Burton, Suzan, Dadich, Ann, and Soboleva, Alena,(2013) Competing voices: Marketing

and counter-marketing alcohol on Twitter, Journal of Nonprofit and Public Sector

Marketing, 25:2, 186-209

Author version

Abstract

Excessive alcohol consumption constitutes a global health problem. Despite increasing

efforts to promote safe-drinking, spending on alcohol advertising far outweighs spending on

safe-drinking messages. Twitter represents a new channel for social marketing, but its use to

promote safe-drinking (or conversely, to promote alcohol consumption) has not been

examined. In this study, six Twitter accounts maintained by advocates of safe-drinking and/or

abstinence were compared with six accounts maintained by alcohol marketers. Quantitative

analysis was used to compare account activity and qualitative analysis to compare Twitter

messages (‘tweets’) by different types of accounts. Tweets by alcohol accounts were

followed by more people, were more likely to use hashtags, to be forwarded to others, and to

be associated with positive stimuli, suggesting that they will be more influential than pro-

health messages. The results show a need for further research into alcohol promotion in social

media, and also suggest that to counter the activity of for-profit marketers on Twitter, social

marketers may benefit from adopting similar practices to increase the visibility, interactivity,

and influence of their tweets.

Keywords

Social marketing, Social media, Twitter, Alcohol, Health promotion

Background

The health and economic costs of excessive alcohol consumption are well-established,

resulting in an increasing recognition of the need for action to address alcohol-related

problems (Coghlan 2008). At a global level, action on alcohol use represents a public health

priority (WHO 2011). However, alcohol remains one of the most heavily marketed products

worldwide (Fielder et al. 2009). In addition to the heavy use of conventional channels like

television, radio, print, and cinema, the promotion of alcohol has proliferated online through

organizational websites, video-sharing websites like YouTube, and personalised email

(Carroll et al. 2005; Casswell and Maxwell 2005). As the Center for Media Education (1999)

has observed, ‘virtually every major alcohol beverage company has staked its claim in

cyberspace’ (p. 8). Online promotion has increased community exposure to alcohol

advertising – including promotion to the online audience of underage people (Carroll and

Donovan 2002; Jernigan et al. 2005).

Social marketing offers the potential for using the same processes used in private sector

marketing to develop social change programs (Andreasen 2002), but it is often difficult to

identify the success of social marketing programs, or link success to particular programs

(Andreasen 2012). Perhaps partly as a result, there is conflicting evidence on the benefit, if

any, of social marketing programs attempting to limit alcohol-related harm. For example

Gordon et al. (2006) state, ‘there is strong evidence that social marketing can positively affect

alcohol misuse’ (p. 1137), but Szmigin et al. (2011) conclude that social marketing initiatives

designed to address the UK’s culture of unhealthy drinking levels among young people ‘have

achieved inconclusive results to date’ (p. 759). Whatever the difficulties of measuring the

impact of social marketing programs, efforts to promote safe drinking will inevitably be

limited by the effect of communications that promote drinking, and in the presence of

conflicting messages, social marketing campaigns are likely to have limited impact (Wall

2005).

Alcohol companies do not explicitly promote unsafe drinking, and often include exhortations

to drink in moderation on their packaging and/or advertising messages. However, a meta-

analysis of 13 studies revealed that adolescents’ exposure to advertising and promotion of

alcohol is associated with the onset of drinking, the level of drinking, and in some studies, the

incidence of binge drinking (Anderson et al. 2009). There is also evidence that binge drinkers

are more susceptible to the promotion of alcohol, and less responsive to a safe drinking

message (Christie et al. 2001), raising concerns that the promotion of alcohol may increase

consumption in the group for whom it is most dangerous. To be effective in promoting safe

levels of drinking, social marketing programs therefore need to engage in counter-marketing

(Peattie and Peattie 2003) – they must successfully promote safe drinking while alcohol

companies are encouraging drinking. However, countering for-profit messages with

traditional media communications is difficult because the cost of paid advertising typically

diminishes the capacity of social marketers to control the reach or frequency of their

messages (Bloom and Novelli 1981).

If social marketing messages can be effectively conveyed using social media, then such

media would be an attractive channel for social marketers, because the reach of social media

is not only a function of amount spent, as typically occurs with paid advertising. If used

successfully, social media may therefore offer a cost-effective channel for social marketing

programs. At the same time, the increasing use of social media by for-profit marketers offers

a challenge to social marketers, because these media provide an additional channel to

promote alcohol consumption. In this paper, we use quantitative and qualitative data to

compare and contrast the use of a new social media technique, Twitter, by alcohol brands and

by non-profit organizations that promote safe-drinking. We develop measures of the relative

effectiveness and efficiency of Twitter communication by both types of organizations, and

compare the extent to which each uses features to maximise the interactivity of their

communications. Finally, implications for non-profit organizations attempting to use social

media for social marketing campaigns are discussed.

