A website dedicated to
wine lovers, Cork’d was launched in 2006. It provided wine lovers a place to
rate and review wines and wineries to promote their wines through
advertisements. Subsequently, Cork’d was owned by Gary Vaynerchuck, a loyal
Cork’d advertiser. Vayenerchuck had a passion for wines. He was one of the
first retailers to sell wine on the internet. His video blogs were quite a hit
and he had a dedicated fan following. He was dubbed as “wine social media
guru”. Vaynerchuck met Lindsay Ronga, at that time an MBA student at Harvard,
and invited her to join Cork’d. Ronga moved on to be the CEO of Cork’d and was
tasked to create the new Cork’d site, re-launch it, and build a social media
strategy that would connect the organization's mission and new goals with the
new features in the site and other social media.
Social Media Strategy:
Ronga created a social
media strategy to match the new image of Cork’d. Several of the components of
the social media strategy are identified below as per the table shown below:
Goals
- Profit
- Complement
wine retail business
- Wine
education
Roles and responsibilities
Roles and
responsibilities were limited to few people considering that the staff
consisted of only two people (Ronda and a full-time developer). They were in
charge of monitoring the site, making changes, and being responsive to the
users. Vaynerchuck played the role of the advisor and promoter. Five interns
were also hired for a short duration.
Products
- Relaunch
Cork’d -with improved features and pricing structures.
- Self
sustaining model, by earning revenue from wineries.
- Free
individual user accounts and paid account for wineries,
- Platform for wineries and wine lovers
- No advertisements
Audience
- Wine
lovers
- Wineries
For the success of the
new version it was necessary that more and more wineries sign up for the paid
accounts. Cork’d strategy was to attract large number of individual users to
the website, who could interact with the paid wineries. This would be a good
marketing place for wineries and they would readily sign up for paid accounts.
This two-sided network would provide benefits for both sides; that is, an
increase in one type of users would lead to an increase in the other type.
Accordingly, the content creation strategy was designed.
The main features of
the strategy were:
- Maximum
outreach to wine lovers/consumers. This will also help in retail business
of Vayenchurk.
- To
attract wineries to the paid account - to generate revenue for Cork’d.
- Bridging
gap between wineries and consumers.
To achieve these goals, Cork’d strategy
was twofold:
(i) To
connect more and more wine lovers/consumers and provide them a platform for
sharing.
They offered a system that allowed for two-sided
networking where both individual users and wineries provided benefits to one
another.
- Users
had access to wineries pages and could shop, reviews that and have direct
contact with their favorite wineries
- Wineries
could communicate with their loyal buyers as well as possible consumers.
Further, through reviews, they were able to better understand consumer
preferences.
- Users
communicated with users, considering that most of the content is
user-generated, on topics such as wine education
Strategy to Attract New Individual Users:
- New
users can sign with their Facebook ID through Facebook Connect.
- By
searching for wine related tweets, interns find and correspond with users
indicated an interest in wine.
- Reach to the old users extensive use of twitter account of Vayenchuk (posts three times a week)
- Use
of Wine Library TV - link provided to Cork’d after each tasting
episode for individuals to post review of the wine just discussed.
- Individuals
could upload profiles, interact with other users, and choose friends
(drinking buddies)
- Link
their Cork’d profiles to their facebook and twitter accounts
- Can become fans of a wine, winery or grape
- Incentives to keep the new users engaged:
· Use of ‘newbie badge’
· Launching a contest to win a trip
· Ensure freshness of the content (new articles)
· Licensing the content to other websites
Strategy to Attract Wineries to the Paid
Account:
- Wineries
could maintain profile pages where they could post information, provide
link to their own websites, and interact directly with devotees of the
wines.
- Featured
winery on home page
- Featured
wine from verified wineries
- Weekly
newsletter - published interviews of verified wine owners
- Bare bone page for those wineries not having paid account
(ii) To create
interesting content so that the users are kept engaged and they keep coming back
to the site .
- User
generated content with minimal of editorial control - added credibility to
the site
- Review
and rate wineries , discuss wines.
- maintain
a ‘wine cellar’ to store their favourite wines.
- create
wine shopping lists
- Actively
engage with the wineries.
- Navigate
to learn about grapes, producers, and wines.
- Shop
for wines (third-party sites) and link their Facebook and Twitter
profiles to their accounts.
- appear
on Featured User
- discover
and keep track of the new wines.
The main idea behind
their social media content strategy was the user-generated content. This meant
that content was constantly updated, interesting, and benefited both sides.
Content generated by Cork’d and other guest writers was supporting to the user-generated
content, which was the building block of the network.
- Freshness
of the content:
- Cork’d
content : New articles on regular basis by guest writers.
- Weekly email newsletter by Cork’d staff.
- Free of advertisements - best possible experience to users, loyal customers.
- Correctness of data - Reliance heavily on user generated data, hence accuracy was most necessary. Wine input system developed to to check adding a duplicate wine etc., correction by CEO .
Tools
- Use
of social media and other tools for interaction (both for pushing and
pulling content)
- Twitter to attract new user(Vaynerchuk’s
status as celebrity)
- Broad
PR and social media campaign to coincide with the public launch
- Cork’d
hosted a wine testing pre-launch party - allowing wine tasters and
wineries to communicate
- Use
of Social Media: Encourage use of Twitter, Facebook, and Blog to spread
the word over the experience of the pre-launch party
- Use of Media: Features about the Vaynerchuk and Cork’d in Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch
Measure performance
Despite Cork’d increasing the number of new
users through its new social media strategy, it was having issues increasing
the number of wineries subscribing to the site. Without paid accounts of
wineries, Cork’d could not sustain itself. Some of the challenges are
identified as :
- Lack
of feedback mechanism from wineries - an important audience.
- Over
Reliance on Vayerchuk celebrity status, which could have been good for
recruiting but not to sustain the momentum
- Over-reliance
on user-generated content to attract individuals
- Loss
of control
- Negative
reviews for wineries that are not members
- Copyright
infringement
- Quality
control is difficult
- Moderation
is important
- More focus on recruiting individual users than wineries
- The two-sided network did not work properly-users were more interested to network/communicate with other users rather than wineries.As such, there was no added value for wineries to join.
Lessons Learned
Some of the components
of the social media strategy such as those aimed at the individual users proved
to be successful. Cork’d was able, through a combination of tactics, to
increase the number of individual users. Despite using a two-sided network that could have proven successful, Cork'd failed to make the content and networking function in a way to create incentives for wineries.
Social media content strategy proved to be interesting and engaging for
individual users but missed the mark with the wineries. For the success of any social media strategy, its important that there is value addition for all its audience.
Cork’d’s social media
strategy shows the importance of thinking about all the social media strategy
components alike; specifically, it shows the importance of analyzing and
understanding your audience. Once you have such information, think of the best
tactics and tools to disperse information and to reach your audience. The tools
that worked for Cork’d might not necessarily work for your organization. The
idea is that different audiences, same as in the case of Cork’d (individual
users and wineries), require for multiple tactics and different content and
incentives.
When planning your
social media content strategy think of it as being a burger where the bun
is where you post your content, the meat is the audience (which you have to
analyze and understand), cheese is the content theme that has to match
your audience and be useful to them (keywords that draw attention), the sauce
is the voice and tone you plan to use and depends on the industry/field
(government vs non-government), and finally condiments are the content format
(such as photos and videos) that make your content strategy visually appealing.1
Future of Cork'd
Note: A joint blog from Fitore Hyseni and Sandeep Jain
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