ICING ON A HOT NZ CAKE.

We reckon that this is the time we really need to sell our place- New Zealand. While Tourism New Zealand does a pretty good job - its time for the rest of New Zealand to start selling our story.

Early this morning we saw a tweet from the Wine Diva, a well known Canuck wine writer and tweeter.

Daenna van Mulligen has been tweeting for the last few weeks as she travelled around NZ chronicling her experiences . If we were writing about Wine full time - she would set the benchmark for use of social media and telling the story of wine in a fun way.

And she is a shining example of how we can get the "story" of New Zealand out through the "new media," online media, social media - what ever you want to call it.

Today we retweeted her wonderful take on NZ. She was glowing in her praise for New Zealand wine and Air New Zealand but she found pineapple lumps hard to swallow...

We have about 630 solid followers on Twitter and have got to the stage where twits with large audiences are following us. We loved what Thewinediva wrote about New Zealand. So we retweeted it. Then we checked on an online tool called Tweetreach later in the morning to see just how many people saw the story. Its a quick and dirty measure of how far your tweet goes. That single tweet went close to reaching 30,000 people in the space of a couple of hours.

We know that it only measures reach and not action and yes we have less than a thousand followers but handled right a tweet like that can suddenly be "heard" by a huge international audience. We know from the #hashtag #nzwine on twitter that it has been retweeted by thousands more people. So the reach of a positive article, if you have the right followers, is exponential.

For anyone who is a bit cynical about twitters ability to spread the word this is an example of how it works. Its like icing on a hot cake.

Thanks theWineDiva- you have showed us a small part of the future.

So New Zealand - get on board - lets sell ourselves to the world- it only takes 140 letters.