At the end of the survey we asked three “free-form” questions. This post focuses on your responses to those questions. We believe since you took the time to comment, we owe you the respect to answer every comment and question in return. Apologies for the VERY long post but there were a lot of comments to answer.

Question 9. What do you find most challenging with Social Connect?

• “Monitoring the large number of brands/campaigns that I have set up. It would be ideal to be able to give precedence to specific brands.”
  It’s funny that you mention this. It is one of our top five features we are focusing on in the next three weeks.
• “Finding the time to fully leverage.” (this comment was repeated at least 30 times in various iterations)
  We understand. Social media is becoming a bear to manage with the continued proliferation of platforms and conversations. It is our philosophy that at the minimum you need to hear the direct and indirect conversations about your brand and respond accordingly. It is our hope that with the new Facebook features, we make this easy in one single dashboard.
• “Converting socially interested to customers.”
  We take this to mean converting them to direct customers because anyone that talks about your brand is already some sort of indirect customer (direct through trade). This is no easy task despite whatever anyone says. Taking a customer and helping them overcome all the friction of buying direct (cost, lack of selection, delayed gratification, shipping friction, et al) is a very laborious effort. However using social media to help retain your direct (and indirect) customers is an effort well spent. It costs less to retain a customer than acquire a new one and often, just acknowledgment is enough . . .
• “Still struggling to quantify the value.”
  This is perhaps our fault but again, we can not stress enough that the new social customer wants to be talked with, not at. Our tool provides the ability in one single dashboard to manage all direct and indirect conversations about your brands.
• “It’s time consuming to comb through every single mention for every brand.”
  That is a good problem to have actually (better than not seeing a single conversation about your brand). Social media is free with the EXCEPTION of time. Recently we have also added some enhancements to VinTank to highlight new social mentions and new social customers for your brand to make your time spent in your account more efficient.
• “Please bring back the email format which lists the social media mentions each day. I don’t have time everyday to log in and view the mentions but have time to read and respond via an email. It saves SO much time and the new format of having to log in is, quite frankly, annoying and time consuming.”
  This was also a common theme. We know our old email format gave the top 5 results from every category we monitor (blogs, microblogs, forums, tasting notes, media, and LBS). Too many of our customers only paid attention to the ones mentioned in the email and missed a plethora of other mentions. Additionally the email delivered a rudimentary abbreviated version of our services and only by logging into the software can you leverage the full value of VinTank to help you manage your social media efforts. That being said, we have listened to all the requests and are releasing a new email format later this week that gets you to your conversations faster. We are also working on a mobile interface of our software to make it easier to manage the conversations about your brand when you are on the go.
• “The Campaigns, adjusting to get the most social media. And, I should be the only one that changes this information, not VinTank.”
  You can – this is in the edit functions of your brand and campaigns. If you are still having problems, please email support@vintank.com and we will help.
• “I enjoyed reading comments directly from the email instead of clicking through.”
  Please see above. Again, we understand that reading some of the mentions on the email was convenient but as a result we were actually harming wineries with the conversations they were not seeing by not logging into the software. Our new email format will make it one click to get to all your new mentions. A key reminder, after reading all your new mentions you should “mark as viewed” all the mentions so when you get the subsequent emails, you will only see new ones to you.
• “Struggling to convert this into actionable intelligence that would help a retailer.”
  A retailer was not our first target but we have had quite a few sign up for the service. Here are a few use cases that might help you better leverage the service.