Relationship between Alcohol Advertising and Alcohol Consumption

Widespread exposure to the promotion of alcohol is problematic because of the reported

dose-response relationship between exposure to such promotion and the consumption of,

and/or attitudes to alcohol (Martino et al. 2006; Saffer 2002). Growing research suggests a

positive correlation between exposure to alcohol advertising, favourable attitudes towards

alcohol, and its consumption (Anderson 2007; Andsager et al. 2002; Barry and Goodson

2010; Winter et al. 2008). For instance, greater exposure to beer advertisements is associated

with more positive views about the social role of beer (Grube and Wallack 1994).

It is difficult to establish a causal relationship between exposure to alcohol promotion and

consumption, largely due to the array of confounding factors involved in alcohol

consumption (Wills et al. 1996) and the potential for a cumulative effect of multiple factors

(Anderson et al. 2009). However, even without assuming a causal relationship, the ubiquity

of alcohol advertising and promotion conveys widespread societal approval of alcohol

consumption (Giesbrecht and Greenfield 2008).

Given growing community concern about alcohol consumption (Hall et al. 2008), the alcohol

industry has attempted to minimise the harm associated with alcohol promotion by using

messages advocating responsible drinking (Barry and Goodson 2010). However, a large

imbalance remains between expenditure on the promotion of alcohol and expenditure on the

promotion of safe-drinking. For instance, although Anheuser-Busch (one of the world’s

largest brewers) has spent approximately $US 675 million on health promotion initiatives

since 1982, the company spent approximately $US 509 million on advertising in 2005 alone

(Center for Science in the Public Interest 2008). Correspondingly, research by the Center on

Alcohol Marketing and Youth reports that ‘for every one responsibility ad aired in 2002,

there were 226 product ads… For every dollar spent on responsibility ads in 2002, the

industry spent $99 on product ads’ (Babor et al. 2004, p. 2).

The ubiquity of alcohol promotion and the increasing problem of excessive alcohol

consumption have spurred a variety of social marketing campaigns, particularly in the UK, to

counter what has been called a ‘culture of intoxication’ (Measham and Brain 2005). However,

as discussed above, these campaigns have achieved inconclusive results (Gordon et al. 2006;

Szmigin et al. 2011). The difficulty for social marketers in countering the effects of alcohol

promotion is compounded by two key factors: the changing patterns of expenditure on

alcohol promotion, and the failure of public health research to keep up with innovation in

marketing activities by alcohol producers (Jernigan 2009). In recent years, new social media

have provided an additional channel for alcohol manufacturers to market their products, or

conversely, for the promotion of safe-drinking messages. In the next section, we review the

potential of social media, and specifically of Twitter, for the social marketing of safe-

drinking messages.

Social Marketing with Twitter

One of the newer forms of social media is microblogging, which is commonly associated

with Twitter, the most widely used microblogging site. Twitter-use is free and allows users to

send short-text messages (up to 140 characters) to individuals who have chosen to ‘follow’

the sender. Followers can choose to forward (or ‘retweet’) messages, and can also be

encouraged to visit a website by accessing embedded shortened hyperlinks. Since its launch

in 2006, Twitter has attracted more than 100 active million users, with half of those logging

on every day (Nakano 2011). A recent US survey of 2,277 adult internet users suggests that

13% use Twitter, representing an eight percent increase from the previous year (Smith 2011).

The same study found the largest proportion of Twitter users to be between 18 and 34 years,

meaning that promotional messages on Twitter are particularly likely to reach a young

audience.

Although limited in message length, Twitter differs from other communication tools in its

versatility. Twitter allows both the one-to-many communication associated with traditional

media, as well as the one-to-one communication associated with computer-mediated

communication (Hoffman and Novak 1996). By default, tweets are one-to-many, yet can be

used to communicate with one individual (e.g., in reply to a tweet) with the potential for

public visibility. For this reason, Twitter is somewhat unique among interactive marketing

communications, because a reply to an individual (a one-to-one communication) is visible to

a much larger audience. The social nature of Twitter thus mirrors the ‘upside of drinking –

the fun, the togetherness, and the sense of social identity’ (Szmigin et al. 2011, p. 775) –

features that have been identified as common in the promotion of alcohol, but which are

largely absent in social marketing campaigns.

Because of its low barriers to entry and low cost per message, Twitter has particular

advantages for non-profit organizations, which are usually constrained by a limited marketing

budget (Bloom and Novelli 1981). As a result, Twitter, along with other forms of social

media, offers non-profit organizations an opportunity to strengthen their organizational

support and brand (Kanter and Fine 2010). However, there is some evidence that non-profit

organizations have been slower than their for-profit counterparts to adopt social media tools

(Eyrich et al. 2008).

