Brewing social alcohol
By Simon Young,
Luke Nicholas brews a very networked beer—and he has the fanbase to prove it
You can’t get much more social than a nice cold one on a Friday afternoon. Brewer and closet geek Luke Nicholas brews Epic Pale Ale and markets it using, among other things, blogging, Facebook and micro-blogging platform, Twitter. Here’s how he keeps up.
Are you building your own community, or joining existing communities?
I’m slowly building an Epic community through a cross-section of the more popular social networks and networking tools, such as RSS feeds for the blog, Twitter and Facebook profile updates. Because it’s evolving so fast, it’s a matter of growing with the fans and moving to the next technology. I think it’s better to use the more open structures of online networks rather than confining people to something proprietary.
Harness what’s out there and go with the flow, move with the crowd. People change social networks as their friends move. A year ago MySpace was it but now all those Epic fans on MySpace are using Facebook. This is bound to change again in 2008, maybe for the likes of Google’s Open Social platform.
How do you manage all these different points of contact? Is time management an issue?
Managing the multiple points of contact is time consuming right now, but I usually find that when I identify a problem or bottleneck for getting a task done to communicate I can just Google the problem, or check out Lifehacker.com, or listen to one of my regular podcasts and someone will have created a hack for the solution.
“It’s a matter of growing with the fans and moving to the next technology. I think it’s better to use the open structures of online networks rather than confining people to something proprietary”
I could be doing more to communicate to my online audience but I need to balance that with getting in front of new people via doing beer tastings, sponsorship, events, and festivals.
I am trying to consume as much as I can when it comes to what is the next big thing. I sign up to everything that looks like it has potential so I can try out the service and see if it will have any legs. A lot of time I find if it’s hard to use or doesn’t really fill any need I have, it’s unlikely to fill a need for my target audience.
Do you have any examples of people in your community giving you feedback or ideas that you never would have thought of?
Feedback is great and I find I get it in different forms. I was at a beer tasting a few months ago and met a couple of people I have as friends on Facebook and they commented on how they love to see what I am up to with Epic Beer every day. I didn’t even realise these people were following what I’m doing so closely.
Another example is posting something on Twitter that strikes a nerve and gets you heaps of great replies from people following you. It’s all very fragmented right now but it’s evolving quickly as people are learning to integrate it into their lives, and to stay in contact with their networks.
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