Cork'd : Building a social network for wine lovers

Dear friends,

On Monday, October 5^th, we will also be discussing about Cork’d, the wine social network, in our class. A website dedicated to wine lovers, Cork’d was launched in 2006. It provided wine lovers a place to rate and review wines. A new version of Cork’d was launched in September, 2009, with a much more social design. The new model allowed individual users to register for free but the wineries had to pay high fee for membership. There were many new features for the individual users for wine related social networking as well as for wine education. There were no advertisements in the new version.

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. Accordingly, the social media strategy of Cork’d, its content creation strategy, in particular, was designed.

While the number of free individual users was growing, there were few paid up accounts of wineries. This was a serious issue of concern.

In the class on Monday, we will deliberate upon the social media strategy of Cork’d, with emphasis on its content creation strategy and how social network was used by Cork’d to create interactions. We look forward for an interesting discussion. After all, it’s about wines…..

NB : This blog is jointly posted by Fitore and Sandeep.