• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, October 5, 2006

Starbucks this week started running a promotion for its nascent book club at the social networking site Gather.com.

The site Tuesday debuted a Starbucks-sponsored page on Gather.com touting Mitch Albom's "For One More Day," which Starbucks is promoting as part of its foray into entertainment sales. The coffee giant, which formed an entertainment division in 2004, said this summer it would start marketing books, beginning with Albom's.

The Starbucks page on Gather.com includes a post from Albom about the idea behind "For One More Day"--which he describes on the site as a story about "a son getting a second chance with his departed mother." As of Wednesday evening, 18 users had written in with their own comments, while about 300 Gather.com members had joined the group.

Stephanie Bittner, Starbucks director of brand advertising and communications, said the company created a group on Gather.com in hopes of leveraging social networking sites to connect with customers. "We'd like to get more involved with social networking, where that fits," Bittner said.

Gather.com, which launched last year, has been signing up about 500 members a day in recent months, said founder and CEO Tom Gerace. Today, the site draws around 80,000 active members that generate content--posting comments, images, and the like--in addition to the members that simply come to the site and read the posts.

Starbucks is the fourth major company to advertise on Gather.com, Gerace said. In June, Nintendo began sponsoring a games section on the site. In addition, two other companies, Volvo and Equifax, are running banner ads on the site.