Listening to Wine Conversations: Six Questions for Paul Mabray, Vintank

Paul Mabray, CSO, Vintank

Startup Vintank created a new “varietal” in social media listening, focusing their company’s offerings exclusively on the wine industry. They aim to provide an integrated social commerce platform with listening at its center. A wine lover myself, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to ask Paul a few questions about their business, business model, social intelligence, commerce, measurement, social CRM and opportunities. Details of his company’s software and service levels are available here.

Steve: Vin Tank was new to me until recently, and is probably new to many of our readers. Tell us about the company.

Paul: VinTank is the wine industry’s predominant social listening and social CRM platform. We power over 4000 wine brands and listen to about 1 million to 1.5 million conversations a day. So far we have analyzed over 330 million conversations and profiled over 10.5 million social wine customers.

Steve: Many companies develop social media monitoring tools and market them to the general market. You took a different approach, which was to go vertical and market narrowly to the wine industry. What was the thinking behind the strategy?

Paul: We believe that listening to a category (especially an experiential one) yields better insights and really allows you to profile social customers based on their conversations. Wine is one of those categories. By doing so we get to push the envelope in social CRM which will be one of the future foundations of companies for customer service, marketing, BI, and more.

Steve: The wine industry is like many artisan or craft-based sectors, where there is a segment of big players with global portfolios and a large segment of many small, more local businesses. Where are you getting the most traction, and why?

Paul: Ironically on both ends of the spectrum. Small wineries want tight, intimate relationships with their customers and large brands want macro understanding to consumers they would never have access to. We provide this to both.

Steve: What are Vin Tank customers using your services and analytics for most commonly? Which services are emerging and becoming more important?

Paul: It falls into three categories: customer service, measuring results of earned media from campaigns, competitive analysis. In terms of social platforms there are only a handful that the wine industry is fully adopting. The two largest are Facebook and Twitter. However Yelp, Tripadvisor, Foursquare, Youtube, Flickr, and Linkedin are also very important. Up and comer’s for the wine industry include Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram.

Steve: As popular as social listening, engagement and social CRM are, we’re still at an early stage. What do you think will increase adoption and the value social approaches have the potential to deliver?

Paul: I think one of the key mistakes people are making with social is trying to take commerce to social. Yes it works, but it is intrusive. However, by taking social to commerce you can build better context about your customer (direct and indirect). The customer is more in control than they have ever been in history and we have the ability to work with the unlimited information customers provide us through social media to do a better job servicing them. Even as we talk about how SCRM is still early stages, I think basic CRM is still nascent. As I like to say CRM is not a tool, it is a culture. Once companies understand this, social listening, social engagement, and social CRM will be a rudimentary exercise.

Steve: Anything else you’d like to comment on or add?

Paul: I think we are all still used to the days of push marketing. As our BOA member and good friend says: Content will be the future of advertising, people distributing and creating content for your brand will be the barometer of your advertising success. Barry Schuler – former CEO AOL/Time Warner/CEO Meteor Vineyards

Social media has empowered customers like never before in history. If your company does not have a customer centric strategy, you are not in tune with the new reality.