Original Research Article
Masters of Wine on Twitter: presence, activity, impact and community structure
Enrique Orduña-Malea- Cristina I. Font-Julian
- José Antonio Ontalba-Ruipérez
- Raúl Compés-López
Published 2021-04-14
Keywords
- wine,
- wine industry,
- wine experts,
- social media,
- Informetrics ...More
How to Cite
Orduña-Malea, E., Font-Julian, C. I., Ontalba-Ruipérez, J. A., & Compés-López, R. (2021). Masters of Wine on Twitter: presence, activity, impact and community structure. Wine Economics and Policy, 10(1), 73–88. https://doi.org/10.36253/wep-9055
Funding data
-
Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad
Grant numbers CS02016-78775-R
Abstract
Globalisation, the Internet and social media have changed the kind of actors with influence in the wine industry and the way these actors create signals to communicate credible information about experience and trust attributes. Among the most prestigious experts in the world of wine are the Masters of Wine (MW). Although initially devoted to international trade, they have spread their activities and their opinion is more and more appreciated by producers and consumers. The main objective of this article is to determine this community of experts’ behaviour on Twitter. In order to do so, four factors (presence, activity, impact and community) have been considered. All Twitter profiles belonging to users awarded with the MW qualification were identified and analysed. In addition, a set of 35,653 tweets published by the MWs were retrieved and analysed through descriptive statistics. The results show MWs on Twitter as high attractors (number of followers), moderate publishers (original contents published), moderate influencers (number of likes and retweets), and low interactors (number of friends and mentions to other users). These findings reveal that the MW community is not using Twitter to gain or reinforce their reputation as an accredited expert in the wine industry, giving more influential space on Twitter to consumers and amateurs.
References
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Thach, L., 2009. Wine 2.0—The next phase of wine marketing? Exploring US winery adoption of wine 2.0 components. Journal of wine research, 20(2), 143–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/09571260903169548
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Watson, Q., 2011. Social media increases wine sales and consumption. Polytechnic State University, CA, United States. https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1072&context=agbsp (accessed 12 June 2020).
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Wright, A., 2015. Lifestyle Blogging Report. Wine Bloggers Conference, Penticton, BC.
Anger, I., Kittl, C., 2011. Measuring influence on Twitter. In: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on knowledge management and knowledge technologies, September 7‒9. Graz, Austria. https://doi.org/10.1145/2024288.2024326
Bhattacharya, P., Zafar, M.B., Ganguly, N., Ghosh, S., Gummadi, K.P., 2014. Inferring user interests in the Twitter social network. In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Recommender systems, October 6‒10. California, United States. https://doi.org/10.1145/2645710.2645765
Bakshy, E., Hofman, J.M., Mason, W.A., Watts, D.J., 2011. Everyone's an influencer: quantifying influence on Twitter. In: Proceedings of the fourth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining, February 9‒11. Hong Kong, China. https://doi.org/10.1145/1935826.1935845
Barabási, A.L., 2016. Network science. Cambridge university press, UK.
Boyd, D.M., Ellison, N.B., 2007. Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of computer‐mediated Communication, 13(1), 210‒230. https://doi.org/10.1109/emr.2010.5559139
Burton, S., Soboleva, A., 2011. Interactive or reactive? Marketing with Twitter. Journal of consumer marketing, 28(7), 491‒499. https://doi.org/10.1108/07363761111181473
Capitello, R., Agnoli, L., Begalli, D., Codurri, S., 2014. Social media strategies and corporate brand visibility in the wine industry: Lessons from an Italian case study. EuroMed Journal of Business, 9(2), 129‒148. https://doi.org/10.1108/emjb-10-2013-0046
Cha, M., Haddadi, H., Benevenuto, F., Gummadi, K.P., 2010. Measuring user influence in Twitter: The million follower fallacy. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, May 23‒26. Washington DC, United States. https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM10/paper/viewFile/1538/1826 (accessed 12 June 2020).
Clement, J., 2019a. Twitter: number of monthly active users (2010-2019). https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly-active-twitter-users (accessed 12 June 2020).
Clement, J., 2019b. Countries with the most Twitter users 2019. https://www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-of-active-twitter-users-in-selected-countries (accessed 12 June 2020).
