Putting Our Philosophy into our Biggest Upgrade Yet

Yep, we just made the biggest upgrade to our software ever.  This one was filled with years of understanding how you use it (or don’t) and where we see the future of social media and the wine industry going.

VinTank Social Connect is now focused on the things we see as the most important functions of social today for wineries: brand conversations and customers.

Brand Conversations:  It is our mantra that no matter what you do in the social arena, you NEED to know if someone is talking about your brand (good, bad, indifferent).  This is the most essential aspect you can be doing with Social Media.  It is your choice how you want to deal with those conversations (Customer Service, Customer Acquisition/Retention, PR, Sales, Biz Dev, etc).  However, if you don’t hear them, you can’t respond.  In our recent release we highlight the conversations about YOUR brand and report to you on those key dialogues differently from your other monitoring.

So what does our software do for you?  Here is a simple metaphor: we are the digital answering machine for your brand.  We take in all the conversations from six categories:

1. Microblogs: Facebook, Twitter, and more.
2. Blogs: We monitor over 100K blogs that discuss wine.
3. Forums: We monitor over 100K forums where wine is discussed and pay special attention to key wine forums like Wineberzerkers.com.
4. Tasting notes: We work closely sites like CellarTracker, Drync and more to listen to wine conversations by serious wine aficionados.
5. Media: We scour the web for pictures and videos of your brand through sites like YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Instagram and more.
6. LBS: We keep close attention to conversations and check-ins from sites like Foursquare and Yelp.

What do we do with these? We digest and sort more than a million conversations about wine per day and present them to you in one single dashboard for you to understand, engage, and report.   Like I said, your digital answering machine.  It is then your choice if and how you want to respond to people talking about your wines.

Per our promise, the listening features of our software will ALWAYS be free to the wine industry as long as we run the company.

Customer:  What is the most important thing to a winery?  It is your customers.  We use the word customer very differently at VinTank.  Since we live in an industry where most transactions are not direct we believe that anyone that talks about your wine is a customer or potential customer and deserves more attention.  These are your social customers.  Some may be direct customers but there may be many that are not and represent the opportunity to convert to buying directly from your winery.  Others may only buy your wine in market but since you are competing with 150K other wines, the service you give them helps them think of you when at a restaurant or retailer.  This new release gives you a preview of the future of VinTank with a keen focus on Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM).  We want to help you better understand your customers.  We want to help you find new customers that you would have never seen without social media.  We want to help you retain your best customers (direct to consumer or our new expression, direct through trade).  Today’s release lets you see your most recent six customers, how many customers have talked about your brand, deeper information about your customers, their conversations about your brand, and top 20 customers who have mentioned your brand.  These features we just mentioned above will always also be free.

Notice to the right we also indicate how many times this social customer has talked about wine . . . imagine the potential.

So much for free, when are you guys going to start charging?  That is the question VinTank hears constantly and today is also our chance to tell you the answer.  Over the next few months you’ll see us expanding our services and it will look like this:

• Social Listening – ALWAYS FREE (your brand plus two campaigns with 5 keywords per campaign)
• Social CRM Lite – Coming soon, will be $35/month and allow you to see ALL your social customers, make notes about them, categorize/segment them, and create reports about your customers.
• Social CRM Pro – Coming soon, will be $150/month and allow you to import your customer data into our software, have three additional listening campaigns, and will include our upcoming wine customer score that measures the value of that customer relative to your brand.
• Social CRM Enterprise – Please contact us to see the jet fuel we are putting into this version that includes much more reporting features, internal brand monitoring, unlimited campaign listening, macro term reports (e.g. do you want to know how chardonnay is performing and being talked about across regions), and much, much more.

Ok, that’s a lot.  To see a detailed list of the features we have released today to improve our free software to help you better succeed with social media just click here.