  1. Set up a campaign for your brand name and manage all the conversations on the web about your retail location.
  2. Set up campaigns about your private label and captive label brands so you can connect to customers that are talking about those wines.
  3. Set up campaigns about your most profitable SKU’s or where you are long in inventory and try to create relationships with customers that mention those brands and may have a propensity for buying the ones in your inventory.
  4. Set up a campaign about your competitor and see if you can lure their customers to your retail services.
• “Clicking on the comment, I never seem to find how to respond if desired.”
  We are limited by which platforms let us respond through technology. Currently the only two platforms that you can respond from within the software are Facebook and Twitter. For the rest (like blog posts, etc) please click on the link and respond there. We will be adding support for more major social media networks like Flickr, Youtube, Yelp, etc over the next few months.
• “Lots of info required, sometimes hard to figure out how to get desired results.”
  The info is not required, it just helps us do a better job finding social matches for your brand and eliminates your need to enter it in 300 other platforms. Tuning your campaign is as much science as it is art. You do not need to enter ANY wine related words (our software creates that net/filter for you). If you are having trouble tuning your campaign please, please contact us for help at support@vintank.com.
• “Keeping the data updated.”
  Yes, this is a pain. Putting in data the first time is always a laborious effort but the value you get from the activity has three key benefits:
  1. Makes our social searching better for you.
  2. Syndicates your content to 300 partners with a potential 9 million wine consuming eyeballs. One entry, 300 outlets.
  3. You are able to add a free app to your Facebook Fan page from our partner Social Candy which displays all your wines. You can choose which wines to display from within their software and it is also FREE.
• “Mentions that don’t actually apply to my brand. I have a very common brand name (‘XYZ’) which is often mentioned in conversations that have nothing to do with my wines.”
  This is where the magic of our software really shines. The fix may just be a matter of turning up the wine context for your brand campaign to “require lots of wine context” to help you get more focus on your brand. You can also include required or disqualifying terms/phrases with each keyword. If you require more help, please contact support@vintank.com and we are more than happy to help.
• “Filtering social media traffic efficiently through keywords to achieve that balance of not missing anything and not spending too much time looking through junk.”
  Again, this is something that our software should make easy and if you are still having challenges, please contact support@vintank.com and we are happy to help.
• “Keeping up with all that your software (and others) can do. need a 1-stop shop!”
  We totally understand. We are doing our best to make the job of hearing and answering all conversations to and about you in one platform. Let us know if we are making that part easier.
• “Selling wine through social and web. It should be tasted after all.”
  Social media is not 100% about selling (but it can be used for that as well). Please remember that people talking directly or indirectly to you have probably tasted your wine and should be considered customers.
• “Finding the time to input all details about our wines. We represent 30+ wineries and 100+ wines from Spain. Already having built out our website, even feeding the bulk import is time consuming.”
  We understand that data entry about wine products is hard. If we could automagically fix it we would. However the greatest inhibitor to wine’s success on the internet is lack of normalized data. We only offer this feature to help you succeed with over 300 partners (and growing). We are also in early stage discussions with the top etailers and the largest wholesaler in the US to get even more value from putting your data into the system. Moreover, when ANY company asks you for the same data (it is endemic), please refer them to VinTank and that you have taken the time and resources to put your data into our system and it is FREE for them to take out via our API.
• “Creating buzz / conversations regarding brands.”
  This is a whole post in itself. One of our commitments after doing the survey is creating more content to help you understand how to better create buzz and conversations about your brand. One key element to start that process is create content and actually engage on the social media platforms. As a great example please look at Jordan Winery who are doing a great job creating content that transforms into buzz.
• “Entering new grapes variety, appellations, or other custom info.”
  If there are data choices missing please feel free to email support@vintank.com and we will add them quickly.
• “Keeping up with the data, having to wade through all the information to determine what is important and what is just noise, finding time to respond to the important stuff and an app that allows me to do it anywhere.”
  One of the unique features to VinTank is the customers tab. We hope that helps you wade through the noise and focus in on the key targets for your time. However, that being said please look at our service as a social media answering machine. You have to listen to all the messages to determine which ones to answer and which ones to ignore. Regarding an app, please see above. It is a key focus for us.
• “How to get your data I enter to etailers.”
  This is a GREAT question and requires your help. If you have an etailer that needs the data you put into the system you have multiple options: have them contact us to give them access to our FREE API or direct them to the VinTank Wine Directory so they can get the information themselves.
• “Most of the entries on our winery are old and clog up trying to see the new ones – therefore wasting our time.”
  A couple of things:

  1. When you first sign up we retrieve the most recent conversations from the last three years of social conversations we’ve recorded (in case we could surface any new conversations/blog posts/etc that you may have missed). We now go back only 30 days for Twitter and 3 months for other categories.
  2. We surface conversations as new as soon as we find them. Conversations from microblogging social networks surface MUCH faster than conversations from blog posts, forums, etc. due to the way our system works across different channels. Even Google has some delay in discovering conversations. We recently addded the ability for you to sort matches by “date published” and “date matched” to make this easier for you to focus on newer conversations (see “Filters” on matches page). Also, if you “mark conversations as viewed” you will be able to get to new conversations faster every time you log into the software.
• “Benchmarking my social media progress.”
  We are working on ways to make this better and more standardized for all levels of our service.
• “I liked the summary emails, don’t like to log in. prefer to view from my phone.”
  Please see above.
• “Conceptually I like the single repository for winery and wine information but haven’t seen much benefit to filling it out. Not knowing the full scope of what you have done… can you do more to get this data to more places?”
  We do our best to reach out to as many potential partners as possible but clearly if you have partners you’d like us to contact, please let us know. Moreover, if wine tech companies are contacting you for information, please send them our way and tell them they can get the information they need for your brand from us for free.
• “May need a little more user friendly descriptions.”
  Agreed. We have already added a new help section and plan to do a complete overhaul of our UEX this year to make everything easier to understand and use.
• “Filling out all the wine detail’s for the online /fb store.”
  Unfortunately we agree that filling out wine data is laborious. Many, many wineries are now using our system as their data repository for all of their partners, their trade contacts like retailers, wholesalers, and press, and even their e-commerce store (as you know it is a major pain to re-enter data if you change vendors but we archive it forever and correctly).
• “Reporting, analytics, publishing (non-existent).”
  This is not true (but we can do a better job of getting you to reporting faster in the software). The homepage and your brand page have easy to read analytics. On your brand page and on campaigns there is a link to reporting (we can do a better job surfacing this functionality) which will lead you to the reporting tool. There are three key types of reports that you can customize date ranges, compare campaigns, and report on conversations). Reporting is a major focus for us over the next ninety days and depending on how much support we get will determine how fast we can release more functionality.
• “Not being able to respond to comments from with in dashboard, lack of AMS integrations.”
  We have heard you loud and clear and have added the ability to respond to interactions on your Facebook Fan Page. We now cover the two most active channels (Twitter and Facebook) right from within the platform. We plan to add other platforms as soon as possible like Foursquare and more. Unfortunately some platforms require you to click through to them to respond or do not have the ability to respond.
• “Remembering my password.”
  If you click on the “forgot password” link we will send you a new password. You can change your password in the account settings to something easier to remember. Most web browsers also provide the ability to remember your user name and password for sites like VinTank.
• “Not have the option to schedule postings like Hootsuite.”
  We are exploring functionality to schedule posts for Facebook and Twitter but our platform is built for listening and responding to direct and indirect conversations about you. Hootsuite is a great tool for managing campaigns and social media interactions that are NOT necessarily about your brand. It is our philosophy that the most important conversations are about your winery or items that you deem important to your brand (campaigns).
• “This survey. I had to look up CRM to see what you meant. Maybe more techno-business-jargon is what we need. That’s why folks get into the wine business!”
  Not really sure how to respond to this. Though CRM is an acronym, it is an ESSENTIAL part of effectively and efficiently managing a business and an endemic term that all wineries should be exploring to be more successful both online and offline.

