What Happens When You Go Viral

From a regional newspaper story to a TV spot on a NBC Affiliate to a live radio interview on NPR to SOLD OUT!

The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses. ― Malcolm X

Don’t underestimate the power of the press…

Going viral doesn’t just mean to spread quickly across social media platforms. It can also mean to spread quickly across conventional media platforms. I know. I just had it happen to me.

Three weeks ago, I wrote a post—Getting Some Good Ink!—about a grassroots media campaign I had launched in order to sell the bulk of my Eclipse Malbec in time for the April 8th total solar eclipse. By the time you read this post we’ll be winging our way to southern Texas to witness that very eclipse, weather allowing.

But in those intervening three weeks the most extraordinary thing happened. Let me set the stage. As described in my earlier post, the plan behind my humble media campaign was to identify all the towns across the U.S. from Texas to Maine that lay in the path of totality for the upcoming eclipse. Then I identified which of these towns had a local newspaper or were serviced by a regional one, either as a print edition, print/online hybrid, or just an online presence. Then I tried to find out, wherever possible, who was the managing editor.

Once I had that entire database in hand I pitched every prospect a unique story idea about the eclipse—that being the whimsical fact that wine has long been used to commemorate celestial events and that I had made such a wine for this upcoming eclipse. My query includes photographs of my Eclipse Malbec and of me making the wine. It also included a pre-written story (by me) that they were free to use as is or edited into their own style.

This pitch worked modestly, more so amongst smaller papers with limited staff and resources. But I also attracted a couple of larger publications, the most notable being Forbes magazine. And I got a wonderful story in my own hometown paper.

And, every time a story got published, I received a few orders for wine.

It’s always good to get some local ink. Keeps your neighbors in line! Click on the newspaper image above to enlarge it to a size that you can read.

…or that of the squeaky wheel

One newspaper that I really had my sights on for a couple of reasons was The Southern, which is the main publication for Carbondale and surrounding hamlets in southern Illinois. This was the only, and extremely rare, place along the April 8th path of totality that had also been in totality for the 2017 Great American Eclipse—a “lightning striking twice” circumstance that only happens on earth every 375 years on average.

I figured these eclipse “veterans” would be especially receptive to my story, and to the additional local angle that my family had roots in southern Illinois that went back for generations to 1869 when my great-great grandfather opened a small bakery in Murphysboro, which would grow into a chain of popular grocery stores that featured their own brand of food products—Daniel’s Pride—with a distinctive logo.

I sent a special query and reworked story to The Southern, emphasizing both the area’s unique history with eclipses and my own family’s history there—AND the fact that I had repurposed the original Daniel’s Pride logo for my Chardonnay to honor my relatives. [I first wrote about this wine here] So now I had two wines with relevancy to the area and that was enough to catch the attention of The Southern’s publisher, who found my pitch “fascinating” and immediately forwarded it on to his editors with the promise that I would hear right back from them.

Only, I didn’t.

An original Daniel’s Pride label used by our southern Illinois Daniel Grocer Company chain, and the repurposed logo on my 2022 Chardonnay.

Repeated requests for an update brought no response from my publisher connection, or from the editors to whom he had forwarded the story idea. Finally, out of frustration, I sent an email with a thinly veiled threat that if The Southern wasn’t interested I was going to send the story on to one of the St. Louis papers, as it was obviously time-sensitive. This brought a response that he had just finished discussing the idea with a reporter and I would be hearing from him shortly.

Only I didn’t.

Another week passed and by that point we were less than a month away from the eclipse and my window of opportunity to find folks interested in buying my Eclipse Malbec, and then get it shipped to them in time for the event, was quickly closing. I fired off a final email to both the publisher of The Southern and the reporter pretty much demanding to know if they really had any intention of running the story.

Then the phone rang.

A friendly voice with that distinctive southern Illinois drawl introduced himself as a reporter with The Southern newspaper, and was I “the Joseph Daniel who comes from Murphysboro and makes wine?”

Close enough!

And, I soon found out that reporter had really done his homework, researching my family history in the area on his own and uncovering some great old photographs. We spoke on a Zoom call for well over an hour, and then he called back a couple of times to ask additional questions and confirm quotes. I was feeling pretty good about not only getting a great piece about my Eclipse wine in arguably the epi-center for the upcoming April 8th event, but also for having the opportunity to pay homage to my family’s legacy where all my past Daniel relatives had lived.

A few days later the story came out and was on the front page. The reporter had done a pretty good job, and he got most things right. And best of all, three of my long-lost second cousins, grandsons of my grandfather’s brothers, and all at one-time involved with the Daniel Grocer Company when they were kids, saw the article and tracked me down with great enthusiasm. They even bought wine!

