It was bound to happen sooner or later, as I pointed out yesterday during a panel discussion, the wine industry is only a few years behind the rest of the world when it comes to social media, and this is a fabulous fact, as compared to other aspects of the business!About 200 people assembled in Sonoma for the first US wine bloggers conference.Bloggers being Bloggers, there were lots of opinions. In addition to a panel on Technology, I got to express a few of my own opinions at a talk on “Blogging for your Business”, where I proposed some new ways of thinking about how wineries should communicate. Some of the topics I covered were: “The weirdness of wine speak”, “Wine Industry Narcissism”, “The paradoxical commoditization of the Premium Wine Market”, “The Winery Narrative” and of course, “Wine Silos”. Just email me if you want a copy of the presentation.Our buddy GaryV, the man who has a better than average chance of being one of the first to leverage his internet fame to “Real” fame, talked on Friday night, and before our very eyes he morphed from the guy who does WLTV, into the Tony Robbins of the wine world. His shtick is good, especially after a bit of vino. BTW, he didn’t talk about wine…..[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYJ6pjmnn3A&eurl=http://www.inside-sonoma.com/wine-bloggers-vaynerchuk-vs-sonoma-county/[/youtube]Everyone was very impressed that on Friday the Twitterers at the event were able to get #WBC as the number two ranked term on Twitter after Obama. I’m not sure what to think, but they WERE gaming the system.There was a good vid done by Tim Zahn, of the Sonoma County Tourism Bureau, who spoofed on Gary. For a trade group, these guys are really with it. Ahem, it would be good if the folks at Wines of South Africa would take note, loosen up, and let their hair down.