Despite the growing use of Twitter and its capacity for interactive communication, which has

been said to increase communication effectiveness (Hoffman and Novak 1996; Steuer 1992;

Sundar et al. 2003), we have been unable to find any research examining the use of Twitter

for the promotion of responsible drinking, or conversely, for the promotion of alcohol. If

social marketers are to address the criticism that they have not kept up with the innovative

marketing practices of alcohol producers (Jernigan 2009), and if they are to develop social

change programs modelled on processes from private sector marketing, as recommended by

Andreasen (2002), it is important they understand how social media are used by both for-

profit and non-profit organizations. The next section describes a methodology to compare

Twitter-use by companies marketing alcohol, and by those marketing a competing message –

that of safe-drinking and/or abstinence.

Methodology

Twelve Twitter accounts were chosen for analysis, including six accounts operated by

alcohol brands, and six operated by health advocates, promoting safe-drinking and/or

abstinence. Alcohol brand accounts were selected to reflect Twitter activity by the three

largest spirits companies using English for most corporate communications – Diageo, Pernod

Ricard and Bacardi (Euromonitor 2010). For each company, the two most active branded

Twitter accounts were chosen, representing six alcohol brands: Smirnoff and Guinness for

Diageo; Absolut Vodka and Malibu Rum for Pernod Ricard, and Bacardi and Grey Goose

Vodka for the Bacardi Group. All accounts incorporated the brand name, with the exception

of the Grey Goose account, which is labelled ‘TheGooseInsider’.

As there is no objective way to identify active or influential Twitter accounts that promote

safe-drinking and/or abstinence, accounts of this type were chosen by using search patterns

an individual might use when searching for these types of accounts. Two organizations,

Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Mothers against Drunk Driving (MADD), were identified

based on their high public profile. Twitter searches for these two organizations revealed three

Twitter accounts:

A Twitter search using the keywords Alcoholics Anonymous revealed two AA-related

accounts: aa_bigbook and aa_reflections. Although it is difficult to be sure of the

ownership of Twitter accounts, the first appears to be an official AA account, as the

Big Book is the primary text used within AA (Humphreys 2000). The second,

aa_reflections, describes itself as, ‘By AA members for AA members’. The account is

also featured on a website, www.daily-reflections.com, which is maintained by AA

members.

MADDOnline is the Twitter account for MADD, a US-based non-profit organization

that aims ‘to stop drunk driving, support the victims of this violent crime and prevent

underage drinking’.

Other pro-health Twitter accounts were identified by searching the Listorious website – a

directory of lists on Twitter. This revealed an additional three Twitter accounts:

Sober_services, which describes itself on Twitter as, ‘a results driven, London, UK

based organization working around the world, utilising various techniques to help

people attain and maintain their recovery from drinking and drugging’;

Quitdrinkingnow, an account apparently operated by an individual who describes

himself as a ‘Mentor of Breaking Free From Alcoholism’;

LifelineProject, an account operated by Lifeline, a UK-based non-profit organization

that provides prevention, treatment and recovery services for drug users, families and

carers.

As some accounts have operated for extended periods and may thus have attracted more users,

the account registration date, the total number of tweets ever sent, and the number sent within

the previous month (as at May 2011) were recorded. The most recent 200 tweets for each

account were downloaded and this sample was used for in-depth quantitative and qualitative

analysis.

Measures

Account Activity and Connectiveness

There has been limited research on the factors resulting in influential tweets, but previous

research suggests that tweet frequency contributes to an account’s influence (Romero et al.

2010). Research on advertising effectiveness also suggests that message repetition influences

consumer choice (Jones 1997) and that higher levels of repetition are likely to be more

effective when messages are complex and/or novel (Tellis 1997). It is difficult to generalise

findings on advertising effectiveness to Twitter research, because research into advertising

effectiveness has typically studied repetition of the same message. In contrast, when a sender

sends tweets, they are likely to incorporate new content each time, rather than repeating the

same or similar content, as typically occurs with higher levels of advertising. Nevertheless,

the suggestion that accounts sending more tweets are more likely to be influential is

consistent with the evidence on higher levels of advertising. For these reasons, account

activity was assessed using two measures: (1) number of tweets ever sent; and (2) number of

tweets sent within the previous month (April 30 to May 29 2011). Research on the diffusion

of innovation suggests that influential individuals tend to be well-connected (Rogers 2003).

Thus an obvious measure of an account’s potential influence is the number of followers

(Kwak et al. 2010). As a result, the connectiveness of accounts was assessed by the number

of its followers (as at May 29, 2011).

Efficiency of Communication

Consistent with discussion of advertising efficiency (Büschken 2007), the efficiency of

Twitter communication will rely on both the impact of communication and the underlying

investment: there is little value in devoting organizational resources to achieve high levels of

Twitter activity if an account has few followers. Since data were not available to assess the

investment by different organizations in their Twitter activities, communication efficiency

was assessed by dividing the number of tweets sent during the previous month (a proxy for

the amount of time spent by the organization on Twitter activities) by the number of

followers (at May 29, 2011).

