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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Earlier that day the guys also took the time to give a more detailed presentation, which come to find out was the first time they have actually presented it together IRL. This was a real treat for those that were able to attend and thanks to B Napa (seriously great film makers for the wine industry and all around great guys) we were able to capture it all on video so that those who missed it can watch it in its entirety. We hope you enjoy what these two thought leaders and experts in Location Based Marketing (and Services) have to say.

Click here to view the embedded video.

After their presentation the guys stuck around to personally answer everyones questions and sign their book Location Based Marketing for Dummies which we fully endorse and serves as an ideal introduction to location-based marketing and gets you started building a location-based marketing program. Here is a brief synopsis on the book:

Learn to create a two-way dialog with customers with location-based services and smartphonesLocation-based services (LBS) have started to gain popularity in the marketplace with more and more businesses starting to incorporate LBS into their marketing mix. This book is a necessary resource for anyone eager to create a two-way dialog with their customers in order to establish customer loyalty programs, drive promotions, or encourage new visitors. You’ll learn how to successfully build, launch, and measure a location-based marketing program and figure out which location-based services are right for your business.Packed with resources that share additional information, this helpful guide walks you through the tools and techniques needed to measure all the data that results from a successful location-based marketing program.

• Helps you figure out which location-based service (LBS) is right for your business and then integrate LBS with your social graph
• Details ways to create compelling offers, using location-based marketing as a customer loyalty program, and set performance goals and benchmarks
• Explains how to use tools to measure your campaign, analyze results, and determine your business’s success
• Includes examples of companies that are successfully using location-based marketing to demonstrate techniques and concepts featured in the book

What is your favorite wine region?   Your least favorite?
My favorite wine region is wherever I just came back from a sponsored trip. I just did a SICK trip to Spain, Jay Miller style. Thank you Pancho.
My least favorite is Jersey Shore AVA. Too much tannin.

If you were trapped on a desert island what wine would you drink and why?
As a matter of fact, I was trapped on a desert island once and all I could drink was  “orange wines”. They were  three-year- old 100 point Parker Reds that were in an unmarked suitcase headed to China.

Natural cork or synthetic?
Natural always is best for me, the synthetic ones ruin my Laguiole corkscrews. Synthetic corks and screwcaps can protect the wine from TCA, but they can’t protect the wine from the winemaker.

Robert Parker, Steve Heimoff and Alder Yarrow in a cage match . . . who wins and why?
I know it’s cliche, every Sommelier says “Steve Heimhoff would kick ass in a cage match”, but I really think Alder Yarrow would be a solid contender. He has the Harry Potter looks with fearless killer instincts.

Robert Parker would make a great luchador in Mexico.

MS (Master Sommelier) or MW (Master of Wine)?
Well, one is a Court the other is an Institute. Two places I’ve been put in before so not dying to get back.  I’ve taken the MW so many times, I’m the Mayor on Foursquare.
I really love the merit pins you get from the MS, I worked harvest once and got the Wilderness Survival pin.
There is a shared desired by many Sommeliers to get their MS. I want to be like Gerard Basset, MS, MW, Wine MBA and Best in the World and E.G.O.T the whole thing.

Any lessons in wine service to share with other Sommeliers?
When decanting a bottle of wine, make sure the candle does not burn your Vinturi wine aerator.
Never recommend 3 Puttonyos to a Gay Mexican.
In Texas, if you want to be a Somm, your first job is Bordeaux Patrol.
When in doubt, mumble…

Why do you think rappers choose moscato? 
Because it tastes like Moscato d’nasty. I prefer getting Krunk, that’s Krug + Drunk.

Is @WINESALESHULK your mortal enemy?  He declares all somm’s as his mortal enemies.
My mortal enemy is oak and alcohol. @winesaleshulk is the biggest “Tool” I can use  to manage my program. I need leftover samples for the tasting menu, donations for The Director of “Domestic Affairs”. 85% of Sales Reps have tech sheets with points on them, 100% of Sommeliers don’t care.

Favorite wine brands and why?
So many to choose, I can think of two.
Chateau Mypants
Veuve Licklow

Social media marketing reminds me of the early days of websites where companies knew they needed one, but didn’t know where to start. Companies were spending a lot on a simple website because they didn’t know better. Now, with greater understanding and more low-cost tools available, companies can get started with a low monthly fee and manage it themselves. Good thing we have learned from the good old days and with another ‘new’ platform, Facebook, there are already tools available to get started. You can think of Facebook marketing having four stages.

First, building a Facebook business fan page, which is different from your personal profile, is a very important start. The key to any online marketing campaign is to keep people interested with relevant information about your business. You don’t want to intermingle your kid’s birthday party photos with events at your winery. You’ll lose potential customers, and you won’t know who are friends and who are customers. With Facebook, you can start out by using free tools, posting to the Wall and start growing your online marketing.

Second, building a custom landing page is important and allows you to control your messaging, improve your branding and offer clear call to actions and special offers (i.e., check out our events, sign up for our newsletter, visit our tasting room, two for one tastings…). There are tools available to quickly create custom Facebook tabs. Think of it like putting an interactive brochure on Facebook that people can share with their friends. Studies show that people are also 37% more likely to click on the LIKE button, if you have a custom landing page. Make sure the tools you are using are relevant to the wine industry and to what you want to achieve.

Third, using promotions to engage your customers like contests, giveaways and sweepstakes are incredibly useful tools to quickly increase your Facebook followers, collect leads and really grow your online community. This can be tricky in the wine industry, which is incredibly regulated, but being creative and understanding that a simple button, t-shirt or even recognition is incredibly powerful and people enjoy ‘game-like’, fun experiences. The cost of these promotions can be higher, but the return on your marketing dollars can be much greater and effective too.

