December 2, 2009
18 Responses to ““Sound Off”- Why do you believe in OwnIT”
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OwnIT can be easily integrated into your website which is a great way for you to show your support of this movement.
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Publish your wines to your Facebook fan page using our Own IT for Wineries Facebook application.
This is exciting! Congrats on the launch of a much-needed and long overdue solution for the wine industry.
We’re looking forward to participating in the OwnIT program, so we can deliver the most accurate wine information to Hello Vino users. This ensures that when consumers discover new wines through our apps, the information is correct – delivered straight from the wineries.
Best of luck with the initiative – we’re behind you 100%!
Rick Breslin
Co-Founder, CEO
Hello Vino
We applaud Cruvee.com’s initiative to help wineries effectively and efficiently manage their brands online. This is an innovative movement to help and we hope wineries will get behind the movement and that other tech partners will also use the service to save money and present clean data on their sites. Great job guys.
Cruvee is taking on a massive initiative in the wine industry which will benefit all parties in the end. Allowing wineries to control their information helps wine drinkers tremendously. This also ensures that companies such as Cork’d have the CORRECT info which is truly crucial in serving our users. Major kudos to Cruvee. Let’s do this wineries, let’s OwnIT! Lindsay
Finally! OwnIt will provide something that is long overdue in the wine business: the ability for wineries to convey accurate brand information, while providing consistent information to the consumer. Clean data is something that all parties involved will benefit from. Thank you, CruVee.
I like the idea very very much. Perhaps someone can shine a light on how Google will like this idea of multiple sites using the same content. As far as I know, duplicated content is not so good for PR
I believe in #ownit because we have a similar network in the commercial business and it works! It keeps everyone connect across the world and has brought like-minded business people together to create remarkable production teams. I’ve very excited to see that the wine industry is adapting a similar network and I would love to help out in any way I can.
Thanks for your feedback, Ralph. You raise a great point. A few thoughts come to mind…
Although it is our goal to provide clean, accurate, and consistent information about wines, the information we will be providing will almost always augment the content and services of the sites consuming that information. Put another way, we are providing information and not necessarily content. In addition, since the data will be provided by flexible APIs, sites will be able to mix and match the data points we provide to best match the focus of their site. There are no restrictions on how information must be displayed or what data points must be used. For example, a wine social network may wrap the basic wine info with their own user reviews, comments, and discussions. Mobile apps may use the location info, open/close hours, and tasting policies in their service.
I think it’s also helpful to draw parallels to similar approaches in other industries. For example, electronics manufacturers provide detailed specs and photos of their products to e-tailers, review sites, and so on. Best Buy displays it one way, WalMart another way, and Amazon still another way. And each site adds their own content around it to differentiate themselves. However, the value of having accurate detailed specs and images of the products across all sites cannot be understated. This is a simplification and the wine industry is different in many ways to be sure but the wine industry is also absolutely lacking an effective information distribution channel that meets the needs of the technical world we live in.
At the end of the day, yes, Google does love content. But that sword cuts both ways. Are we better off with multiple different versions of information online where it’s incomplete, or even worse, wrong in many places or having our information displayed accurately? Let’s give accurate a shot!
Thanks again for stopping by.
The fears about “duplicate content” are a little misunderstood, in my experience (5+ years in web development)… Google is really looking for entirely _duplicate pages_, not pages that repeat some info that other pages contain. Otherwise, we’d all be suffering in SEO just by putting a datestamp on things… OwnIT sounds great, as a wine blogger, I can’t wait to have an easy, reliable way to find the info I need on the wines I review.
Kudos to Cruvee.com for stepping up to the plate with ‘OwnIt’ to provide the lubricant easing the fiction points in wine biz ecommerce by providing a solution to the Balkanization of wine product data in our wired world, where a winery’s brand message is often modified by users across the universe of sites including mobile apps, marketing agents, ecommerce portals, bricks & mortar retailers with an ecommerce presence, and social networks. The same passion that is put into the production of one’s wines is mirrored in the story inherent in one’s wine brand. However, user-generated content often retells this story in a way that obfuscates the unique, value added proposition that differentiates wine products in a crowed and increasingly difficult market. This is a notable & significant step forward in the landscape of the wine biz. Thanks, Evan & James …. Cork
Evan and Cruvee continue to be innovative leaders in fine wine communications and marketing. I’m very excited about the project and the opportunity to own my information with OwnIT. Now with Cruvee and OwnIT I can not only find out what people are saying about my wines, but be sure what their saying is accurate.
The wine business suffers from such fragmentation of data, it’s not even funny anymore. It makes my job harder as a wine communications professional to build a consistent brand message for my clients. OwnIT is a vision that I think we can get behind. It is going to take a lot of work and some time. But, in the end, the consumer will be better informed and the rest of us will be much more efficient and effective at communicating our brands. Kudos to the crew at Cruvee for taking the initiative to get this off the ground.