Question 10. Any other comments?

• “Need suggestions on how to create buzz and stir in social media. We don’t do this stuff 24/7 so are somewhat clumsy at it.”
  This was a clear request from the survey. We plan on putting out more content, webinars, etc to help give more tips on how to manage social media and help you succeed in this channel.
• “Keep up the great work!”
  We are trying our best and strive to do better everyday.
• “Thanks for providing the service for free!”
  You’re welcome and thank you for using it.
• “I really like the QR code but I wonder if it would be possible to have a separate code for each wine – could put that on a back label and direct straight to wine info and buy button.”
  Our system does in fact generate unique web based QR codes for every wine and brand. However, our QR code images are not optimized for print applications. What you want are vector-based image files (which can also be freely generated from several online sources or converted from our images using a tool such as Photoshop). We are considering generating vector-based QR code images in the future.
• “I do love the service and wonder how long it will remain free. Hoping forever!”
  Yes, our social listening will ALWAYS be free as long as I am leading the company. We will continue to add enhanced features as well that will be premium services with even more value that people choose to add but we are so pleased to service all our customers (free and premium).
• “Great tool!!! Amazing that it is available to us.”
  Thank you.
• “You have the beginnings of something powerful here but I think you need to be thinking about how to report on trends that are useful for brand managers.”
  We are brainstorming on that all the time. If you have requests or suggestions we are all ears.
• “IMO the emails now look tacky and unprofessional with the song link to itunes. Quite a large disconnect from the Vintank brand/UX on the site. Thank you for your service.”
  Sorry, we were trying to be fun with our transformation to better features. We are releasing a new email in less than a week that we hope is more helpful and more “brand true.”
• “Well done on the recent changes.”
  Thank you, it was a lot of work and we really appreciate the kind words.
• “Love what you are doing for the wine biz…”
  Thank you. We love the wine biz.
• “Integration with CellarTracker would be nice.”
  We do have an integration with CellarTracker. Just click on the tasting notes section on your dashboard or in your brand tab. We are one of five companies that have direct access thanks to Eric Levine. We do not scrape his site.
• “I preferred the old email format that allowed me to see a few mentions in the email body. It is time consuming to go to the platform and log in.”
  As stated above, we apologize for this major change but we hope the value of logging in and the ability to answer both Facebook and Twitter directly from the platform more than compensate for this change.
• “As above, we need to better understand what all you are doing, and how we can use it to our advantage.”
  We agree. We have not done a great job telling all the features, how to best use them, and what they mean for your business. It is our hope to do better in the upcoming months.
• “Thanks for this great tool!”
  Thank you for using it.
• “I’d love to see a built-in tag cloud generator that gives me a quick visual snapshot of what people are saying about my brand.”
  You can find the cloud generator for the last 50 conversations in the advanced reporting. We are looking at ways to generate this in other parts of the software as well.
• “I would love to see more case studies for who is doing it right. Kind of tired of hearing we all suck at social media. If nobody is benefiting in a measurable way, it’s not worth the effort. But if it is worthwhile, and I believe it is, you’ll attract 100 times more users by showing them how to succeed rather than telling them they aren’t good at what they do.”
  This was one of the comments we took to heart. We are working on case studies, tips and more. At the very minimum, the best way to use social media is like the phone – answer who is calling. If you have any success stories, please share them and we will publish them in our weekly email.
• “Love you guys.”
  We love you too!
• “Love this program a ton! Very helpful for our winery.”
  That makes us VERY happy.
• “Looking forward to drilling into customer level, which is a differentiator from many other systems.”
  That is one of our key differentiators – our view and perspective on customers. We hope that wineries understand what a competitive advantage it is using the Social CRM features.
“Hi Paul, please come in France and make a such great social media. I told my INSEEC school about that.”
I am on my way in June!
“Good job guys!”
Thank you.
“Keep up the good work guys, you are on the right track.”
Thank you, we think so too. We wish we could do more faster and will keep pushing forward.
“Vintank misses many social mentions of our brand – I get more from following twitter mentions and using www.socialmention.com than I do from VinTank thought I would be interested in finding out more about how wineries can better utilise Cellar Tracker/Snooth etc.”
Sorry you are missing mentions. This is easy to resolve by editing your brand campaign to “require less wine context” or by adding additional keywords. How the system harvests mentions for your brand is very flexible but it may require some tuning on your part. If you need additional help please email us at support@vintank.com. Regarding Snooth and CellarTracker we will try to et a blog post out about how to best utilize. Since CellarTracker is a community of very qualified wine tasters, we highly recommend using individual accolades or aggregate scores to promote your wine (please source CellarTracker and link back to their site).
“I have a brand that calls ‘XYZ’ and I haven’t yet find a way to filter better towards my brand. The words that I can indicate that should not be used is too limited in amount of words to filter all the garbage.
I have redacted this winery’s name but it is so open (like naming the brand “good”) that it is almost impossible to narrow down on just wine since many people use the word “good” and “wine” in the same phrase. We will work with any client to help them reduce the non-relevant matches that occur about their brand. However some brands are just so generic that even the best software in the world can not filter out a certain percentage of noise.
“Can you confirm that you changed the look of the email for updates and why? I don’t know how to use this new email look.”
We are working on a new email format ASAP to make it easier to get to the relevant conversations quicker.
“I think Vintank is a solution looking for a problem, as they say.”
This commenter was frequently negative in all of their responses. I am sorry they can not see the value of our solution and obviously of social media. As my mentor always said, you can lead a horse to water . . .
“The current format is confusing.”
We are working on improving our user experience. If you have any additional suggestions, please let us know.