Click on the newspaper image above to enlarge it to a size that you can read.

Unbeknownst to me, that same reporter from The Southern then took the story and produced it into a short TV spot for WPSD Local 6, a NBC Affiliate, which broadcast the story and put it up on a special service available to all NBC Affiliates to use.

With the 2024 total solar eclipse now just 17 days away, one winemaker in California has released a 2021 vintage Eclipse Malbec three years in the making.

Click here to watch the spot: California winemaker with Illinois connection releases Eclipse Malbec

I didn’t even know that he had used footage from our Zoom call, or photos that I had supplied him and that he had dug up himself, to produce a TV spot. The first time I found out about it was a few days after The Southern article appeared when I started receiving a spate of orders from the Paducah, Kentucky area, where WPSD Local 6 is located, and then 11 orders in a row in about 10 minutes, all from women in northern California. It was so odd to have that specific of demographic all lumped together that I contacted a couple of those women and asked if maybe they were from a group all traveling together to go see the eclipse. But none of them knew each other, and yet they had all seen a “story” about my Eclipse Malbec on the evening news in Sacramento, California—of all places!—just up the road from me. This kind of cluster grouping of buyers happened a few more times in New York, Ohio, and Indiana.

Then the phone rang, again.

“Hi, I’m a producer for National Public Radio’s news program 1A and I’d like to talk with you about possibly appearing live on the show and talking with host Jenn White about your Eclipse Malbec. We’re doing a segment on the business of the eclipse and we thought your wine would fit in well.” Or something to that effect. I was too shocked by that point to remember exactly what she had said.

“NPR? Hell yes!” Or something to that effect, was my reply.

And so, I did. Not without a little drama, of course. They wanted me to provide my side of the live audio interview using a Zoom connection with a special microphone. On the morning of the interview, I suddenly found myself unable to connect with their Zoom link. “Classic Zoom,” I muttered nervously, only with a little saltier adjective. As we approached ten minutes to live broadcast time, I started to sweat bullets. It would certainly be lame if I missed this, of all interviews. Finally, one of their engineers called me. He said they could see me trying to enter the meeting on their end, but for some reason Zoom wouldn’t connect us. He then hooked me up with a very cool audio transmitting App called Report-IT which allowed me to access their server with my iPhone and use it as a microphone. Worked like a charm.

The interview went very well. Jenn White is a wonderful host, asks very pertinent questions and comes across genuinely interested in her guests. I really enjoyed it as she prompted me through my experiences chasing eclipses and then making my Eclipse Malbec. I was even able to sneak in a plug for the wine with my web site information. Right near the end of the interview I heard a disturbance on the line and I was suddenly dropped from the show. Ms. White didn’t miss a beat and filled in with some listener responses until they were able to reconnect with me for a final, heartfelt sign-off on the need to engage with the ethereal nature of… well, nature.

Click the sound bar above to listen to just my interview. If you want to listen to the entire 1A program about the Business of the Eclipse, or if you’re having trouble with the sound bar above, click here. My segment of the program begins at 30:57, which you can get to by sliding the red time bar at the bottom of the 1A page.

I had no idea what to expect from coming on the show. I had heard Jenn White was a marvelous host and that she is beloved by her listeners, which apparently number more than 4 million weekly across 375 NPR member stations nationally. But how exactly does that translate to someone like me trying to sell wine?

It turns out that disturbance I heard on my phone just before I was dropped from the show was one of her listeners already calling me to buy wine. When I finally wrapped it up with Jenn White and disconnected from the Report-IT App my phone went off like a pinball machine with virtually non-stop pings from people placing orders online and/or trying to call me to talk about the wine. This went on unabated for half-an-hour and has continued sporadically for the last four days even though I’ve had to restrict orders to no more than three bottles per customer so that the greatest number of interested people could be served.

In all, I received over 125 orders from the 1A appearance alone, nearly 200 in total since I had my first order come in from my newspaper campaign on March 8th. A total of 722 bottles (60+ cases!) of wine has been sold and right now, at the time of this writing, we have only 25 bottles of Eclipse Malbec left available on the website.

This modest Eclipse campaign of mine yielded results unprecedented for anything I’ve done marketing-wise since I started making commercial wine almost four years ago. I am most affected by how it touched people. I’ve had numerous phone calls and emails from folks who just wanted to talk about how it had inspired them. Whoa, that’s amazing! But you can only imagine how it has inspired me. I've never experienced anything like this.

It was exactly the right message, at exactly the right time, with exactly the right product, to exactly the right audience. Pretty strict parameters for success, but I’ll take ‘em any time!