Zephyr Conferences

The Entrepreneur Behind Zephyr Conferences

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I was recently interviewed by Leisure Group Travel magazine about starting and running Zephyr Adventures and Zephyr Conferences. Zephyr Adventures started as the world’s first inline skating tour company 22 years ago and now includes the five conferences we run here at Zephyr Conferences.

With 22 years of experience, I have some insights into starting a small company doing something you love to do. Here is the start of the article.

What Prompted You To Get Into The Travel Industry?

I was living in Europe and had traveled to dozens of countries, but I had done all of that on my own with a backpack, passport and a Let’s Go book. For the first time I had a job that gave me more money than time and I switched over on that continuum and took a bicycle tour in France. This was not something I thought I’d want to do, but I was wrong. It was very fun. I had a great time. I loved the activity, I loved the camaraderie and got to love the country, food and the wine. I had no idea that there was this business of “group tours,” so that opened my eyes.

Read the whole article at Leisure Group Travel.

Is Influencer Marketing Worth the Time and Effort?

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Is it worth your time and effort to engage in influencer marketing? Especially “micro influencer” marketing?

In November we outlined Why and How to Engage in Influencer Marketing. Here we will talk about the potential payoff.

There is no question that engaging with micro influencers takes more time. Putting all your eggs in one or a few baskets (major media personalities or publications) can reduce your time investment. But as we outlined, it might not produce exposure to the targeted, engaged audiences micro influencers can provide. And so while working with multiple, smaller influencers takes more time and effort, we think it is worth the money.

We’d like to offer our 2019 International Food Blogger Conference as an example. We did an analysis of 20 of the more successful food bloggers signed up for this year’s conference. The 20, on average, have:

  • 8,568 Twitter followers
  • 29,124 Instagram followers
  • 32,978 Pinterest followers
  • 125,424 Facebook followers

This gives a grand total of 196,094 followers per blogger or 3,921,880 in total. That does not include other platforms such as YouTube or the tens of thousands of unique website visitors these blogs receive each month.

In our opinion this is pretty dang impressive considering 1) most of these folks are blogging and using social media only part time and 2) the consuming public has an awful lot of choices for consumption of media. Bravo, food bloggers.

We think this also shows that working with even one food influencer can provide significant exposure, especially at reaching consumers who actually care about what these influencers have to say. This is even more true if you do your homework to work with influencers whose subject matter corresponds well with your brand.

And if you choose to attend and sponsor one of our influencer conferences, you can meet multiple influencers in one weekend!

Tri-Cities, Washington Hosts the Perfect Excursion

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At our three media conference we always offer pre-conference and post-conference excursions that allow attendees to engage with the local wine, beer, and food industries.

At the 2018 Wine Bloggers Conference (now the Wine Media Conference), I participated in the “Explore the Heart of Washington Wine Country” put on by Visit Tri-Cities. 17 of us spent a full day visiting this area and a perfectly planned excursion.

Winemaker Caleb Foster at J. Bookwalter

Excursions are essentially like media “fam” or familiarization tours. Like any fam tour, local organizers are tempted to pack in as much as possible, with visit after visit to local producers, restaurants, and highlights. But our conference participants much prefer a more leisurely pace that allows them to ask in-depth questions, take notes, post on social media, and truly get to know the area.

Visit Tri-Cities did this to perfection. Our agenda looked like this:

  • Travel by bus from Walla Walla where the conference took place to the Tri-Cities area.
  • Morning visit to the Goose Ridge Winery & Estate Vineyard. While everyone on the excursion had been to dozens if not hundreds of wineries, this visit was interesting because Goose Ridge is a large production winery that has an area focused on small batch production. We were able to see both the sides of the story, from watching trucks dump grapes into the bins to small fermentation barrels with glass tops for viewing. Timing was perfect as this was the only stop scheduled for the morning, so we had plenty of opportunity to ask questions of key staff.
  • Lunch and tour at J. Bookwalter, which is both a winery and restaurant. It was no coincidence that the lead winemaker, Caleb Foster, was an extremely personable and photogenic guy. Caleb spent a good hour with us, touring the facility and answering our questions. Again, this was an experienced group and so the key for us was not seeing the facility but engaging with Caleb. The restaurant staff put on an amazing meal for us, consisting of a photo-worthy buffet of small plates, each of which was identified by a small sign that called out ingredients and potential conflicts with dietary restrictions.
  • Again in the afternoon we had only one visit scheduled, a sit-down guided, blind tasting at Terra Blanca Winery. This was a fantastic item to schedule as it engaged the attendees and educated them on Red Mountain AVA wines. The level of discussion was extremely high, as befits a group of wine media professionals.
  • After checking into our hotel, which was courtesy of Visit Tri-Cities even though that was not part of their responsibilities, we went on a wine dinner cruise on the Columbia River. Visit Tri-Cities had invited some of its staff and board members to mingle with attendees. The CEO made a few comments but, otherwise, the cruise was a fun social event that wrapped up the day.

Tri-Cities knocked it out of the park. For future excursion hosts, here are a few hints:

  1. Don’t over schedule. It is better to have a limited number of in-depth encounters.
  2. Provide access to key people, ideally those who are interesting and engaging.
  3. Account for individual eating restrictions.
  4. Communicate! We suggest emailing your list of attendees at least twice in advance of the excursion to make sure they are attending and know all the logistics. We also suggest a follow-up email immediately after and another one three to six months later.
  5. Provide photos. You don’t need to pay for a professional photographer. But it is nice to have someone there taking photos and providing access to the top 5 – 10 photos after the trip.
  6. Provide social media handles, both yours and your meal and tour providers, in advance of and during the excursion.
  7. Most importantly, remember these are professionals who know their stuff. Challenge them with advanced information and expect great questions in return.