Also so many people took the time to say nice things about us and our services. We listed them last and just want to say THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU for being a VinTank customer, for using our software, and for all the kind words of encouragement. These type of comments are what keep us inspired and give us the fortitude to keep pushing our software forward to help you succeed in social media and beyond.

Question 8. What do you like most about our software?

• “The chatter tracking is interesting. We haven’t had a great deal of traffic yet but are working on creating more all the time.”
• “It’s incredibly robust for the price (free), which enables me to monitor my brands in order to provide customer service online.”
• “Despite repeating ‘new’ results, you have delivered several results that I had not yet seen using our other social monitoring devices.”
• “Easy to use….”
• “It’s free! Love the facebook app and the social monitoring.”
• “Well laid out”
• “We’re an importer, so it’s great to see mentions of our various brands in one place. It makes it easy to reach out and interact on behalf of the brands.”
• “It encapsulates mentions about my brand.”
• “All of the features are great, they tie into Facebook as well to “Buy Wines”.”
• “It gathers conversations from multiple platforms. It finds information that I don’t have time to find.”
• “Listing device to pick up conversations I am missing”
• “Seeing comments about our brand”
• “The breakdown of brand mentions is nice.”
• “user friendly, useful, interesting, appropriate”
• “It provides a great overview of our social media coverage.”
• “Once started, easy to update and tweak”
• “New UI”
• “Finding content…”
• “The price , organization”
• “Mentions in one place.”
• “Mobile friendly, QR codes, and facebook integration”
• “Its free”
• “It’s free. You guys deserve a LOT of credit for what you’re doing!”
• “Not sure yet- but so far I like seeing what others are saying about us online.”
• “Nice so see what’s going on about your brand”
• “The ease of use, ability to rapidly drill down to detail levels about new mentions.”
• “Consolidated social media references in one place”
• “Intuitive, easy to use.”
• “I like that you are aggregating just wine industry data. We are so lucky.”
• “It works”
• “One place to enter all data.”
• “The daily push works well provided that is has new entries”
• “Centralization of social media data”
• “Easy peasy to use.”
• “Notices of mentions (although they are harder to find since the upgrade)”
• “It is cool – and very informative”
• “Love the wine sales tab on facebook.”
• “Wine keyword/convo niche, campaign creation, visibility into forums and tasting notes, new customer identification”
• “Graph, personalization of features…”
• “The friendly interface! And it is very complete…”
• “Design, UI, and depth of reporting”
• “Tracking pertinent social media comments about my brand.”
• “The overview that I can see who is talking what about our brand”
• “Wine trade specific, v insightful”
• “I like how easy it is to enter data as well as how I can instantly find out how much more data I need to enter. At this early stage, I just want to get the data-entry correct.”

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 . . .

1. How do you use VinTank Social Connect?

• To see a summary of what is being said about my brand – 64.4%
• To see who new is talking about my brand – 17.8%
• To create reports about conversations about my brand. – 2.2%
• To watch what is being said about my competitor. – 0%
• To manage my social media conversations. – 5.6%
• I have no idea what your software does. – 6.7%
• Your software is not helpful to me. – 3.3%

VinTank - The good news is that you are using our software for its primary purpose.  The bad news is that we are doing a terrible job helping you understand how to use our software even better.  The worst news is that some of you (~10%) answered that either you don’t know what our software does or it’s not helpful.  That is our fault.

Our next steps - Create more content and how-to’s to ensure we help you understand how to get the most out of the platform.

2. If you have any new matches we send you a daily email. If you have no matches, we don’t send you an email. What are your preferences on email?

