how did you find/gather people?

Now onto the data. I can’t speak for the Palate Press data as I haven’t seen it and here are some thoughts. If it’s an ad network it’ll notice traffic by serving ads for people who actually participate in that network and therefore the data exclude those who don’t participate. An example is Steve Heimoff blog http://www.steveheimoff.com/, he has no ads on his blog and wouldn’t be recognized by the Palate Press data set (right?). I believe the industry would recognize him as very influential.

When we did this study with #wbc10, we actually used the list provided by WBC website. The blog pulled was the one submitted by the registrant blogger (You may have submitted St Exupery I believe per their list) so your personal blog wouldn’t not have appeared in our list. On another note, Personal vs Company digital footprint is also a very interesting topic and how manage those two together. This was at the heart of the debate when someone like Jeremiah Owyang left Forrester Research last year.

Influence is a very hot topic these days and depending on how you look at it people may differ. Our current philosophy here at Extanz is that we consider who is blogging in specific vertical or group and measure in-links. If someone refer to your blog on their own blog, it means they paid attention to what you said and therefore influenced them. It’s our way of looking at influence. For example, Twitter alone wouldn’t be a good measure of influence by itself in my opinion hence all the debate about Klout.

Let us know your thoughts and I hope this helped – I’d love to interview you on how you transitioned and manage the personal vs company brand topic. Would you be open to this?

Not sure how I, along with various other influencers didn’t make this list. Seems inaccurate.

If the US wine industry wants to compete in the global wine industry I highly suggest the influencers READ: critics, bloggers, media, industry leadership start talking about the ENTIRE process. Consumers want to connect with the entire process and the wineries who start yanking their marketing departments out of their offices and into the vineyard may just be able to turn that into measurable ROI in terms of volume sold, customers served and the repeats who keep coming back for more and more, who eventually turn into evangelicals and tell all 9,000 friends in their social network about the farmer who grew the grapes and talked to them about the difference between Dijon clone based Chardonnay and fighting off birds with his shotgun to save the Pinot.

**Full disclosure, we fight off birds at Thomson Vineyards, but only humanely!**

IMHO some bloggers are beginning to examine pieces of the the process, but on the whole they are real busy examining what it smells like, taste likes, and the kind of barrel the rockstar winemaker chose to use and his work with the good wood campaign. Oh yeah, and the oysters they’re eating while gallivanting around to wine events across the west coast. It’s food and liquid (wine) focused not agriculture, heritage, craft, science and skill focused. I argue that it can get a bit more diverse than what it currently is. That’s all.

Cheers from Carneros!

Some food for thought: if the wine bloggers are praising a wine, are they not inherently praising the labor and care that went into the making of the wine? What do you think? Or is it important to blog about the entire process?