Walid Romaya (@princeofwine) is a San Diego wine connoisseur and global ambassador for wine. After founding the Wine Twitter group, he now finds himself at the center of the Twitter wine world as well. You can learn more about Walid (and his upcoming TV show) at his wine blog Prince of Wine.

Adam Loving:

Hi, well, it’s good to meet you. I have this vision of you out on some winery somewhere, is that the case?

Walid Romaya:

I’m just a wine lover and trying to spread the message about wine.

Adam:

I’ve got your Prince of Wine website up here which looks great. Tell me a little bit about this site and a little bit more about what you do.

Walid:

I started this site because I love wine and my immediate audience just really was kind of my peers that are in the wine world, that already understood about wine and that kind of thing. And since then I’ve decided that it’s kind of… I’m preaching really just to the choir, so to speak, and I wanted to go beyond that.
So, I think what I finding a lot of people say, "Well, we’re intimidated by wine and we’d like to go to your site, but we really don’t know anything about wine." So, I’m in the process of changing my message to make it more open to wine, food, travel. More for the lifestyle of healthier lifestyle, wine and moderation, but also about traveling and about food – make it more appealing to the general public.

Adam:

So, what’s your background and how did you get into this?

Walid:

When I was 13 years old, for some reason I was in a bookstore and I found a book about how to make wine, "500 Ways to Make Wines at Home," and I gave it to my dad and I said, "Make some wine," and he did. And I drank a little bit of it, but then I eventually ended up in San Diego – I’m originally from Iraq – and I ended up in San Diego. In the 80s, my brothers they still do own a bunch of liquor stores in San Diego. What happened is they get invited to a lot of trade tastings. And every week, they get a lot of trade tastings.
They brought me along with them, so through them for the last 27 years, I’ve been tasting so much wine; I’ve tasted thousands and thousands of different kinds of wine. And developed my palate and I’m finally, just in the last couple of years I thought, "You know, I’m going to do something about. I keep talking about it; I might as well just create a blog." And now we’re also launching a television series called "Prince of Wine." We’re going to shoot next week at those wineries I just mentioned earlier. I’ll be in [inaudible 02:49] next Monday for a week with my crew.

Adam:

Wow, that sounds great; I’ll watch for it. So, yeah, I wanted to get some ideas from you on what you’ve been doing with Twibes. So, over on the wine Twibe, you’ve got like 370 people signed up, which is very impressive.

Walid:

Good, I don’t know in this wide world, if that’s good or bad.

Adam:

It’s really good. It’s been interesting seeing this play out. Twibes itself is a pretty new site; there’s probably 20,000 Twibes but a very small percentage of those really have very many members. I think the top Twibe is maybe photography with just over 4000. But, anything with more than 50 members is really pretty impressive. So, I don’t know how much of that is your hard work or how much is just luck from having a great name, or a combination of both. I’d be interesting in what you thought about that.

Walid:

Well, I think it’s a little bit of both. When I first found out about Twibes… I mean, I’m still excited about it but I’ll tell you all sorts of comments about where I would like to see some improvements. But, what I like about it is I thought, "Well, all right Twitter is… You post a message and it gets lost in the huge avalanche of tweets." And this was a great thing so it kind of narrows it down into more of the… You’re like tweeting to your own people that are really interested about it. They look for those tweets within Twibe. So, I like that concept a lot, I think it’s a great idea.
And yes, I was lucky because I found about Twibes early on and I actually registered three names – wine, food, and cigars. I was surprised that food didn’t take off because there was another one called Foodey. I cannot ignore really the food and the cigar; cigar I did a little promotion, not much. But, I started tweeting a lot about – in the beginning I did that a lot more. I have to be honest with you, I haven’t much of Twibing lately, but in the beginning, I did promote it quite a bit. And I kept sending out tweets saying, "I just joined a Twibe, check it out." And, "Check this Twibe out." And pretty soon I started getting more people and that’s where it’s at.

Adam:

Right, great. As you’re experience, I’ve noticed the same thing with Twibes in general, that these groups form very quickly, but then very few Twibes actually bring a lot of people back day after day. And I don’t know if that’s a normal thing because really the drive is to meet other people with the same interests. Or if it’s because Twitter is so light weight that you just communicate on Twitter or what have you, and that may be perfectly fine.
But, I think, I’m guessing there’s probably a few little things that I can do that will make the Twibe page itself more valuable. For example, continuing to improve how many tweets we find so that when you come to Twibes, you get the feeling that you’re actually finding all of the tweets. And maybe slightly more useful email notifications; not spammy but just to let you know when someone has replied to you on the Twibe page and actually include the tweet, instead of just telling you the number and things like that. Is there anything else in particular that you’ve noticed that you think we can do better?

