Friday Wine News You Can Use: Introducing Cruvee

This article was sent to me via a coworker as I begin my social media exploration.  For those that are totally into it, I thought it may be worth sharing.  Enjoy!

This article was originally found at Mashable.com.  It is pasted here for your convenience.

Social Media Monitoring: Is Vertical Specialization the Next Big Thing?

3 days ago by Erica Swallow

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Cruvee is unlike any other social monitoring tool on the market — in contrast to competitors, such as Radian6 andCrimson 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 ofTwitter, 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 theDrync iPhone app and CellarTracker cellar management software.

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 look at the embedded gallery below for screenshots of the tool in action.


Click here to view the screen shots.

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% 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 courtesy of iStockphoto, Thomas_EyeDesign