• I like the daily email, keep sending it. – 51.1%
• I like the daily email even if I don’t have matches. – 4.4%
• Please send me the email only 3 times per week. – 11.1%
• Please send me the email weekly. – 33.3%

VinTank - The majority of responses either liked the daily emails (if they get matches) or weekly emails.

Our next steps - Add a weekly email option BUT we are hoping that our next release will make it even more meaningful for EVERYONE to at least sign in daily.

3. We are about to add super-charged features that focus on CRM. Which features most appeal to you?

• Integrating my e-commerce/wineclub/POS CRM with my social customers. – 42.5%
• Integrating my Facebook insights into the platform. – 33.3%
• Ability to better respond to social media conversations from within the platform. – 51.7%
• Ability to tag, organize, and report on my social customers. – 28.7%
• A mobile version for reviewing social mentions – 26.4

VinTank - Our first lesson here is that we are lame at asking survey questions. What we meant to ask is which SINGLE function would most appeal to you. However, what we read into these responses was glaringly obvious to us. We need to add tools to help you manage customers that you interact with on your owned media channels, ESPECIALLY your Facebook fan page and Twitter accounts.

Our next steps - A release is coming next week that allows you to better manage the conversations on your Facebook page from within the platform (with support for other channels to follow). Another release in four weeks to organize your social customers that will also include *fingers crossed* a mobile version. And in 90 days we will be integrated with Vin65.com!

4. What are the other solutions you use to manage your social media efforts:

• Tweetdeck – 42.3%
• Hootesuite – 29.6%
• Seesmic 2.8%
• Twitter – 62.0%

VinTank - Looks like Tweetdeck is the clear winner (we agree).  For all conversations to or about you, you’ll be able to manage them right from within our dashboard.  For all other conversations we still recommend Tweetdeck.

5. Which Social Media sites do you use for your Brand (please check all that apply):

• Facebook – 100.0%
• Twitter – 84.1%
• Google+ – 31.8%
• Flickr – 25.0%
• Youtube – 51.1%
• Yelp – 40.9%
• Foursquare – 36.4%

VinTank - Facebook pages will be integrated into our platform as of next Wednesday (with Twitter thereafter). We are exploring G+ and Yelp for integrations in the next 90 days.  We’ve been in deep conversations with Foursquare and hope to have a tighter integration in the same time period.  These will not only be integrated for listening but also integrated so you can manage your accounts directly from VinTank.

6. We have a section in our solution to enter your wine data and we distribute it for free to over 300 online entities like e-tailers, iPhone apps, and more so you don’t have to. We also use this data to help you better match the brand conversations from social media to your brands. Which best describes this feature?

• I find these features useful. – 52.8%
• I like the concept but I do not have time to fill out the data. – 38.2%
• I do not understand the need to fill out wine data. – 3.4%
• I find these features useless. – 5.6%

VinTank - This one is tough.  We understand that filling out the data is a boring and laborious process but this is one of the most important things you can do to help your brand online. The data now serves TWO key purposes. The more complete your data is in the system, the better we can match social conversations mentioning your brand, your products, etc.  As an added benefit, we syndicate that data for free to over 300 digital partners (mobile apps, e-tailers, wine websites, and more). One place, 300 solutions.

Lastly, you get a free Facebook app from Social Candy that lets you publish your wines in your Social Connect account right on your Facebook fan page.

Please know that we need your help here too.  If you have put your data into the system and a digital company requests your wine or winery data, PLEASE send them our way.  The data is free for them to get from our API. We want you to think of VinTank as your platform too so be sure to leverage it by referring requests to us.

7. In regards to social media how can VinTank be helping you better:

• More tips on how to manage social media. – 56.3%
• More seminars how to use social media. – 22.5%
• More content how to use social media. – 37.5%
• More articles about social media best practices. – 58.8%

VinTank - The message came through loud and clear. Please give us more information on how to better succeed at Social Media.  We are on the case!  Please also remember that when we send you a general email from VinTank we try to include some of the best curated articles we discover and want to share with you.  Also please follow our Twitter feeds where we curate the best articles we read throughout the week (@vintank, @pmabray, @james_jory, @evancover)

In the final post for this series, I will organize and answer all the kind comments, challenges, and feedback you provided in our survey.

The answer is incredibly simple, we do use our software every day.  The best way to look at VinTank is we are the answering machine for all conversations about or to you and your brand.  At the very minimum you should listen to the messages.  How you respond is your choice.

Every morning you get our daily email (soon to change to be much more useful for you) encouraging you to sign-in to view the new conversations and new customers discovered that are talking about your brand or campaign. Signing in from the email brings you to your dashboard with some high level statistics as well as some key numbers in orange buttons. The numbers in the orange buttons represent the new mentions or customers for your brand since the last time your marked them as viewed.

Clicking on an orange stat button from the dashboard takes you directly to the new conversations or customers the system has discovered since the last time you marked them as viewed. Conversations and customers are considered NEW if it is the first time you’ve seen them. Once you’ve reviewed all new conversations and new customers, click the “Mark All Viewed” link to reset the “new” counter.

When viewing mentions I go through and a) choose to answer, b) make notes or tags about the conversations for either reporting or follow-up, or c) both.