Walid:

Well, I think the main one I have is about the Twibe post, it’s done based on three tags that you as the founder put in; you know, me as the founder puts in. And that does limit, because then you cannot say, well like in my case, wine. Well, there are so many great tags for wine, there’s obviously wine, or winery. And in my case I put wine, winery, or Cabernet because Cabernet is the most popular. But, I mean, if someone posts about Pinot, or Melodic, you don’t mention the world wine is gone. You won’t see that post. I assume that these tags bring in the post. Is that how it works?

Adam:

Yeah, it cross references the tags with the members, which is part of the reason why it isn’t always up to date because it has to do a bunch of different searches. I’m actually using Twitter on the back ends to do about one search for every five or six people with each of those terms.
It does a lot of searches. Yeah, at the end of the day, that is just a search string and there is no reason why that can’t be longer. I just tried to make it simple. For people who get it and understand what is going on like yourself, yeah we can extend that to be any number of words or you can put ‘or this and this’ so you can put whatever you want in there so that’s a great idea.

Walid:

The other item was, and I have not tried this yet, can you do a specific slide post that doesn’t go to twitter, it just stays within the members?

Adam:

Yeah, yeah, there is a check box there to just post to the page. So, of course, the nice thing is that that doesn’t make your tweet stream too noisy but does mean that only the people who visit the page will see it. But, that’s one of the things where I can send an email notification that sends those tweets to the people that really want them.

Walid:

So where it says ‘Tweet box – what would you like to say?’ is that, oh I see, so you just…

Adam:

By default it goes to Twitter and the Twibe but if you check the box it just goes to the Twibe.

Walid:

OK got it OK. If you don’t check the box, it will go to both. My point is you can do it there and it will show up immediately on the Twibe post.

Adam:

Right.

Walid:

OK. Good. To me, that was the only issue with me was the tags or its limits. How we get to have more content there by increasing the number of tags.

Adam:

How about twitter or your website? Are there other tools regardless of Twines that you use or found useful? Are you a TweetDeck kind of guy or an iPhone kind of person or a Blackberry person?

Walid:

Well, I was a blackberry person, but I just switched to iPhone a couple of months ago. I like it a lot more now. I put it on my website a program where my tweets show up on my website. Such an application you just download it. So, when I tweet you can see my latest tweet by going to my website as well.
As far as me using on my iPhone, I have downloaded quite a few of these system Twitter platforms. I have Tweety for example, Twitter Phone, just a few of them. I tend to use Tweety most of the time. There is Tweet Deck, I have Tweet Phone, there is Twitterrific, another one. I find Tweety, maybe because it’s the one closest to my first page, that’s probably why I use it the most.

Adam:

Yeah, I have tried that one. It seems to be one of the faster ones. I’ve been working with another developer here to possibly do an iPhone version of Twibes, which would just hopefully be a light weight easy thing to get the tweets from the Twibe directly. And then, the other thing I’ve been working on is a little job snippet to put the Twibe on your web page or you can run it on a second page on your site somewhere which might be interesting.

Walid:

How many Twibes do you have now? You mentioned it earlier.

Adam:

There is just over 20 thousand I believe, but the vast majority of those are one or two members where people founded something but really didn’t know that to do next. There is probably only, the thousands with the most members probably make up 99 percent of all of the people using it.
It’s a real testament to the community you’ve built on your site. Hopefully it’s kind of amplifying that effect by making you the center of the wine universe on Twitter.

Walid:

Yeah, I hope so. One thing I did actually, because I’m getting ready to try to reposition myself as an expert, I’m trying to create my own personality as an expert in the field and try to monetize that as speaking engagements or maybe writing a book, I’m not sure.
One of the things I talked to this other lady a couple of hours ago, she’s like a Twitter social media expert, she positioned herself and she is a very good example. She created herself out of nothing. She positioned herself as an expert. She was telling me you really need to start doing a lot more replies.

You can just broadcast stuff which I’ve been doing. I’ve been tweeting just saying look at this wine or look at this photo but I don’t really comment on other peoples work. I don’t go out and do at replies on other people. That’s how you have to do it so you can build up your following. If you don’t do that, you’re just like a radio station, just broadcasting.

Adam:

Right. Yeah, it takes time that’s for sure.

Walid:

It does take time. I’m going to start doing some of that. Have you thought about Twibes like kind of squishing the number of groups down to make it more relevant for people who are first time to Twibe and might get too lost.

Adam:

Yeah, basically I just want to give an overview of the top Twibes there which we kind of do today. There may be a couple more categories to add to make it more evenly balanced but then it will probably just be search. I think most people discover Twibes through their friends and joining through the tweets they see on Twitter from the people they follow.
I don’t know that landing on Twibes.com, other than if you have in mind to start a Twibe and you are going to look around and see what is already there. I don’t know, it doesn’t see to me that a significant portion of people joined by landing on Twibes.com. It’s more that someone would have found it, someone would have tweeted about it and then they sort of see that circulating around the network.

Walid:

I’m amazed that there’s a librarian Twibe.