Influence

The number of messages and the number of followers provide simple measures of account

activity and reach, and thus, of the potential influence of a Twitter account. However, the

number of followers has been criticised as a measure of influence because, to be influential, a

Twitter account must be more than popular: it must also overcome user-passivity (e.g., Cha et

al. 2010; Romero et al. 2010). An alternative measure of an account’s influence is thus the

extent to which the account’s tweets are forwarded (or ‘retweeted’) by followers, because

retweeting requires engagement with, and implied endorsement of a message. Twitter

provides a count of the number of times each message is retweeted, and this measure was

averaged across all tweets sent during the study period, providing an average retweet measure

for each account. Engagement with an account, and thus with its messages, can also be

measured by the number of times an account appears on other users’ lists, since listing

provides public endorsement of a particular account. (A list is a way for users to organise

other Twitter accounts, somewhat akin to the Favourites feature on web-browsers, though a

user’s Twitter list, by default, is publicly visible.) The number of users who listed each

account was therefore used as an additional measure of user engagement, and thus of

potential account influence.

Interactivity

One of the features of social media is that they permit increased interactivity: that is, social

media allow users to participate in modifying the messages they receive (Steuer 1992).

Research on websites suggests that increased interactivity of communications is associated

with higher comprehension (Macias 2003), more information processing, higher favourability,

a greater flow-state (Sicilia et al. 2005) and a more positive user response to the website

subject (Sundar et al. 2003). Duncan and Moriarty (1998) have argued that an increase in

interactivity makes communication ‘an even more valuable element of marketing’ (p. 8).

Tweets can provide interactivity in two key ways – by containing an embedded web-link,

which encourages the reader to access another website, and/or by including one or more

hashtag (#)keywords, which link the tweet to an existing conversational topic, or create a new

conversational topic for others to join. Interactivity of tweets was therefore assessed in four

ways: (1) by the proportion of sampled tweets that contained embedded links to websites, (2)

by the proportion that contained hashtags, (3) by the total number of hashtags used, and (4)

by the number of hashtag topics used (since some brands used a particular topic repeatedly).

Embedded Associations

As well as increasing the interactivity of the tweet, the inclusion of one or more hashtags

allows a tweet (and thus the related account) to be linked with a particular topic or topics, and

thus with positive associations linked to those topics. Research suggests that liking a stimulus

(such as a brand) can be increased by pairing it with a positive stimulus (De Houwer et al.

2001). Thus, inclusion of hashtag keywords/topics such as ‘SpringVacation’, ‘music’, ‘party’,

and ‘BeautifulPeopleParty’ in an alcohol brand’s tweets may increase liking for the brand by

pairing it with positive stimuli. Therefore, details of the hashtag topics used by each account

were recorded to investigate associations that are pursued by different accounts.

Promotion of Drinking (Alcohol Accounts Only)

The text of all sampled tweets by alcohol companies was coded into one of four categories: (1)

promotion of alcohol consumption; (2) promotion of safe-drinking behaviours; (3) unrelated

to alcohol consumption (‘neutral’); or (4) otherwise neutral, but including an alcohol brand

name. Coding was performed by two separate coders, and agreement reviewed. There was

very high agreement (over 95%) and inconsistencies were resolved by discussion, resulting in

100% agreement. Because followers may not choose to access embedded web-links, the

content of embedded links (which often contained cocktail recipes and/or images of alcohol)

was not coded. As a result, this method of text-only coding is likely to underestimate the

promotion of alcohol in tweets.

Data Analysis

The data were highly skewed, so comparisons between median counts for alcohol and pro-

health accounts were made using Mood’s median test – a non-parametric test appropriate for

comparing distributions that are not normally distributed and which contain outliers (Israel

2008). Where each tweet could be coded separately (e.g., for the presence of hashtag topics),

grouped comparisons were made across all tweets. Where summary measures only for the

account were available (e.g., number of times each account was listed), comparisons were

made between the median score for each type of account, thus resulting in smaller

comparisons (with only six summary measures per account type) and lower statistical power.

Comparisons of proportions (e.g., the percentage of tweets containing hashtag) were made

using chi-square analyses.

Results

Account Activity, Connectiveness and Efficiency

Descriptive statistics for the number of tweets sent, number of followers, and efficiency of

each account are shown in Table 1. There were no significant differences between the pro-

health and alcohol accounts in the number of tweets ever sent or sent in the previous month

(p>.100), however the alcohol accounts had significantly more followers (p=.021).

Although there were no significant differences between the account types in communication

efficiency (p>.100), there were substantial differences in efficiency between individual

accounts. The most efficient account, Bacardi, had more than 700 followers for every tweet

sent in the previous month, while the least efficient accounts, LifelineProject and

Malibu_Rum, had fewer than ten followers for each tweet. The low number of followers for

some accounts, relative to the number of tweets sent (and thus, presumably, relative to the

time and staff costs expended in sending tweets) suggests that for some organizations, Twitter

is currently an inefficient communication channel.

