What Wine-Tasting Can Tell You about Content Writing

Wine aficionados flock to tastings to discover some rare gem of a vintage or sample the best bottles from a little-known winery, but numerous studies suggest that many aspiring oenophiles have trouble telling white wine from red by taste alone. In his New Yorker article, “Does All Wine Taste the Same,” Jonah Lehrer describes an experiment at the University of Bordeaux – an epicenter of wine knowledge – in which a white wine was served with just enough food coloring to masquerade as a red. The same white wine that was described as crisp and light in its natural state was perceived as “jammy’ and filled with “red fruit” notes when it wore its red disguise. These results aren’t uncommon, either; time and again, experts presented with blind taste tests do little better than chance when ranking a flight of wines from least expensive to costliest.

Here’s where the data gets interesting for SEO content creators and marketing teams: Tasters may miss the mark on expensive versus cheap wines and even red versus white, but they unerringly use a different vocabulary to describe their top and bottom picks. Inexpensive wines, or at least those that tasters believe are inexpensive, get generic descriptions; “light,” “crisp” and “sweet” are terms that crop up frequently. Wines perceived as high-end, by contrast, draw specific and evocative praise that appeals to the senses.

The same wine that got a token “crisp and fruity” description when poured from an inexpensive bottle becomes “as crisp and cool as autumn’s first apples” when a taster believes it’s an exotic and costly vintage. Tasters will expend extra effort to savor a red wine they see as valuable, delving deep into its presumed complexity and pulling out notes of coffee, chocolate or cherries to describe the richness of flavor they detect. They note the wine’s legs, its color and its body – things no one bothers to notice about a merely adequate table wine.

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Making the Most of Bing: When Google Isn’t the Only Search Engine in Your Sights

Google remains the giant among search engines, but Yahoo and Bing are gaining in popularity, especially in some demographics. For older computer users who buy plug-and-play desktop systems, the easy accessibility of Bing has made it an increasingly popular option, but the Microsoft-owned search engine has something else in its favor: it’s optimized for social media. As the new kid on the block, Bing is ready to take advantage of sweeping changes in search engine ranking factors while its older competitors have had to retro-fit to take social media data into account. Continue reading

4 R’s of Social Media Customer Service

They may not be grammatically or orthographically correct, but everyone knows the three R’s taught in school: reading, writing and ‘rithmetic. Customer service via social media has its own set of guidelines that aren’t as well known yet, but as social media occupies an ever larger chunk of customers’ awareness, these rules are critical to keep in mind. Work with your content creation team to give great customer service via social media, and you’re well on your way to mastering the lessons your competitors may have yet to learn. Continue reading

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