VinTank 2.0 Advanced Features: Innovation through Context.

Yesterday, we quietly launched our new advanced features on VinTank Social Connect.  As promised, the social listening for your wine brands will ALWAYS be free. We want you to hear the social conversations about your winery and help you to better manage all of your social media interactions.   We have worked diligently for three years to make this one of the best social listening platforms in or out of the wine industry.  Call it our winery social media stimulus package.  Call it our firm belief that social media is as relevant as the telephone to any business.  Or just attribute it to our strong passion to help wineries succeed in the digital world. Regardless, what it means for you is that you can hear everything said about your brand on a myriad of social media channels for free in a single platform: VinTank.

That being said, many of our winery partners have risen to the next level and now require even more powerful tools.  We listened and built these tools around two key areas: Social Customer Relationship Management and Owned Channel Management.  These features are now live and are available for $35/month per brand.   For any VinTank customers that sign up between now and the end of the month, we will include three months complimentary.  That is less than $1/day to annotate, organize, and manage your social customers.  We will be rolling out new features as fast as we can build them to make this new version even more powerful.  If you are a VinTank customer you can upgrade here: https://cruvee.com/admin/v2/account/upgrade-tier.

So what is so special about these two features and what do they mean for your wine brand?

Let’s start with Social Customer Relationship Management.

In July, Mashable reported that we were the first ever vertically focused social listening platform.  We have been solely focused on this for three years.  During those three years we have taken all our learning from the data and formulated our vision of Social Listening and Social CRM (SCRM).  We truly believe we are breaking new ground and we hope that people understand everything we are doing and the dynamic changes we are making not only to the wine industry, but within social in general.

The value proposition:

1. We ONLY focus on the wine industry and measure every conversation about wine across tens of thousands of brands, wines, varieties, regions, and other dialects of wine.  Even if a winery is not using our free service, we are measuring the conversations.
2. We’ve measured the conversations of 10 million+ social wine customers and append their identity anytime they have a conversation about wine.
3. It is due to our vertical focus that we are able to derive real intelligence about a social wine customer.  We know when they have said the word “wine”, talked about a variety, spoken about a brand, or a wine region and what we call the “texture” of that wine conversation (did they talk about flavor attributes, did they take a picture, did they check in at a location).  ONLY A VERTICALLY FOCUSED SOCIAL LISTENING PLATFORM ON AN EXPERIENTIAL PRODUCT CAN DERIVE ENOUGH CONTEXT TO ATTRIBUTE MEANINGFUL DATA TO INDICATE A PERSONS BUYING PROFILE.  This is a revolution not only for the wine industry but in Social CRM in general.

What do I mean?   Take a look at this screenshot:

Immediately you have a tremendous amount of context from the information we provide about every customer.  In this case, you can see that she lives in NY, works for Lot18, has a decent follower count (1,588), and has a Klout score of 38.

However, we believe that this is not enough, so our platform adds additional context that is uniquely available through VinTank:

It is our extensive background in winery e-commerce and our singular focus on the wine industry that have allowed us to incorporate the value of “social customer context” into our SCRM features.

Everyone is looking for the ROI of social media.  One component of ROI is qualifying the investment of time for the greatest return.  We believe that everyone that interacts with your brand or talks about it, is by definition, a social customer and should be serviced according to your resources.  However, if we can shortcut your way to better insight of your social customer, we can help elevate your understanding of the value of each customer. Innovation through context.

You have the opportunity to provide much of the relevant context.  We have added tools for you to personalize the information about each social customer and ultimately report on the business intelligence that is most relevant and important to your brands.

For example, I have taken this customer who mentioned Mondavi in a wine conversation and categorized her as working in the Retail sector as an Account Executive for Lot18.  I have also tagged her as a “partner” and that the conversation was about “Michael Mondavi” not Robert Mondavi.  Finally, I put a note in her customer record indicating what a great job she did promoting the event that she organized with Michael Mondavi for Lot18.  We will be adding the ability to report on all these items in the near future.  Imagine the ability to ask questions like:

• Give me everyone categorized as retail that talked about Mondavi.
• Give me everyone that has spoken about our brand more than three times.
• Show me every partner that has spoken about my brand.
• Give me everyone with notes so I can follow-up.
• Show me everyone that mentioned my brand five or more times but has not mentioned us for over sixty days.
• Show me how many customers talk about our brand more than ten times.

Imagine the possibilities.

Now let’s look at Owned Channel Management.

So far, we have done a really good job capturing all your “earned media” through our social listening platform.  Monitoring over one million conversations a day to ensure we capture as much as possible about wine.  We understood that many of the relevant interactions were occurring on your Facebook Fan Page, as well as the social media channels that you own (Owned Media).  We have added a layer for you to monitor, measure, and report on your owned channels, beginning with Facebook.  That means our platform now manages all direct and indirect conversations about your brands.   We will be adding other owned channels over the next few months including Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp, YouTube, and more.  Unlike other platforms, we do it with the singular goal of helping you better understand your social customers.  When you log-in to VinTank you will now see a new tab called “My Channels”.

When you click on the link it will prompt you to authorize and add your Facebook Fan Page:

The magic begins when you have the ability to  respond to every post on your Fan Page.   You add new dimension to your Facebook conversations and new elements to your Facebook social customers.

Facebook is great at surfacing macro vanity statistics such as how many Fans you have, how much the aggregate has grown, what is the potential visibility of your posts.  Where it falls flat is in understanding and generating notes and comments against conversations on your wall.  This allows you to manage and report on your owned media conversations as well as your earned media conversations within VinTank.

We believe that the customer is king, and as such, have layered our Social CRM functionality to include your Facebook Fans.  Clicking on anyone that has commented or tagged your brand on Facebook brings you to a customer screen.  However, we now look at the relationship you have on your owned channels differently and have created a tab called “interactions”. Interactions include anytime someone “likes”, comments, or tags your brand on Facebook.   Future owned channels measure the type of interaction based on the channel (e.g. Twitter will measure follows, lists, @ replies, Favoriting, RT’s, and ” “.

Soon you will be able to ask the system questions like:

“Give me every customer tagged as a wine club member that has interacted with my brand.”

“Which social customers interact with my brand the most?”

“Which ones the least? ”

“Tell me how many of my customers interact with me 1, 3, 5, 25 times.”

“Please give me every customer that has not interacted with my brand in over three months.”

KAPOW.  Context.  The faster you start annotating and tagging your customers, the faster you will get value from this new dimension on your Facebook Fan Page.

We hope that you see the incredible value in these unique features and that we make it easier for you to interact with customers that talk to or about you.   With the investment of  30 to 60 minutes a day, you log-in to one platform to listen and respond to all your social customers.  It is our goal to save you time and to help make managing your social conversations easier.

So there it is.  The new VinTank 2.0.  This is just the beginning of all the exciting features we plan to release to improve our Lite version and more.  Please sign up now to get access to all these powerful features.  If you have any questions about the upgrade or specific requests, please feel free to add them to the comments or reply to us on Twitter @vintank or email us directly.  We are committed to constantly improving our platform to make this the easiest and most powerful solution that enables your success with social media and your social customers.

PS – Here is a sneak peek at where we are going . . .