Snooth’s introduction of the iPhone Wine Pro app gives wine lovers a fun tool that simultaneously permits Snooth to amplify its serious content marketing strategy by expanding crowd sourced wine content to drive search traffic and wine sales revenue. Snooth’s wide network of wine retailers benefit from the site’s consumer traffic of wine review readers and writers and Snooth takes a cut of the wine sold through it’s platform. More than half of their roughly 200k monthly unique visitors show up through organic search, so Snooth has lots to gain to make it fun and easy for consumers to search and add reviews, always expanding the site’s content.
With the app, you can snap a photo of the wine bottle, enter the vintage and type of wine, and quickly get to the reviews and network of sellers of that wine. You can easily add your own review too. Sound like fun? I snap a lot of photos of wine bottles for the WineZag blog, but never as organic search criteria. Will more consumers access Snooth and its sellers to search, review, and buy wine because they have been enabled to skip half the keyboard entry process and replace it with the cool new TinEye image recognition technology?
I am just not sure. But Snooth has a lot to gain, since the power of their crowd sourced content strategy is central to their audience creation and revenue model. More content, more visitors, more fees on the wine sales generated for retailers. For now the app will be interesting to play with, but it remains to be seen whether it is little more than a one week wonder, demoted off my iPhone screen for not adding value to the process cycle of searching, buying, and reviewing fine wine. If successful, Snooth will have pulled off just one more example of the power of creating and using content to drive positive business outcomes.