Is Social Media Monitoring Going Vertical?

Market specialisation could well be a 2.0 model for social media monitoring

We saw this post on Open Forum, and then Mashable and thought that it was a great question to ask by Mashable, since there’s a wealth of potential for some markets.

You may have seen in the past that we have compared the features of the main social media monitoring tools. Well, there’s now a new tool to add to the list! Cruvee is the first vertical social media monitoring tool, that we’re aware of.

This approach seems proven and popular for the wine market with around 30% of US wineries using it. With that evidence, why aren’t we seeing more platofrms like this for other markets? A gold mine, surely. That said, Cruvee remains free, for now!

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. Mabray goes on to explain the specific terms that Cruvee’s algorithm has been callibarated for as it monitor 77 wine-specific platforms across mobile and web including cellar management software and the iPhone app Drync.

Once brands have inputted their winery informationis also aggregated through an API to an audience of 2.2m potential customers, with partners like winelog.net as well as to the brands own Facebook page, do read the full post on Open Forum to get the details.

What are the opportunities here?

We think this is a great evolution opportunity for social media monitoring that makes sense to many markets becuase:

• Social media is about way more than the big networks and we know from experience that there are unique forums, blogs, web services, portals and apps that are all creating, sharing or mashing up data specific to our own niche – this trend will only grow, we’d suggest
• Those niche out-posts for your market are where the hot stuff specific to your brand’s language and your audience – where rich interactions between raving fans, sceptics and new learners are coming together
• Even the big listening tools (like Radian 6) can only monitor a percentage of the market anyway, it makes sense that tools honing in on markets or verticals would have a pretty big advantage

This model of mashing ‘big data’ together is something that commentators like Charlene Li tout as major/disruptive trends for 2011, the opportunity here is not only Cruvee mashing data and re-sharing, but other apps leveraging Cruvee’s API and creating value in other dimensions. Cool stuff?

Limitations? It likely couldn’t work, or wouldn’t be so relevant over industry standard tools, where there are limited specialist platofrms, services, blogs or forums – say consumer banking. That really is its key?

What do your think? Would it work in your market and would you pay for it?