Thanks for getting this tool operational. It was one of the features, or potential features we sought from the beginning of Cruvee’s services. It will take a little while to change everyone’s expectations, but it will serve our message well to have one, consistent source in the internet world.
OwnIT is an extremely relevant and timely initiative. From our perspective, data is everything. The quality of the wine data in Drync Wine directly impacts our value proposition and the consumers’ experience with Drync. If a user searches for ‘David Bruce’ and receives 80 results, half of which are duplicates and/or are missing critical data, then we look bad, the consumer becomes confused, and the industry is suffers. OwnIT promises to clean this “mess” up by giving the producers control over their data, offering consumers clean, rich wine information, and enables technologists invest in more impactful projects.
OwnIt is a great idea. Espeakers has a similar product for speakers. Since I am also a talent manager, it made everything so much easier to put it on one place to make sure it was up-to-date and accurate on the bureau sites all over the world. Good move for wineries!
[...] can not conceive, in the midst of defenseless poverty we can not imagine. A wine auction for the …Sound Off- Why do you believe in OwnIT OwnITCraig Camp says: December 5, 2009 at 9:18 am. Evan and Cruvee continue to be innovative leaders in [...]
Fantastic idea and a “no brainer” for wineries to implement.
However I work with small wine retailers and so the “duplicate content” issue raises it’s ugly head. For those who don’t know, this issue is about Google not wanting to show the same exact results on its search engine results page. It wants to give the user a variety of relevant and helpful links.
Note not all your traffic comes from Google’s organic (left side) search engine results. They come from regular visitors, referrals, Adwords, Maps, Yelp, foursquare, email marketing. There is no algorithmic penalty for using duplicate content with these traffic sources! Yourwineyourway defintely works for them, its just the SEO issue we’re worried about.
So back to organic SEO results for a wine retailer. It’s a tricky issue as discussed above by Ralph, Steve and James. They all have good points and, since I’ve been writing my own post on wine retailers using winery descriptions, here’s a draft version of my view.
If all you use is the winery description from yourwineyourway (or the winery website) then Google will regard this as duplicate content and it will rank poorly in organic search results (if at all).
Ideally you would have a completely unique description thereby avoiding the duplicate content issue. However being one of those people has tried to get wine products up on a website at 2am in the morning having ready made descriptions is a god send! So I truly appreciate what OwnIt is doing.
Here’s a middle path. Google won’t tell us how much of the duplicate content we need to change to make it seen as unique – and they never will as this will open them up to manipulation. So we’ve got to experiment and test how much unique content there needs to be.
Here’s what I recommend: use yourwineyourway data as an accurate description from the winery. But supplement it with your own review. This review may be “stimulated” by the winery’s description but it will not be the same. Hopefully you also have the time or resources to add experts reviews and customers add their own reviews – but if you’re a small business then probably not
.
Just how unique it needs to be will be something I’ll do some experimentation with.
Thanks again guys!
Bruce-
Thank you for your detailed thoughts. SEO is certainly an important factor that affects many types of sites but it’s also important to keep it in perspective. The impact of duplicate content is a real concern. However, it’s also just one component of an overall SEO strategy. As you said, coming up with original content for every wine that a site lists/features/represents, is often not practical when thousands of wines are involved. Being aware of the SEO implications of using syndicated wine descriptions/details is important but I believe choosing to use syndicated content appropriately while staying focused on SEO fundamentals is preferable to no content at all. In other words, it can be detrimental to fall into the trap of focusing too much on avoiding SEO penalties at the expense of sound SEO optimization and site design.
The web is evolving rapidly and although search engines are still incredibly popular tools, traffic is originating from an increasingly diverse set of sites. And often the traffic from these sites while not as high as natural search traffic has a higher probability to convert to a sale. For example, links to wine purchase pages originating from social graphs (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LBS feeds) carry with them the weight of a personal recommendation. As we know, the greatest catalyst for wine purchases are trusted recommendations. Having rich and detailed information on your pages can make the difference in converting the sale.
Lastly, looking forward, we may find that the use of semantic markup will help mitigate any negative impacts of using syndicated product details on e-commerce sites. (Just a theory of mine. I don’t have any evidence that this is or is not happening today). For example, using the hProduct or hListing microformats on e-commerce sites will allow site owners to indicate what content on their page represents, say, the product description. Search engines can then use this to know that the page is referring to a product for purchase and the description is not search engine spam. All of the major search engines are already indexing microformats so there are the additional benefits of getting your wine purchase pages listed correctly and on new commerce aggregation sites.
-James
Yep, I’d agree with most of that. My only issue is the organic SEO results and this is only one source of traffic amongst many others (albeit an important one).
Interesting comments on microformats thanks James. Best of luck with the site, it’s a great idea!