Ready For Your Close-up?

My "day job" is director of VeritageMiami, an annual beer, wine and food event in Miami, Florida that benefits the important charity United Way. This is crunch time for us - over the next four days, more than 4,000 people will take part in our events in four venues. There is a Craft Beer Tasting at the gallery area called Wynwood Walls to kick off the festival on Wednesday, April 15. This is the national tax day in the United States, so everyone needs a drink.

On Thursday 1500 people will come to a Fine Wine Tasting in Merrick Park in Coral Gables, an affluent suburb of Miami. There is an Interactive Dinner at Miami's Hotel InterContinental on Friday night and then the festival wraps up with an Auction Dinner on Saturday on the field of Marlins Park, the home of Miami's major league baseball team. (You can get more details on all the events on the VeritageMiami website).

This event has been my primary focus for the past few weeks, and it's very exciting to have it finally opening. Just in case you can come to one of the events (tickets are available on the website), I have a few tips for you:

In this age of the ascendancy of social media, it is hard to persuade people you’ve done anything if you haven't tweeted about it and have a selfie to back up your assertions.

We at VeritageMiami are here to help! The Craft Beer Tasting that begins tonight and the Fine Wine Tasting on Thursday, April 16, have some great social media options to help you have a good time. And, since you are clutching your smart phone anyway, here is the biggest tip:

The maps of Wynwood Walls and Merrick Park showing where all the beer, wine and food tasting stations are going to be online!

Do this now: go to www.veritagemiami.com/map and bookmark the page. Right now it will show you the map of Wynwood Walls for the beer tasting April 15.

The morning of April 16, refresh the page and it will give you the map of Merrick Park. In both cases, all the tables with restaurants and pouring stations are marked. Press a button and it flips the map over so you can get a list of the breweries or wineries, find the number of the table you want, flip the map over, locate the table and go get your glass topped up. Easy!

We will also have a Capture Pod (an enclosed photo booth) at both the Craft Beer and Fine Wine Tastings.  The Capture Pod will allow you to take a photo of yourself, then email or text the photo to you instantly. And, it will also print out a photo strip with our VeritageMiami logo on it. City National Bank, our presenting sponsor, also has a stand-alone camera that will take your photo with the natural backdrop of the event.

For tweeters, the Digest Miami’s booth has a huge monitor screen projecting all tweets and Instagram posts that use #VeritageMiami – this is our preferred hash tag and it’s easy to remember. 

Most important to your social media well-being is that you follow us on Twitter @VeritageMiami or use @VeritageMiami to tell us how you're enjoying the event. We’ll tweet you back! Come on, share photos, share your favorite beers and wines, and most of all, share your support for our community at VeritageMiami – we are counting down the hours!

 -- Lyn Farmer (@FizzFan on Twitter and @lyn_wine on Instagram)