In more detail let’s explore those three key functions:

Answer –

When answering conversations I first look into the customer to better understand them by (if possible) reading their profile, looking at their follower/following ratio, how many wine conversations we’ve recorded about them, how much have they talked about my brand, and in some cases, their Klout.com score.  This gives me better context about who I am talking to before jumping into the conversations.  In our new version you’ll be able to make notes about the customers and report on them.

Then answering is as easy as just a click of a button for Twitter (and Facebook that should be releasing today or tomorrow).

You can also see that Evan left me a note on how he worked with the customer and this conversation was tagged as "inquiry".

Making Notes or Tags –

These two functions are a key layer superimposed on top of all conversations in the software (they are also superimposed over all customer information in the tool as well but more on that in my next post about Social Customer Relationship Management).  Here are some great use cases for using tags or notes that we use at VinTank.  Remember you can create multiple tags per conversation but make sure you use the same tags consistently if you are planning on reporting on them.

Examples:

• Marking a conversation as an “accolade” or “review” for future use on your site or for sell sheets.
• Marking conversations about topics or campaigns that are key.  For example when we get a great press review, we tag those conversations to the source of the conversation.  e.g. Vinography, Palatepress.  Or if there are internal blogs that created buzz like Shark (for the Heimoff article).
• Marking conversations by the actual wine for reporting to see the sentiment of wines over a period of time.  Eventually we will have the ability for you to just select from the wines you have put in the Winery section to attach to the conversations but currently this is a manual process.
• Appending NOTES to conversations for indicated future interactions such as “Evan, please follow-up, Use for press releases, Follow-up with this customer in 30 days, Customer service issue resolved” and so on.

Our philosophy is to respond to all customers in a timely and appropriate manner, just like over traditional communication channels, and we attempt to respond to all pertinent customer conversations at or about us. Sometimes we don’t get to all of them, most often we succeed.

Managing Sentiment –

Although the system will automatically indicate sentiment in some cases, you have the ability to override or set the sentiment for each conversation yourself. In our account we try to set the sentiment for all conversations, where relevant, so we can use this information for monthly internal reviews of our online reputation.

When I mark the conversation as strongly positive an icon appears in the upper right hand corner after I save. You can see I have also tagged this press and left a note for the team.

More advanced use cases:

We also create additional social campaigns to monitor other conversations about topics that are relevant to our business such as Social Customer Relationship Management, #SCRM, wine e-commerce, etc.  If we have additional time we go through those conversations and mark them as well.  In the case of a winery, you might monitor conversations about vineyards you own or source fruit from, your winemaker, or marketing campaigns you are executing (e.g. Build a Better Burger from Sutter Home).  Marketing initiatives should have their own campaigns so you can measure how much the campaign contributes to the conversations about the brand and other benchmarking efforts.

Reporting:
Weekly I generate reports on all conversations that have notes and send them to the team so we can deal with the ones that need follow-up.

Monthly I create multiple reports (it takes me about 30 minutes):
1.     A recap of our social activity and footprint for the team.
2.     A report on our social reputation.
3.     A report on key blogs that mentioned our brand to ensure we have added them to our press section and added the blogger to our PR contact list.
4.     A report on all customer accolades, issues, and discuss how they were resolved or how we can do better as a team handling issues.
5.     A report on how our blogs performed for the month.

So in the end our steps are actually very simple and take the first 30 minutes of everyday as part of our morning routine like answering phone messages or email.

1.     Answer all relevant customer conversations.
2.     Annotate conversations according to your internal procedures (tags and notes).
3.     Run reports weekly or monthly for items that need followup.
4.     Run monthly reports on how well you are performing in social media, social customer service, and online reputation.

Any questions?  Need more suggestions?  Please leave them in the comments below.

Here is a quick run-down of the new features you will see the next time you sign in to Social Connect:

GetGlue

We are pleased to announce GetGlue as our newest content channel! Now you will discover when consumers are virtually “checking-in” or mentioning your products through this popular social gaming mobile application. Why is this important to you? In 2011 GetGlue reached over 2 million users. That is amazing growth and represents a huge pool of consumers that are “checking-in” and commenting on wines, wine topics, and wine related TV shows, movies, books, and magazines. Through Social Connect, you now have visibility into this growing network of social customers.

Enhanced Filtering

When displaying the latest social mentions for your brands and campaigns, we order mentions by the date when the system matched the conversation. The most recently matched conversations are always on top. This can sometimes be confusing, though, since the time between when a post was published and when it was matched can range from a few minutes to a few days and sometimes longer. For example, tweets are typically matched by the system within minutes but blog posts and forum posts can take up to a few days. In addition, when you add or edit keywords for your campaign or we find new sources of wine content, the system will go back and find matches against older content. Because new matches are always new to you, we sort them to top. But when new matches have different publish dates, it can be difficult to differentiate what’s been newly published from “older” posts.

To resolve this issue, we added the ability to sort matches by the date the posts were published. This will display the most recently published matches first, giving you a view of the freshest conversations. You can select the desired sort order from the “Filters” panel at the top of the matches page.