[Insert Table 1 about here]

Influence

An account may have a large number of followers, but followers may largely be passive,

without being influenced by tweets. For this reason, measures of explicit influence

(retweeting frequency and account listing) are shown in Table 2. Alcohol tweets were

significantly more likely to be retweeted (p<.001), with the most popular tweet (a

GooseInsider tweet about the Oscars) being retweeted 92 times.

A comparison of the median number of times each account was listed was not significant

(p>.100), though this may be due to the low power of the test, as it involved a comparison of

only six medians for each account type. There was some (non-significant) evidence of higher

influence by the alcohol accounts, with alcohol accounts listed, on average, more than four

times as often, relative to the pro-health accounts.

[Insert Table 2 about here]

Interactivity

As discussed above, interactivity can be assessed by both the number of embedded links and

by the number of hashtags within tweets. Data for each, and for the total number of hashtag

topics used by each account, are shown in Table 3. Tweets by pro-health accounts were more

likely to use links, partly due to the heavy use of links by aa_reflections (where every tweet

contained a link to a daily AA blog) and LifelineProject (where every tweet contained a link,

generally to news and policy websites). Tweets by alcohol brands were significantly more

likely to contain hashtags (p<.001) and used more hashtags per message (p <.001). The

alcohol brands also used a wider range of hashtags, with Bacardi using 62 different hashtag

topics in the 200 tweets sampled. In contrast, the pro-health accounts which used hashtags

tended to reuse a small number of hashtag topics repeatedly, although the difference in the

number of topics used was not significant.

[Insert Table 3 about here]

Embedded Associations: Hashtag Topics and Links

For each account using hashtags (all except two pro-health accounts), the ten most commonly

used hashtags (or all hashtag topics used, for those accounts using fewer than 10 topics) are

shown below.

Account Most used hashtag topics in order of use (equal numbers bracketed)

Pro-Health

Sober_Services (joke, wonder, travel, quotes)

MADDOnline PowerTalk21, drunkdriving, momscongress, (sb45, give, cowboys, twittatthemix,

mc2011, 100factsaboutme, childsafety)

aa_reflections AA, DailyReflections, AADR, god, steps, sober, anger, (gift peace) faith

aa_bigbook (No hashtags used)

quitdrinkingnow (No hashtags used)

LifelineProject (Mentalhealth, insite, drugpo, NICE2011, UKpoverty, ALCOHOL, in)

Alcohol Brands

Bacardi Cocktail, Bacardi, FF, cocktails, party, MemorialDay, (LikeItLive, Summer,

TorchedCherry, Bartenders)

Smirnoff FF, MusicMonday, HappyHour, DrinkResponsibly, HappyHourCrew, HappyBirthday,

Shoutout, (StaySafe, WeGoTogether, RoyalWedding)

absolutvodka_us Absolut, WildTea, AbsolutUnfiltered, FridaysPerfected, BeautifulPeopleParty,

AbsolutDuranDuran, aynin, MusicMonday, (Grammy, Oscars)

GuinnessIreland ARTHURGUINNESSFUND, Guinnessrugby, obamavisit, (GuinnessCarrick7’s,

guinness, Everest)

TheGooseInsider Oscars, BAFTAs, Cannes, TheKidsAreAllrightParty, Oscar, BAFTA, TheKingsSpeech

Malibu_Rum MalibuCorrespondent, Malibu, BestSummerGig, BoominBus, SpringVacation,

giveaways, (music, travel), (StPatricksDay, 100factsaboutme)

An analysis of the most heavily used hashtag topics suggests that relative to the pro-health

accounts, the alcohol brands appeared to actively link the brands with positive associations

such as celebrations (e.g., party, Happyhour), social events (e.g., the Oscars, Cannes), and

social activities and hobbies (e.g., holidays, music). Use of such hashtags would mean that an

individual (including one below the legal drinking age) searching for information on a topic

unrelated to alcohol (such as the Royal Wedding or the Oscars) could be exposed to tweets

promoting alcohol brands:

Ending such a spectacular day in history w/ an elegant cocktail: The ABSOLUT

ROYAL. Cheers! http://on.fb.me/mQqm2v #RoyalWedding (absolutvodka_us)

Javier celebrating his nomination at Grey Goose party. Penelope will enjoy her

night out on Sunday. #Oscars (TheGooseInsider)

In contrast, hashtags used by pro-health accounts were less likely to contain positive

associations and topics with broad appeal. Instead, they appeared to be dominated by more

serious and/or informational content:

Please RT: Every minute, one person is injured from an alcohol-related crash.

