Strade del Vino and the Web, an impossible love story

Strade del Vino and the Web, an impossible love story

At the International Wine Tourism Conference 2012  in Perugia Donatella Cinelli Colombini and Antonio Gnassi analyze Italian Strade del Vino web sites

 Read for you by Donatella Cinelli Colombini

Firstly the tourist offices were checked and 9 Strada del vino: Barolo, Franciacorta, Piana Rotaliana, Costa degli Etruschi, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, Sagrantino, Castel del Monte, vini dell’Irpinia e dell’Etna.

I begin with a comment regarding the tourist offices: basically in only 3 Strade del vino in centralItalyhad an information point for the public managed directly, all the others depend on the local authorities or don’t have one at all. The contents of the web sites are generally rich but with many critical aspects: often they are only in Italian and with no information regarding wines. Our analysis reveal other problems which are deeper routed and more serious.

The tourist offer is based on the product and not on the client. But only if the Italian Strade will be able to satisfy the necessities and the client’s trip motivations will they be able to beat the competition from the French Spanish and German ones. Which means that they must offer itineraries for couples, families, wine lovers, those who adore luxury,

the young, homosexuals …….This will also be possible if they will structure their offer according to the length of the visit: a few hours, a short break, a holiday….

And last but not least, if they will explain how to get from the clients home to the winery, adapting the explanation to the new geography of the low cost airports nearby.  The perceived and the realistic accessibility will, in the next few years, be the key to touristic success.

Unfortunately the Italian Strade del vino are difficult to understand even in their names. The wine lover fromTorontowill be able to sense that the Bolgheri wines are in the Strada del Vino Costa degli Etruschi? And those wanting to visit wineries making Teroldego, will they know that they are in the Strada del vino della Piana Rotaliana? And once they have discovered this will they be put off when the open the web site and find apples and asparagus? At present wine is a co-protagonist presented together with country inns, handicraft and monuments with an effect of lack of clarity and efficiency.

The most serious thing however is the lack of a National portal for the Strade del vino which presents the in an organized way grouping them according to the services offered (those that are equipped and those that are not) and the main characteristics:  Strade dei grandi vini, Strade dei vini e dei sapori, Strade dei vini e della natura and so on.   In fact those searching via  Google, find many many Strade del vino among which it is very difficult to get oriented, they are also very similar one to the other. It would be indispensable, that they appear different one from another. A National direction would allow communication and marketing actions which were advantageous for the whole sector but most of all would permit the cataloguing of the service s on offer in a homogeneous manner that could be accumulated in only one data base.

To my evaluations which do reward the willingness of the individuals, I must underline the difficulties of working without a National direction, followed the analysis by Antonio Gnassi. My professor friend began by noticing some evident technical errors: there are web sites for Strade del vino that use Flash technology and they propose to be apt for iPhone and iPad whereas it is well known that these two technologies don’t dialogue. There are also web sites who declare their presence on Twitter but from 2010 to today they have only two tweets. From these facts Antonio gets the cue for a real lesson regarding article marketing and on how to obtain the ROI – Return On Involvement.

From this point on arrives the description of the proper functions of a press office “social media” and how the contents of

a message – necessarily made up of text, images, video and audio – is not sufficient to render it visible if there is no use of key words and an effective marketing action on the social medias.

Let us conclude with words of encouragement: willingness is evident in the work done and is going to be useful in completing the last phase of this project and to win over the  “lizard brain” concept that stops us from carrying out actions when we are  scared of making a mistake. So let’s just jump in and win!