Along with the new sorting option, you can also tell the system to only show new matches (which are indicated with a  icon below each post). Once you have reviewed all new mentions, you can mark them all as viewed to reset the counter. This will allow you to easily focus on the new conversations each time you sign in.

“New” Customers
Similar to the icon displayed below new mentions, you can now view your new social customers too. Simply navigate to your customers tab within the tool and look for the “new” icon below the user’s profile image. The same rule applies where you can mark all new customers as viewed to reset its counter.

Lastly, we are now displaying the average score for user-generated tasting notes for your brands (normalized to a 5 star scale). You will see this average score on your Social Overview page as well as on your Brands page. You can click on the on the average score or the “Tasting Notes” link to view the individual tasting notes.

All of these new features build upon our recent shift to focusing on the social customer. Below are the highlights of those changes. You can read more about the details of these new features along with our overall philosophy about our software:

• New daily emails which include the total number of new mentions as well as the “Big Stat” of what we are measuring in the wine world
• Entirely new social overview and dashboards
• New customer highlights
• New brand measurement and monitoring with focus on consumers talking specifically about your brand(s)
• The ability to create customized campaigns (we call them Social Campaigns)
• And more…

We cannot thank you enough for all of the feedback you have provided this far. We want this to be your “go to” social monitoring, measurement and management tool. Please let us know if you have any questions or need a help with any of the new features as we will be more than happy to assist you in leveraging the platform to its maximum capabilities!

We asked, you answered, we are acting.

We believe in customer centric strategies and we tout over and over again how important it is to interact with your customers.   In following our own philosophy we sent out a short survey to all of our winery customers (THANK YOU TO EVERYONE THAT PARTICIPATED) to answer some basic questions on how to improve our software and company.  I will probably extend this into a series of three to four posts since there is so much to discuss but let me start with the big items.

What the H-E-DOUBLE HOCKEY STICKS is VinTank?

Yes, we’ve been a bit of anomaly in the industry for almost three years bridging the gap between digital and wine.  Since our recent shift in focus on the software company we bought, we are now just one very simple thing – we listen to conversations on social networks and bring all mentions of your brand into one easy dashboard for you to better communicate and connect with your customers. Forget all the mumbo-jumbo social media tactics, the basic principal behind our software is that customers are talking about your brand and you need to at least hear those conversations and decide how you want to respond.

We heard a lot about the email changes.

Yes, we did change the email from including a daily digest of recent mentions.  Why?

1. The digest only included the five most recent matches from each category we monitor. That meant that most of you were not seeing all of the new conversations. Including all matches is simply not practical in an email.
2. We’ve added TONS of new features to the software to help you better manage and even respond to conversations from within the tool. And we will continue to further enhance and refine the platform.
3. Sorry that you have to sign-in, but it is not possible to deliver the full functionality and value in an email as we can in the software. We will be making improvements to the email, though (and yes, we’ll be abandoning the kitsch of KISS).  We also are adding more tools so you can manage Twitter and Facebook from within the app so you can do all your social work in one place (which should make it even more valuable to only have to log into one place).
4. We are building a mobile interface to our software so that those of you who prefer to keep up on your brand and customer activity from your mobile phone will have an optimized user experience.
5. We added the notion of customer into our platform.  This is one of the most unique perspectives of any social listening tool inside or outside the wine industry and we think it is as important, if not more so, than just hearing the conversations.  This is unique to VinTank.

Help us, help you.

We have big plans for enhancing and improving our platform, both in features and quality. But overall, our software is a juggernaut when it comes to finding conversations about your brand and ensuring they are about wine. It is not (and can never be) an exact science and requires your help to make it better.  How can you do that?  First, go to Help & Support site for valuable tips and resources.

That’s not enough?  Then any of these places will work: paul@vintank.com, evan@vintank.com, james@vintank.com, help@vintank.com, Tweet to @vintank, make a note on our Facebook page, or use carrier pigeon, smoke signals, or other variations.  We will respond and give you a hand.

We also heard loud and clear that you would like us to deliver more content on how to better manage social media and our software for the wine industry.  To do so we are working hard writing, writing, writing.  But that is still note enough for us and in a few weeks we’ll start up an hour Hangout on Google + Hangouts to answer your questions about our software, answer questions about social media, and hopefully have some guest thought leaders join us to help as well.  Please add VinTank to your circles here so you can see when we start up our little video show. You can also circle up me on G+ at http://gplus.to/pmabray

We Try, We Try, We Try.

Please know that we heard every single one of your likes, dislikes and challenges with our software.  Many of them echoed our own hopes and are on our roadmap to build and implement.  But please be patient with us.  We are essentially 3.5 guys working as hard as we can to make our tool better and more useful to you and delivering as much functionality as we can for free.  We do our very best and have nothing but good intentions in our actions but with such limited resources, we can’t fulfill everything as fast as we’d like.  Here is our commitment to you:

• The Brand listening features of our software will ALWAYS be free for you.  We want you to hear what people are saying about you on social networks and give you the ability to connect with them.
• We will continue to work to keep improving the software that helps you connect to your customers on social media.
• We’ll respond to every email, social media mention, tweet, and phone call you send our way to get you the answers you need.
• Finally, and most importantly, we are logging every one of your suggestions, challenges, and goals and have put them on our roadmap.  We will be honest with how they fit in our release schedule.