$1 helps eliminate #drunkdriving bit.ly/lqAATL (MADDOnline)

ACCEPTING SUCCESS OR FAILURE http://bit.ly/g4xs29 #A.A. #pride

#sober (aa_reflections)

RT @DrugScope: RT @papershadow: Court ruling could lead to safe-injection

sites nationwide: judge (http://t.co/O7h3EaW ) #Insite #drugpo (LifelineProject)

The alcohol accounts also used embedded links to encourage their followers to access

websites containing content about sport, parties, music, and/or recipes for cocktails:

Looking for somewhere exciting to go this weekend for a pint? Then head to the

International Guinness Blues on. http://fb.me/A6dCBm6D (GuinnessIreland)

Are you a #Malibu guru? We’re looking for a #MalibuCorrespondent to hit the

summer party circuit with us! Go to: http://bit.ly/RadioMBB (Malibu_Rum)

@martinichuck Happy birthday! Are you celebrating with Smirnoff? Check out

this cocktail: http://twitpic.com/4ki0zc Enjoy! (Smirnoff)

Alcohol accounts also used both hashtags and links to promote competitions and/or

promotions, often encouraging followers to click through to websites:

What would make your summer even sweeter? Getting sweet gear from

#Malibu! We’ve got summer #giveaways at http://www.malibuhotsummer.com!

(Malibu_Rum)

#BACARDI #BlackEyedPeas Last Day to Enter to Win 2 Round Trip Tickets to

London. Must be 21+. http://bit.ly/deIPjk #sweeps (Bacardi)

As discussed above, links by pro-health accounts were dominated by aa_reflections’ repeated

links to a daily blog, and by the news and policy links contained in LifelineProject’s tweets.

Pro-health accounts also included connections to sites providing specific advice:

A LIST OF BLESSINGS One exercise that I practice is http://bit.ly/kiMhHF

#AADR (aa_reflections)

The story behind Scotland’s alcohol death statistics http://bbc.in/jKIVhz | BBC

News (LifelineProject)

Stop Drinking: Day 3 - Shame & Guilt and Stopping Drinking: Stop Drinking in

7 Days. Finally Learn How To Stop... http://bit.ly/jOq1e9 (quitdrinkingnow)

Promotion of Drinking (Alcohol Accounts Only)

Across all alcohol brands, more than one-third of tweets (37.90%) were coded as promoting

alcohol consumption: a further 18.30% of tweets used the alcohol brand without directly

endorsing alcohol consumption (see Table 4). One sample tweet shows a common method of

alcohol promotion, including (in one tweet) a personalised message, recognition of a birthday,

a suggestion to celebrate with a particular cocktail, and an embedded link to a recipe for, and

a stylised image of, the suggested cocktail:

@Suzi_Cue Happy birthday! How about celebrating with a Pomegranate

Cosmo: http://twitpic.com/4ffkxd? (Smirnoff)

Four of the six alcohol brands directly promoted safe consumption of alcohol through their

tweets; however, tweets promoting safe-drinking represented a very small percentage of total

tweets (1.30%) and sometimes also contained a suggestion to drink, and/or an associated

web-link:

It’s Friday and time for a Malibu Twisted Pink…http://on.fb.me/eBEFvt Enjoy

(always drink in moderation)! (Malibu_Rum)

Many tweets (18.30%) did not directly promote alcohol consumption, but included mention

(and thus promotion) of the brand, thus, at a minimum level of influence, reinforcing brand

recall. Many of these messages linked the brand to positive stimuli, using sponsorship, music,

and/or blogs, often coupled with a web-link to a company website. Guinness was the heaviest

user of brand promotion tweets: more than two-thirds of its tweets (67.50%) promoted the

brand, usually linking it to the brand’s sponsorship of rugby, with embedded links to team

results, messages from team members, and team photos.

Other tweets linked a brand to sponsorship or to other positive associations, such as a music

mixtape sponsored by WildTea (a sub-brand of Absolut Vodka) and/or by providing links to

bloggers on popular topics, such as the Cannes Film festival. Although the text of many of

these messages did not directly promote alcohol, they often contained links encouraging users

to access the brand’s website or Facebook page:

Happy #MusicMonday. Download the #WILD TEA mixtape @

http://on.fb.me/ABSOLUTmix to get a sweet mix of @Lykkeliofficial’s “I

Follow Rivers” (absolutvodka_us)

Wrap on this year’s #Cannes Film Festival - Charles & Lainey re-cap the awards

and social scene at blog.greygoose.com (TheGooseInsider)

[Insert Table 4 about here]

Tweet Content

An analysis of the content of the alcohol tweets suggests a concerted effort by the alcohol

brands to demonstrate direct benefit to followers. Alcohol tweets offered suggestions on

alcoholic beverages, cocktail recipes, as well as invitations to engage in promotions and/or

enter competitions:

Who’s in Panama City, FL for #SpringVacation? We are! Come find the #Malibu

Boomin Bus on Thomas Drive @ Joan Ave! (Malibu_Rum)

RT with the name of your City if you want the next Smirnoff event to come to

you! (Smirnoff)