Adam:

[laughs] I know. I just started this in March or April this year and it just has taken shape so quickly and completely unpredictably and to have all these random interest groups… And it’s a specialist type of interest too. It has to be sort of a neutral interest. It can’t be "My Real Estate" – whatever. Your agenda can’t be too strong. It has to be common people with a common interest finding each other because if it’s the other way around then nobody joins. People can sort of sense that from a mile away.

Walid:

Yeah. There is one called "DU-BIST Terrorist." I don’t know what that means. I have no idea what that is.

Adam:

No, I haven’t seen that one.

Walid:

Yeah, it’s called "DU" – it’s on the top one, on the Internet. I’m on it right now. DU-BIST-Terrorist; they have 118 members under the Internet.

Adam:

"Du Bist Terrorist"… Yeah. Luckily these haven’t gotten too far out of hand. Oh, looks like German maybe?

Walid:

It looks German, yeah. It’s interesting.

Adam:

I’ll have to look it up and make sure that they’re not offending anybody. [laughs] It’s a fine line to walk.

Walid:

So Adam, you started this in March?

Adam:

Yeah, yeah. So, I’m kind of a serial entrepreneur and experimenter with these sorts of social websites. This is the latest in a series but it’s definitely been my most successful experiment so far, due to people like yourself.

Walid:

Oh, well, thank you. I get a lot of direct messages from you about what you’ve been doing. I’m up to speed on my Twitter; I get those, which that’s good.

Adam:

Hopefully not too many. [laughs] Great. Any other questions or thoughts here?

Walid:

No, I think it’s good, it’s great. You’ve done a great thing. I like it; it’s good. Just one that I didn’t mention: when I started the wine group, I had a choice where to put it, under which grouping. Whether it’s Lifestyle – I looked at where does it belong? And so I initially put it under Lifestyle and it was right at the top, close to the top under Lifestyle.
Then I think a few other things – you started going on Lifestyle and there was a lot of things like, for example, "gluten-free lifestyle." But, I don’t really see a lot of food and wine stuff under lifestyle, so I switched to…

Adam:

Yes, it’s number two in food and cooking.

Walid:

Food and cooking, yeah. So, there are some grey areas, because wine is kind of a grey area. Is it lifestyle, is it food? And I went online on the Lifestyle section and there are some wine…like there was "Women Wine" – very small groups, one or two or three members.
I decided it would be better to shift it to food and cooking and maybe get it to get more membership by tagging it under another popular one. So, at the time I looked at "Foodies" and Foodies was getting double mine. I thought with my membership at least I’m going to place second behind Foodies. So why don’t I try to put it under Foodies so that people who go to Foodies maybe go to join Wine.

So, it’s like the equivalent of a slip stream on a bicycle race. You’re trying to get some draft out of them.

Adam:

Yeah, I mean, did you have any feeling whether that was successful or not? I don’t have any metrics, to be honest, on whether people come in through a category or whether… I mean most of my stats show that people come from Twitter when they see that a friend of theirs has joined and then they join too.
So, I don’t know about the subtlety of switching categories, if that would bring any big changes.

Walid:

I think that only really works if you know you’re going to place on your landing page with the groups. In other words, like how I do right now. I’m right behind without having to click on "Food and Cooking" and look at the 179…
Foodies is one, Wine is second and Coffee is third. So I think if I was in that mode, I like food and cooking and everything, I would probably join them all, the first… I think that has helped.

Adam:

My secret agenda here too is making them better categorized. It helps people find them; it also helps Google. Eventually, I’m hoping that when people search for "Twitter wine group" or "Wine group Twitter" or some combination of that, or "Twitter wine" that this Twibe will rank high and that’s what they’ll land on. And so having it categorized as food and whatever it was…

Walid:

Oh, and cooking.

Adam:

Food and cooking. Those are also hints to Google as to what this is about as it tries to read this page, which is full of Twitter gibberish and figure out how to categorize this page on the Internet. So, that’s the other reason for requesting that people pick a category.

Walid:

Yeah, I don’t know much about search engine technology, but when you add a slash, like food/cooking, is Google only going to find that segment if it’s typed exactly like that – food/cooking? Or will it find it just as food or cooking by itself?

Adam:

In this case I think I should be… I lost it again. There we go. You click on the 179 more; I’ve got a food-cooking. It should be smart enough to recognize that as two words. On the page where I’ve got all the food and cooking Twibes listed, the URL is food-cooking. Yeah, the slash isn’t ideal, but I believe it will be smart enough to figure it out.

Walid:

OK.

Adam:

Well, great, I really appreciate the time and this has been very helpful. Anything comes to your mind about what you wish Twibes could do, just shoot me an email at adam@twibes.com and I’d love to hear from you.

Walid:

Well, great. Good work. I’m a big supporter of yours and I’ll start Twittering more and mentioning your Twibes.

Adam:

Oh, thanks a lot. I’ll be looking for the TV show too.

Walid:

Yeah, thank you very much.

Adam:

All right, have a great afternoon. Thanks a lot.

Walid:

Bye-bye.

Adam:

Bye.