Yes, there are paid versions coming.

Though the brand listening part of our software will always be free, there are three paid tiers coming in the next few weeks, all around Social Customer Relationship. All tiers of our service will look like this:

• VinTank Free – Listening and managing conversations about your brand.
• VinTank Lite – Ability to see and manage all your social customers including making notes, categorizing, and reporting for your customers. It will also have the ability to manage your Facebook wall and Twitter conversations right from within the platform. $35/month/brand
• VinTank Pro – Integrate your e-commerce/club/tasting room/e-mail customers into our software.  If you use Vin65.com, this will be done AUTOMAGICALLY.  Imagine seeing how many times your club members are talking about you, etc.  It will also have a special new customer insights feature that tell you what kind of customer is talking about your wine or campaigns.  $150/month/brand
• VinTank Enterprise – Every bell and whistle you can imagine including detailed share of voice reporting, competitive analysis, macro/industry trends, and more. Please inquire.

“What?” I thought. “That’s not your customer?” I couldn’t reconcile that statement. I had to dig deeper so I asked some questions.

“Did they buy your wine?” I asked.

“Yes, but not from us. They bought it from a retailer or a restaurant.”

I continued. “Did you make money from that bottle of wine?”

“Yes, but from the wholesaler.”

“So you made money from the bottle of wine that the customer bought from a retailer who bought it from a wholesaler who bought it from you?” Everyone nodded. “Would you want them to buy another bottle of your wine?”

“Of course. But I prefer they’d buy it from us directly.”

Well, that I can understand. But let’s get real for a moment. There are no real advantages to consumers buying wine direct from the winery (we can debate this in the comments below). I know this sounds like blasphemy coming from someone who has been pro-direct all my career. I am still the biggest believer in this channel, but it is time we face some realities and, I repeat, there are no real advantages to consumers buying wine directly from the winery. No price advantages, limited shipping discounts, limited selection, delayed gratification, silly shipping regulations, and in general, mediocre customer support. Ok, I digress.

We have been working on a concept at VinTank called “Direct Through Trade.” This should not be confused with “Direct To Trade”, which was coined at Inertia Beverage Group (now WineDirect). “Direct To Trade” is the ability to sell wine direct to a restaurant or retailer with or without interaction from a wholesaler. Instead, “Direct Through Trade” is our understanding of the new reality of the social customer. Direct Through Trade is the notion of interacting with indirect customers through social media to engender brand loyalty, support your resellers, strengthen your relationships with resellers, and derive business intelligence about all of your customers. Although this concept applies to any distributed product where the end customer is separated by one or more layers/intermediaries, we feel that it is particularly applicable to our industry since wine is both a consumable and experiential product. This makes it a perfect match for social media.

The key to Direct Through Trade is recognizing the evolution of the customer to the social customer. In this context, a social customer is anyone who interacts with your brand or product online.

So does this mean that someone who tastes your wine with their friends and tweets about it is your customer? Yes.

Is a retailer talking about selling your wine your customer? Yes.

Is a blogger writing about your wine your customer? Yes.

Is a critic talking about your wine your customer? Yes.

They are all different types of social customers and they all merit different tactics. However, the key is that you are now able to hear your customers and choose how you want (or not) to interact with them. Social media makes this both possible and scalable.

As an illustration, the screenshot below shows a social customer detail page in Social Connect (from an entirely different winery than mentioned in this post, by the way).

So how does this all link together?

Direct Through Trade is about talking to your social customer to:

• Acknowledge their mention of your wine.
• Thank them for their purchase (think The Thank You Economy).
• Enhance their purchase through additional information about your wine, pairing suggestions, etc. (e.g create trust and context for that customer with you).
• Acknowledge your retail/restaurant partner.
• Support your retailer/restaurant’s efforts in interacting with your/their customers.
• And many more.

In a market where each one of your products competes against 150K other products approved by the TTB don’t you think that servicing your social customer is a key way to differentiate your brand and create loyalty in a market where wine consumers have so much choice?

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.

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.

What you see is 1.1 million conversations about Chardonnay across 5 broad social categories (shown above as weekly totals). That’s a whole lot of information about people who drink and talk socially about Chardonnay.

To look at Pinot Noir you can see almost 500K conversations. Imagine what a winery or brand manager could learn from analyzing these conversations and customers . . .

We thought the same thing and wanted to do a little deeper analysis. To better understand which of the mainstream varieties were being discussed through the holidays we built a real-time tracking dashboard. We started by tracking the four major varieties (Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Merlot) and then added five more (Malbec, Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Shiraz, Zinfandel) a couple days later on Dec 26th. The system automatically deals with synonyms, misspellings, and abbreviations for each variety.

The winner was easily Chardonnay by a landslide.  Also, as you can see Merlot is by no means dead in the social ecosphere placing a strong #2 and doing a fine job bucking the Sideways affect of Pinot Noir who places #3. And mired mid-pack at #4 is the king of grapes, Cabernet Sauvignon.

This is just the first of many future reports where we will be surfacing interesting macro trends we see in our industry. Can’t wait to share what’s next. Do you have a report you want to see?  Let us know in the comments.