In contrast, the direct promotion of product-related links was less apparent in tweets from

pro-health accounts. Their tweets often contained inspirational quotes from respected texts

and/or celebrities, as well as references to harm reduction websites:

We find it a waste of time to keep chasing a man who cannot or will not work

with you – Alcoholics Anonymous – AA Big Book – pg 96 (aa_bigbook)

How To Stop Drinking Alcohol: Day 7 – Willpower: How to Stop Drinking

Alcohol in 7 days. Finally learn how to http://bit.ly/mpcb0E (quitdrinkingnow)

Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the

indifference of those who should. http://fb.me/UupToeiG (Sober_Services)

Consistent with their higher levels of interactivity through hashtags, the alcohol companies

were much more likely to send personalised tweets, recognising birthdays, and/or addressing

followers by their Twitter account name. The alcohol accounts were also more reactive in

replying to tweets, thanking retweeters, posing questions, and facilitating discussion:

@SantaFeBarman we LOVE your WILD TEA cocktail creations you just posted

on @Forbes. Can’t wait to try them this wknd! (absolutvodka_us)

@martinichuck Happy birthday! Are you celebrating with Smirnoff? Check out

this cocktail: http://twitpic.com/4ki0zc Enjoy! (Smirnoff)

Conversely, the pro-health accounts were largely used for one-way communication of health

promotion messages, conveying information on the ill-effects of alcohol, strategies towards

abstinence, and sometimes encouraging lobbying efforts.

Discussion and Conclusion

Previous research into media content concerning alcohol – both online and offline – reveals a

pattern of primarily pro-alcohol communication (Carroll and Donovan 2002; Carroll et al.

2005; Casswell and Maxwell 2005; Center for Media Education 1999; Daykin et al. 2009). In

contrast with the much heavier relative representation of alcohol promotion found in earlier

research, this study found more tweets were sent by the sample of pro-health organizations

than by the alcohol brand accounts. Twitter clearly provides a low-cost channel for

disseminating messages that promote safe alcohol consumption, and thus represents a

potentially important medium for both social marketing and countering pro-alcohol messages.

However, both the quantitative and qualitative results suggest that alcohol brands are more

successful in attracting a larger audience on Twitter, engaging with that audience, and linking

their messages with popular and positive stimuli. Pro-alcohol messages had a significantly

larger number of followers and were significantly more likely to be forwarded to others.

These findings may be because the alcohol accounts used interactivity features (such as

hashtags with popular topics) significantly more than the pro-health accounts, and is

consistent with previous research that found tweets are more likely to be forwarded if they

contain hashtags (Suh et al. 2010). Thus social marketing campaigns that promote safe

drinking on Twitter face a dual challenge in reaching a wider audience – they are received by

a smaller audience, and their tweets are less likely to be forwarded to others. These factors

are likely to make it difficult for these messages to counter pro-alcohol messages.

The qualitative analysis helps to explain the higher rate of following, forwarding, and listing

of alcohol accounts. As well as making greater use of hashtags, alcohol brands were more

likely to incorporate popular and topical issues such as celebrities, football, films, and

holidays in hashtags and also in the text of Twitter messages. As well as increasing the

probability that a tweet will be seen, by making it more likely to be found and/or forwarded,

this practice can increase the probability that an alcohol brand is liked by creating learned

associations with favourable stimuli. Web-links promoting drink recipes and topical content

were also used to encourage tweet recipients to access a website, including the home pages of

the alcohol brands. The inclusion of such links means that even underage individuals

searching Twitter for content on a topic unrelated to alcohol can be exposed to alcohol

promotion and encouraged to visit alcohol websites.

Apart from exposing minors to alcohol promotion, the heavy use of lifestyle content in

alcohol brand tweets reflects the former practice of promoting cigarettes by using lifestyle

images, thus deemphasising the product in favour of responses provoked by models and

settings (Altman et al. 1987; Kelly et al. 2000). Lifestyle content in tobacco advertising was

banned in the US in 1996 (FDA 1996), well before the more far-reaching 2003 WHO

Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which banned tobacco advertising, promotion,

and sponsorship in signatory countries (Shibuya et al. 2003). The heavy use of lifestyle

content by alcohol companies suggests there is a need for ongoing consideration of whether it

is appropriate to allow lifestyle content in alcohol promotion.

Unregulated promotion of alcohol, including to minors, is not the only concern with a lack of

regulation of Twitter. Other authors have noted that social media increase the risks of loss of

privacy, bullying, and harmful contacts: they have reported on calls for pan-European self-

regulation of social networking services, and have called for the development of evidence-

based policy in this area (Livingstone 2009; Livingstone and Brake 2009). Developing any

agreement on the potential regulation of Twitter and other social networking services to limit

inappropriate promotion of alcohol will not be easy. However, thirty years ago, the regulation

of tobacco promotion was rarely considered, and after increasing evidence on the harmful

effects of tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship, those practices are now banned in

168 countries (WHO 2012).

