknown but outstanding French wines – the 5th one, Château Simone, being world-famous. Let’s name my hidden gems: Champagne Philippe Gonet NV, 2007 Château de Beaupré – a white wine from Provence, 1996 Château Laplagnotte-Bellevue, a red Grand Cru from Saint-Emilion and a Beaumes de Venise from Domaine de la Pigeade.

Those wines were wonderful and we all did enjoy them tremendously. Back to my office, I searched for their web sites: Champagne P. Gonet has a wonderful site in French and a very ugly one in English. Beaupré doesn’t have a web site at all: worse, the keywords “château de Beaupré Provence” brought me to a wonderful B&B in Provence and I almost forgot my initial search. Laplagnotte-Bellevue and Domaine de la Pigeade have decent French web sites but not available in any foreign languages. Still searching for information, I found some tasting notes of on line wine stores in France but nothing in English and no information on the wines.

I do agree quality is important for a wine brand. It is even a prerequisite but it’s not enough to “brand” your name in the customer’s mind. How does a potential consumer get in touch with those wonderful wineries? How does the winery inform its customers of its new releases or news? What is the communication strategy being the brand building of those wines? I don’t know and I care. They are worth more exposure. They have to sell the typicity of their terroir but also a story and a very unique taste. They have a story to tell and they should be heard.