July 13, 2011
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Cruvee is unlike any other social monitoring tool on the market. In contrast to competitors, such as Radian6 and Crimson Hexagon, Cruvee focuses solely on one vertical, the wine industry. The free social monitoring tool helps wine brands track and engage in conversations across the Web about their brands.
Acquired by VinTank earlier this year, Cruvee is used by 1,800 wineries—out of about 6,500 total wineries—in the United States and measures 1.5 million conversations about wine per day.
So, what makes Cruvee so special? Paul Mabray, VinTank's chief strategy officer, says that Cruvee's strength is in its ability to understand wine-specific language and taxonomy, as well as the fact that it monitors wine-specific social platforms.
The language of wine is already complicated enough, but when you throw in the 140-character confines of Twitter, for example, it gets even more difficult to interpret. Mabray explained, "If I say 'cab sauv' on Twitter, because I only have 140 characters, what I'm really saying is 'cabernet sauvignon.' Or if I say, 'blackberry in a six word spread of Twisted Oak," there's a high propensity that's going to be a tasting note about Twisted Oak winery, and not about Twisted Oak golf course, for example." Because Cruvee's algorithm was built around wine conversations, it is able to parse such granular details.
Furthermore, Cruvee is able to monitor 77 wine-specific platforms, both mobile and Web-based, that may be seen as too niche to track by other social monitoring tools. For example, it pulls in conversations from the Drync iPhone app and CellarTracker cellar management software.
A look at Cruvee
Because Cruvee focuses solely on the wine industry, it includes a number of features that you won't see in other social media monitoring tools. Take a below for screenshots of the tool in action.
Winery overview page
Wine brands input winery information into Cruvee. That data is then syndicated to more than 76 partners with an aggregate audience of more than 2.2 million potential customers through Cruvee's API. Some partners include Drync, VinoVisit and Winelog.net. The data is also also syndicated to a wine brand's Facebook Page.
Wine list page
Wine brands can also input information about each of their wines.
Wine details page
Each wine entry may include a number of details, including the wine's name, wine type, alcohol content and details about its production, among other options.
"The wine details tab and related tabs illustrate the comprehensive nature of the data that Cruvee collects and how Cruvee has been built from the ground-up for this purpose," says Mabray.
Data syndication ROI dashboard
The data syndication ROI dashboard enables wine brands to see "where their data is distributed through our partner network and where their data is in demand," says Mabray. "Through Cruvee's syndication network wineries are able to see what types of applications, businesses and services are accessing their data and in what levels."
Social media dashboard
The social media dashboard "provides a high-level snapshot of the latest activity across all social media campaigns created by the user from the six broad categories monitored by Cruvee," says Mabray.
The true value for wineries comes in with the types of systems Cruvee monitors. Mabray explained: "Besides monitoring conversations and posts from sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Delicious and so on, the system also monitors over 77 wine-specific platforms, 110,000 blogs and more than 50,000 forums. This list grows organically as the system discovers new locations where wines and wine brands are discussed."
Social media campaign edit page
Like other social media monitoring tools, Cruvee enables users to set up campaigns specific to current promotions or marketing initiatives. However, it does so with the language of wine in mind.
"Since Cruvee's social media monitoring system was built with wine in mind, it already has the ability baked in to apply filtering and context validation of conversations that are either impossible or very difficult to employ in general purpose tool sets," says Mabray. "The user merely has to dial up or down the necessary 'wine context' needed for each keyword in their campaign."
Monitoring conversations
After a social media campaign is active, the user can access a feed of conversations related to a given campaign. Cruvee recently added a feature that shows the Klout score for the commenter, so that wine brands using Cruvee can see a general measure of the user's influence.
Facebook application
Cruvee's API syndicates a wine brand's winery and wine details to its Facebook app, which enables wine brands to publish those details to their Facebook Pages, including Buy Now buttons that lead to their e-commerce sites. More than 900 wineries—about 50 percent of Cruvee users—use the free Facebook app. Here's an example of Jordan Vineyard & Winery's use of the app.
"Besides being syndicated to all of our partners, the information in Cruvee can also be used by the wineries themselves to satisfy one-off requests from critics, writers and bloggers (Cruvee Directory), as well as integrating into their own initiatives or even powering their own website or trade portal," explained Mabray. "We are also seeing companies begin to bootstrap applications on top of Cruvee's data, rapidly accelerating product development and innovation in our industry—case in point is the restaurant menu iPad app called Tastevin."
Is this the beginning of a vertical social media monitoring trend?
Cruvee is the first vertical social media monitoring tool we've seen, and it is being widely adopted in the wine industry, with nearly 30 percent of American wineries using it, as reported by VinTank. With Cruvee's growth, we wonder why other industry-specific social media monitoring tools haven't made their way to the stage.
After all, most industries operate on jargon. In the automobile industry, for example, social media monitors running solely on keyword searches—rather than industry-specific algorithms—would likely have a difficult time parsing whether the sentiment behind a post mentioning "sick rims" was positive or negative, or that it wasn't talking about glasses or BlackBerry-creator RIM, for example.
Mashable spoke with Altimeter Group Industry Analyst Susan Etlinger, who focuses on social and mobile analytics, to hear her thoughts on whether this is a trend we'll see blossoming in coming years. In short, Etlinger says:
"I am not convinced that this is the beginning of vertical social media monitoring. I think it does raise the bar for the monitoring tools out there to improve their domain expertise. Furthermore, I think domain expertise will become an even bigger differentiator than it is now. Building industry-appropriate lexicons is going to become critical in the next year, because the only way to truly understand a conversation about a particular product or industry is to understand the environment, the relationship between the customer and the business."
Etlinger says that social media conversations are akin to detective work: "Every post in social media is a clue to something—it's a clue about the relationship between that person and the business he or she is discussing. If you don't understand the context of the conversation, then you are very vulnerable to drawing the wrong conclusions."
We'd like to open this conversation up for discussion. Readers, do you think that Cruvee is leading the way towards a vertical social media monitoring trend? Have you seen other industry-specific social media monitoring tools on the market? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Image credit: Thomas_EyeDesign
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