Compés-López, R., Font-Julian, C., Orduna-Malea, E., 2018. Has Robert Parker lost his hegemony as a prescriptor in the wine World? A preliminar inquiry through Twitter. In: 2nd International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics, July 12‒13. Valencia, Spain. https://doi.org/10.4995/carma2018.2018.8320
Cosenza, Tracy R., Solomon Michael R., Kwon, W-S., 2015. Credibility in the Blogosphere: A Study of Measurement and Influence of Wine Blogs as an Information Source. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 14(2), 71–91. https://doi.org/10.1002/cb.1496
Costopoulou, C., Ntaliani, M., Ntalianis, F., 2018. Social Media in Greek and German Wineries' Websites. In: 9th International Conference on Information, Intelligence, Systems and Applications (IISA 2018), July 23–25. Zakynthos, Greece. https://doi.org/10.1109/iisa.2018.8633596
Costopoulou, C., Ntaliani, M., Ntalianis, F., 2019. An Analysis of Social Media Usage in Winery Businesses. Advances in Science, Technology and Engineering Systems, 4(4), 380–387. https://doi.org/10.25046/aj040446
Eftekhar, M., Koudas, N., 2013. Some Research Opportunities on Twitter Advertising. IEEE Data Eng. Bull., 36(3), 77–82. http://sites.computer.org/debull/A13sept/p77.pdf (accessed 12 June 2020).
EUAWE, 2020. Behaviour of European wine consumers during the lockdown. http://www.euawe.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/EuAWE-INSEEC-Survey-Behaviour-of-European-wine-consumers-during-the-lockdown.pdf (accessed 12 June 2020).
Laverie, D.A., Humphrey, W.F., Velikova, N., Dodd, T.H., Wilcox, J.B., 2011. Building wine brand communities with the use of social media: A conceptual model. In: Proceedings of the 6th AWBR International Conference, 9–11 June. Bordeaux, France. http://academyofwinebusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/71-AWBR2011_Laverie_Humphrey_Velikova_Dodd_Wilcox.pdf (accessed 12 June 2020).
Leigon, B., 2011. Grape/Wine Marketing with New Media and Return of the Boomer. Practical Winery & Vineyard Journal.
Lockshin, L., Corsi, A.M., 2012. Consumer behavior for wine 2.0: A review since 2003 and future directions. Wine Economics and Policy, 1(1), 2–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wep.2012.11.003
Marlowe, B., Brown, E.A., Schrier, T., Zheng, T., 2017. Beverage bloggers: A developing relationship between wine blogger expertise and twitter followers. International Journal of Hospitality Beverage Management, 1(1), 2. https://doi.org/10.34051/j/2019.2
McMillan, D.W., Chavis, D.M., 1986. Sense of community: a definition and theory. Journal of Community Psychology, 14(1), 6–23. https://doi.org/10.1002/1520-6629(198601)14:1%3C6::aid-jcop2290140103%3E3.0.co;2-i
Newman, K., 2010. How wine lovers use social media: Wine and social media have created an incredible force within the industry. Wine Enthusiast. https://www.winemag.com/2010/02/17/how-wine-lovers-use-social-media/ (accessed 12 June 2020).
Pucci, T., Casprini, E., Nosi, C., Zanni, L., 2019. Does social media usage affect online purchasing intention for wine? The moderating role of subjective and objective knowledge. British Food Journal, 121(2), 275–288. https://doi.org/10.1108/bfj-06-2018-0400
Riquelme, F., González-Cantergiani, P., 2016. Measuring user influence on Twitter: A survey. Information Processing & Management, 52(5), 949–975. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2016.04.003
Sigala, M., Haller, C., 2019. The Impact of Social Media on the Behavior of Wine Tourists: A Typology of Power Sources, in Sigala, M. and Robinson, R.N.S. (Eds.), Management and Marketing of Wine Tourism Business. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Switzerland, 139–154. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75462-8_8
Storchmann, K., 2018. Wine Economics, in Ashenfelter, O., Gergaud, O., Storchmann, K. and Ziemba, W. (Eds.), Handbook of the economics of wine. World Scientific Publishing, Singapore, 3–40. https://doi.org/10.1142/9789813232747_0001
Szolnoki, G., Dolan, R., Forbes, S., Thach, L., Goodman, S., 2018. Using social media for consumer interaction: An international comparison of winery adoption and activity. Wine Economics and Policy, 7(2), 109–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wep.2018.07.001
Thach, L., 2009. Wine 2.0—The next phase of wine marketing? Exploring US winery adoption of wine 2.0 components. Journal of wine research, 20(2), 143–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/09571260903169548
Thach, L., Lease, T., Barton, M., 2016. Exploring the impact of social media practices on wine sales in US wineries. Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice, 17(4), 272–283. https://doi.org/10.1057/dddmp.2016.5
Watson, Q., 2011. Social media increases wine sales and consumption. Polytechnic State University, CA, United States. https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1072&context=agbsp (accessed 12 June 2020).
Wei, W., Cong, G., Miao, C., Zhu, F., Li, G., 2016. Learning to find topic experts in twitter via different relations. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 28(7), 1764–1778. https://doi.org/10.1109/tkde.2016.2539166
Wilson, D., Quinton, S., 2012. Let’s Talk about Wine: Does Twitter Have Value? International Journal of Wine Business Research, 24(4), 271–286. https://doi.org/10.1108/17511061211280329
Wright, A., 2015. Lifestyle Blogging Report. Wine Bloggers Conference, Penticton, BC.