Company Profile
Company: Stone Brewing Company
Product: Beer
YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/user/StoneBrewingCo
Website: www.stonebrew.com
The Stone Brewing Company is a microbrewery based in Escondido, California, just north of San Diego. Beer lovers Greg Koch and Steve Wagner first met in 1989, when Steve’s band was using rehearsal space at Greg’s music studios. They ran into each other again a few years later when both men took a Sensory Evaluation of Beer class at UC Davis. Eventually they decided to open their own brewery and did so in 1996.
The Stone brewery has a capacity of 70,000 barrels per year and includes an onsite bottling line. The brewery is also home to the Stone Brewing World Bistro & Gardens, a 300-seat restaurant with a large outdoor patio and an acre of gardens.
The company brews a variety of popular beers, including Stone Pale Ale, Stone Smoked Porter, Stone IPA, Arrogant Bastard Ale, and a variety of special releases. You can find Stone beers throughout the Southern California region and in select markets throughout the United States. (Although not in my new home state of Minnesota—darn it!)
Promoting a small brewery is a difficult challenge; it obviously doesn’t have the budget of its larger competitors. To meet this challenge, Stone CEO Greg Koch came up with the idea of a video blog (a vlog), posted on the company’s website and on YouTube. Why a video blog? Here’s how Greg remembers the genesis:
There was so much going on in the world of Stone at the time…especially with the beginning of the construction of our new brewery. I really wanted to capture it to be able to share with all the fans of Stone, to take them on the journey with us. And for posterity.
Each vlog entry runs from 2 to 20 minutes. The postings focus on Stone Brewing happenings, news, and announcements, all from Greg’s personal perspective. These vlog postings enable a unique bond between customer and company because you’re hearing about Stone Brewing from a company insider, completely unfiltered.
Greg’s video log resides on both the Stone Brewing website and on YouTube. The resolution of the videos is a little higher on the Stone site, but, as Greg says, YouTube is more universal. To date, he has posted close to 300 videos; he posts at least one video per month, sometimes as often as once a week.
Has the video blog affected Stone’s sales? Greg isn’t sure. As he puts it, “They are not commercials in even the loosest sense. They are not intended to do anything other than to share an insider’s view—specifically from my perspective—into the world of Stone Brewing.”
Stone’s videos get decent viewership on YouTube and on Stone’s own web-site. It’s a low-cost way to reach out and touch the company’s customers— and put a human face on the corporation.
How low cost is Stone Brewing’s video blog? When I asked Greg how much they spend to produce a typical video, his reply was, “Not a dime.” And he means it. He shoots all the videos himself—the on-camera person, the interviewer, and the cameraman, all at the same time. Here’s how he does it:
Ninety-nine percent of the videos are shot while I hold the camera at arm’s length. I don’t use the viewfinder at all, and as such I am able to simply take the viewer with me in the conversation (some of which is admittedly not perfectly framed!). I then cut the clips together in chronological order. I do not add any effects or voiceovers.
That’s a low-cost approach to creating online videos, but for Stone Brewing it works. Greg’s videos are uniquely personal; the “arm’s length” perspective brings the viewer face-to-face with Greg, and when he turns the camera around, the viewer sees what he sees. It’s just like being there!
A video blog with frequent postings is a great way to reach out to a company’s most dedicated customers. As Greg notes about his own vlog viewers:
We like to keep people informed and clued in, to the degree that they want to be. The type of person who enjoys Stone beers tends to be the type of person that is more inquisitive than average. They are seekers of culture and information.
And they watch his vlog to keep up-to-date with what the company and its founder are up to.
Interestingly, Stone Brewing’s most viewed blog posting had little to do with brewing. When he posted a video about the 2007 San Diego wild-fires, viewership spiked. Greg says, “Many people responded that my short video gave them a better sense of what [the fire] was like than any of the voluminous TV pieces.”
That’s the power of a video blog: to bring viewers personally into the picture, to make them feel as if they were there.
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