Why and How to Engage in Influencer Marketing

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“Influencer Marketing” is all the rage. It is popular – and should be – because influencers can affect how people perceive your brand and, ultimately, whether consumers purchase your product or service.

Who Are Influencers?

Influencers are anyone who tends to set the opinions of others. This could be your Aunt Jane when it comes to how to create a dinner party. We talk about “early adopters” in the world of technology who are the first to purchase new products. More recently, the term influencers has come to be correlated with those who have online communities of followers in a specific subject area: bloggers and social media users.

There are three must-have attributes for an influencer:

  1. An audience or community of people who listen to the individual
  2. Expertise or at least perceived expertise in a subject matter
  3. Credibility or the belief by the audience that the influencer is speaking the truth

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Traditional marketing is you telling your customers why they should purchase your product or service. Public Relations is different, in that someone from the media tells your story for you – ideally in a positive way but this is not in your control.

Influencer Marketing is sort of a combination of traditional marketing and traditional PR:  brands engage influencers (ala marketing) to tell their story for them (ala PR). This engagement can take the form of a sponsored post on the influencer’s site, an endorsement, social media (written, photo, or video), or other forms.

There are multiple ways to engage with influencers but I’ll divide them here into two main strategies:

Work With the Stars

Some brands have decided to work with the stars. This could include those with national fame, like Kim Kardashian who has 120 million Instagram followers. But it could also include the relative “star” of the niche you are pursuing – that wine blogger whom everyone labels as the cream of the crop. This method involves quite a bit of work:

  1. Identify potential influencers
  2. Calculate the size of their audience
  3. Determine the “quality” of their audience as it relates to you
  4. Contact influencers you believe are a good fit
  5. Create a working relationship with those influencers (ie pay them)
  6. Provide them your product or service
  7. Reinforce their social media postings with your own social media accounts
  8. Follow up to ensure they do what they say they will do

Micro-Influencers

Another strategy is to worry more about an influencer’s niche and less about his or her reach. So, in the wine world, rather than that star social media influencer, this strategy would suggest pursuing a number of wine bloggers with less reach but who have great credibility with their audience. Forbes Magazine suggests this strategy is the Marketing Force of the Future.

As an example, consider a wine blogger who has 200,000 followers and who writes about the wine industry in a fun, snarky way. His readers might or might not read every blog and social media post and might or might not pay attention to his recommendations. On the other hand, consider a wine blogger who has a following of 20,000 but who writes only about Pinot Noir. Her followers do not follow her unless they are interested in Pinot Noir and interested in what she has to say.

Engagement as a Metric

Size of the audience does matter in influencer marketing. But marketers are now looking at more than just audience size. They are looking at engagement: open and click through rates of emails; likes and shares on social media; and comments or replies to posts made by an influencer.

An influencer who has an engaged audience and who writes about a subject relevant to you is very likely to have real influence over his or her community when it comes to your brand.

Media Conferences

At our three influencer conferences (Wine Media Conference, International Food Blogger Conference, and Beer Now) you can pursue both strategies but the second is the most relevant. Yes, the stars attend and you can make relationships with them. But the real benefit of a blogger or influencer conference is to bring hundreds of micro-influencers together in the same room.

We do not limit attendance to our conferences based on their reach. (Although we do get some powerful influencers – see this post about 20 top influencers at IFBC19.) Instead, our attendees are self selected because they are passionate about their subject and it is this passion that makes them credible with their audience. As a sponsor, you can then serve your product or present your message to these folks without having to spend the time and money to analyze, segment, and narrow down to get what you hope will be the right fit. And when you have access to hundreds of influencers at the same time, if your message is good then good things can happen.

Beer Bloggers Conference and Wine Bloggers Conference Renamed

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We at Zephyr Conferences have talked about rebranding our blogger conferences for years. Eleven years ago when we started the Wine Bloggers Conference as one of the first niche blogging conferences in the world, blogging was new and hot. But even back then, change was in the air as the most debated subject at that 2008 event was whether this new thing called Twitter was going to die a quick death or change the way people communicate.

Fast forward eleven years and we are proud our wine, food, and beer blogger conferences are still going strong. Blogging, despite its many death announcements by pundits, is not going away.

Rebranding of the WBC and BBC

Yet we all recognize blogging is only one form of communicating and that our conferences also attract non-blogging writers and social media users. For years we have discussed changing the name of these three conferences and have now made major steps by rebranding two of our events.

We are rebranding the Wine Bloggers Conference as the Wine Media Conference and the Beer Bloggers & Writers Conference as Beer Now.

We have two main goals we are trying to achieve with these name changes:

  1. Better Represent Our Attendees: Almost all our attendees not only blog but also use social media. Many write about wine or beer for print publications or on contract for businesses as well. So calling the conferences “blogger” conferences is not really accurate any longer.
  2. Be More Inclusive: There are social media users and writers who communicate about wine and beer but who do not blog. While we feel the conference content is applicable to social media influencers and non-blogging writers, we want names that reflect that.

We did not make these changes in haste, nor without great consultation among our communities. The new names (and websites URLs) will be more accurate and more inclusive. We have also kept our existing graphics, the megaphone man and beer man standing on kegs, which keeps our ties to our original name.

Let there be no mistake. We love bloggers and believe blogging has drastically altered the landscape of beer and wine writing. But with these name changes, we hope to continue our support of beer and wine bloggers while opening up our conferences to others.

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