Lastly, building larger, custom marketing campaigns similar to Skittles, Coke, Oprah and now Domino’s Pizza can be very effective campaigns to transition your marketing efforts from traditional print, media and email to Facebook which can be cheaper, have more measurable successes and provide greater results. These campaigns are typically driven by agencies who will create, manage and market the entire promotion to achieve very specific business needs. As a smaller organization, you typically won’t get into this stage, but you can use the lower-cost tools in the third stage to accomplish relative results for your smaller brands.

If you haven’t started or you are at one of these stages right now, try getting the most out of it and start moving to the next stage when you are ready. Facebook can be a powerful and very effective marketing tool to promote your products and services with a greater return on your marketing dollar. Facebook is such a unique platform that allows you to grow at your pace and allows your customers or followers to promote your products and services for you. Why wait, get started today!

Darin Kotalik
CEO, Co-Founder
Social Candy

A note from VinTank: With our recent partnership with Social Candy we thought it would be great if they could provide our valued clients and community some key insight and guidance into what they do best, Facebook Marketing. In the future, you will be seeing more of our valued technology partners posting important information to help you succeed in your digital efforts. If there are specific topics you would like to learn more about please let us know by contacting evan@vintank.com.

Once a campaign is created, the system will immediately begin harvesting and matching conversations. Social Connect users are notified of new matches in a daily summary email and can view, filter, and build reports for campaigns or engage/reply to posts from within their Social Connect account.

Free Social Connect accounts are limited to five campaigns for each winery connected to the account (multiple wineries can be connected to the same account). Each campaign is also limited to five keywords.

To create a campaign, click the “Campaigns” tab and then the “Add Campaign” button.

Enter a name for your campaign and at least one keyword. The campaign name can be whatever you’d like—it has no bearing on how the campaign performs. The keyword, however, is important. For the keyword, enter a single term or phrase. For example, your brand name, a person’s name, a variety or region name, the winery’s tagline, and so on.

The keywords are what the system uses to listen and harvest conversations. To use a fishing metaphor, the keyword is the bait on the hook. Therefore, if your keyword is too specific, fewer conversations will be harvested for the matching engine. For a brand campaign, think about how your brand is typically described by your customers and add a keyword for each of these terms/phrases. For example, a keyword for your complete brand name, a keyword for a typical abbreviation for your brand name, and perhaps a keyword for a common acronym used for your brand. Additional keywords can be added to the campaign by clicking on the “Add Keyword” link. In general, it’s often best to be more generic than specific in your keyword. We want to “cast a wide net”. As you’ll see below, we can filter out false matches using the Advanced Settings for the keyword.

Below each keyword on the campaign add/edit page is an advanced settings section. Click the “Advanced Settings” link to open/close this section. These fields control how the matching engine filters, or matches, conversations that are harvested based on the keyword.

Each field in the Advanced Settings section is described below.

Keyword Type

There are two options here: “Entity Name” or “Natural Text”. If the keyword represents the name of a person, place, or thing, select “Entity Name”. Otherwise, if the keyword is a phrase, such as a winery tagline, select “Natural Text”. When in doubt, go with Entity Name.

Keyword Weight

The keyword weight is where you control the amount of “wine context” that is required near your keyword in the post in order for it to be considered a match. The Social Connect matching engine is built upon a sophisticated system of dialects where we have carefully codified the conversational “language of wine” with hundreds of terms, phrases, acronyms, synonyms, and abbreviations. Replicating this same level of accuracy and precision in a general-purpose listening tool is either not possible, extremely hard to maintain, or requires expensive professional services to setup. In Social Connect, it’s a simple drop-down where you can dial up (ambiguous keyword) or dial down (exact) the required context.

Rather than include terms like “wine” or “winery” in your keyword (making your keyword more specific), try making your keyword more generic and use this field to more dynamically control the matching.

It’s also worth noting that you use Social Connect as a general-purpose listening tool for keywords that are not wine-related by simply setting the keyword weight to “Exact”.

“Terms must be ordered” checkbox

If your keyword has multiple terms/words, use this checkbox to control whether those terms must appear in the sequence entered or can be in any order. For single term keywords, this checkbox has no effect.

Term Proximity

The term proximity controls how many other terms can separate the terms in your keyword. For brand names you typically want the proximity set to zero (“all terms must be next to each other”) but for natural text you may want to increase the proximity to add flexibility and increase matches.

For single term keywords, this field has no effect.

Required Keywords

When adjusting the keyword weight alone is not precise enough for your needs, you can use this field to specify one or more keywords that must also appear in posts for matching.

You can enter multiple required keywords here, separating each with a comma. When multiple required keywords are specified, the matching engine will require only one of them to be present.

Disqualifying Keywords

The opposite of “required keywords” is “disqualifying keywords”. If any disqualifying keywords are found in a post for your keyword, the post will be discarded as a match. This field is handy when you’re finding a lot of false matches that have a consistent theme. You can weed these false matches out by entering one or more keywords in this field that are consistently found in those matches.

Separate multiple disqualifying keywords with a comma.

Trial and Error

To wrap up, it’s important to point out that some trial and error may be needed to fine-tune your campaign keywords for optimal performance. You can use the fields in the advanced settings section described above together to great effect. Don’t be afraid to experiment, either. If your keywords aren’t matching enough conversations, loosen them up by making them more generic and/or by dialing the wine context down. If you’re matching too many conversations or seeing a lot of false matches, dial the wine context up and/or specify some required or disqualifying keywords.

We are also here to help. If you’re at a roadblock and need some help, we’d be happy to review your campaigns and make suggestions. We also welcome your feedback to make the system even better.