What’s Different With VinTank Social Connect Version 2.0?

Well to start . . . our philosophy about our software.  We want the most important parts of our software to be helping you hear conversations about your brand and from your customers.

Before I start listing out all that is new, here are a few things:

1. This is the first big release among many over the next 60 days and represents our commitment to the product and to helping all wineries succeed with social media.  We ENCOURAGE you to tell us what you want, what you like, and what challenges you.
2. If there is anything that is vexing you with the upgrades, PLEASE contact us at support@vintank.com or on Twitter @vintank. Even with our small team, we pride ourselves in being responsive to all requests from our 2900 winery partners.
3. We have added a new HELP section to our software.  We plan on enhancing this more and more over the upcoming months and keeping it fresh to help you get the most out of our software.
4. With the new social enhancements around brand you may see it re-matching recent matches so please bear with us if you have seen some of the matches.  Everything will hit equilibrium in 48 hours.

Ok, onto the changes:

The platform used to send you a daily email only if you had new matches, including a digest of the five most recent matches for each category.  Also, if you had a new match in, say, only one category it was difficult to discern which matches were new and which were just recent matches you’ve already seen. The days of this confusing email are gone. Now you will receive a daily email that better summarizes activity for your account and is a little more fun:

• We will be giving you a random big stat of what we are measuring in the wine world (e.g. yesterday we had 6K matches for chardonnay, 1000 new customers talking about chardonnay, so far we have had 250K chardonnay matches across 500K customers).
• An occasional message from the VinTank team (we hope to keep it light, fun, and educational).
• Your total Brand Matches and new customers talking about your brand with a fun message depending on the number of matches (think a member of the iconic rock band KISS matched to one of their songs).
• Your total Campaign matches.
• Our undying thanks.

So the digest is being replaced with a more useful summary of activity in your account, some fun and interesting stats, and our daily thanks.  Why have we changed the way emails work?  Because we know listening to what is being said about your brand and connecting with your customers or conversations is paramount to the success of your company.  How you choose to answer them is up to you . . .

Now for the big stuff.   

Social is KEY.  We refactored the entire social media user experience to focus on social customers and your brands. We will keep adding sections to this area over the next 60 days including more features for location-based-services (LBS), how to pull in your Facebook fan page insights, and outbound conversations FROM your brand so you can have a quick dashboard to see how you are talking to the world from all your social channels.

A Whole New Overview screen.  We wanted you to see more useful information when you sign-in to your account. If you manage several wineries with multiple campaigns, the overview screen will allow you to quickly scan them all.

Customers.  There is now a full menu for customers where we feature charts about your customers, stats of how many customers are talking about your brand, an introduction to six of your new social customers, and the top 20 customers talking about your brand.  This page will be expanded significantly over the coming weeks.

Customer detail page.  For every customer we drill down to let you see how they mentioned your brand, details of their social profile, and the ability to follow them without having to jump to another tool.  This will be a place of exciting change over the coming days as we add reports, ability to tag customers, create team notes for customers, import customer history, and much, much more.

Brands.  We feel this is the most important part of social listening: who is talking about your brand and what are they saying?  To also make brands more effective we now also leverage all the data about your winery and your wines that you put into the winery section (which is also syndicated to over 300 partners representing 9 million potential eyeballs).  This means the better you fill out your wine data, the better we can analyze conversations about your brands.  This has its own menu area to ensure that we help you hear all the messages and see all the customers that are talking specifically about your winery and wines.  We are adding specialized ways for you to edit our listening software to better hone into the CORRECT conversations about your brand.  Expect to see those roll out over the next week.

Building on our “digital answering machine for the wine industry” notion, we have also added the feature of highlighting new mentions and customers as well as allowing you to mark them as viewed so that you can choose to clean out your social inbox or let it keep running.  The stats in your daily email and on the overview screen of new messages will remain new until you mark them viewed.

IMPORTANT – In our prior release we included brand monitoring as a campaign. If that campaign could not be automatically converted into your brand campaign, you will see it listed under Campaigns. We can manually convert that campaign into your brand campaign so please contact us if that is the case for you.  Also, if you are getting too few or too many matches (or just want to do better), please contact us at support@vintank.com or @vintank and we will help you tune your campaign for FREE.

Campaigns.  Campaigns have become more intuitive and have more high level stats so you can see how well they are performing at a glance.  If you have multiple wineries you can also toggle between wineries and campaigns within this screen to find different campaigns across easier within the brand or between them.

As we said before, this is just the beginning of tons of new features that are in the queue and almost ready to go live.  We do hope you’ll sign-in, check out the new VinTank, and give us your feedback.

If you haven’t signed-in to the software recently, there are lots of other features we added months ago (and have you checked out our new kung foo reporting?).  For a list of features just look in our HELP section or you can check out this previous blog post where we listed quite a few: http://www.vintank.com/2011/11/the-parlotones-johnnyhifi-and-an-upgrade/

Side note from me (Paul) – all of this couldn’t have been made possible without the tireless days, nights and weekends that James Jory and Evan Cover contribute to bring you the best software I’ve ever seen in my career.  I am very thankful to them for being the best friends and partners who believe in helping wineries succeed online.  If our free version of the software helps you succeed with social media, I hope that you share your appreciation with them for all their hard work.