Coupled with the rapid growth in Twitter users, the results from this study suggest that

Twitter is providing an increasingly important communication channel for alcohol companies

to present their product in a positive way. Research shows that the influence of alcohol

advertising is bolstered by likeability (Wyllie et al. 1998). The increasing use of Twitter to

create likable, popular tweets and to encourage consumers to visit alcohol websites may

therefore provide an unregulated environment for the promotion of alcohol brands, even to

underage drinkers. The use of Twitter by health advocates to disseminate safe-drinking

messages may go some way to counter this force. However, the greater use of hashtags,

personalisation, promotions, and topical content in alcohol tweets suggests that pro-alcohol

tweets will achieve substantially higher reach than their pro-health counterparts. As a result,

health advocates and regulatory bodies might benefit from reviewing their current and

potential use of Twitter, and by adopting some of the features used by alcohol companies to

increase the effectiveness of their messages.

The findings from this study are, however, limited. Firstly, the limited sample size for some

statistical tests restricted the statistical power of these analyses, which may partly explain the

lack of statistical significance in some results. Comparisons of larger groups will benefit from

higher power and will therefore be better able to detect significant differences between

groups. Despite showing larger numbers of followers for alcohol accounts, and higher levels

of message forwarding, the study does not show that the promotion of alcohol on Twitter

results in any increase in alcohol consumption. Longitudinal research would be valuable to

establish whether exposure to higher levels of social media promotion predicts subsequent

higher levels of alcohol consumption.

Despite these limitations, the results raise concerns that higher levels of alcohol promotion,

especially when coupled with high levels of lifestyle content, may result in more favourable

attitudes to alcohol, following comparable research on the effects of lifestyle content in

promotion of tobacco (Altman et al. 1987; Kelly et al. 2000). There is clearly a need for

further research on the effects of alcohol promotion via social media, and for ongoing

consideration of whether policy developments are necessary to curb the promotion of alcohol

on Twitter and other social media.

The results also show that, as a tool for interactive communication, Twitter represents a

viable way to engage people and communicate pro-health information in different ways:

individually, using personalised messages, in a segmented fashion using hashtags (to target

an audience interested in a particular topic) or through mass communication, using general

tweets to all account followers. However, the challenge for social marketers is to counter the

more heavily-funded activities of the alcohol industry. Hastings and Siren (2003) have argued

that social marketing will flourish by exploiting its twin understanding of the good and bad

that marketing can bring to society. By examining and adapting the techniques used by

alcohol companies, social marketers can identify strategies that can increase the success of

their strategies (Andreasen 2002). This study suggests that alcohol companies on Twitter

have adopted the principles of interactive marketing, which has been said to be a ‘hallmark of

the paradigm shift in both marketing and communication’ (Duncan and Moriarty 1998, p. 8)

far more effectively than organizations promoting safe-drinking. To be more effective in their

social marketing practices, not-for-profit organizations may benefit from studying, and

learning from, the practices of for-profit organizations. This does not necessarily mean

copying for-profit practices, but is likely to involve building and testing models to guide

social marketing practices (Andreasen 2003). Unless social marketers can use social media to

engage in effective counter-marketing, such media may further contribute to the relative

dominance of pro-alcohol messages, and become a barrier, rather than a benefit, to social

marketing.

In summary, building on prior research into social media (Livingstone 2009; Livingstone and

Brake 2009), the lessons for public policy following this study are threefold. First, greater

technological infrastructure may be required to support the efforts of pro-health organizations.

Second, personnel affiliated with these organizations may require training to enable them to

use the interactive features of social media which are increasingly being used by the alcohol

industry. And third, the use of social media alone is unlikely to curb the rising prevalence of

alcohol-related harm – as such, further research is required to determine how social media

can best complement existing health promotion strategies.

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Tables

Table 1: Account Activity, Connnectiveness and Efficiency (Followers Per Tweet in Previous

Month)

Account Account

Registered Total

Tweets

Tweets in Previous Month

Followers Efficiency

Pro-Health

Sober_Services 03/08/09 926 29 2,803 96.70

MADDOnline 26/02/09 764 27 2,609 96.60

aa_reflections 25/07/09 724 31 801 25.80

aa_bigbook 16/05/10 1,292 118 1,904 16.10

quitdrinkingnow 18/07/09 7,931 172 1,863 10.90

LifelineProject 13/02/10 6,092 295 1,753 5.90

Mean 2,955.00 112.00 1956.00 42.00

Median 1,109.00 74.50 1,884.00 21.00

SD 3,202.00 107.50 711.00 42.80

Alcohol Brands

Bacardi 18/02/09 611 31 21,987 709.30

Smirnoff 04/12/08 2,387 126 16,581 131.60

absolutvodka_us 20/04/10 507 39 3,056 78.40

GuinnessIreland 08/09/10 787 104 4,213 40.50

TheGooseInsider 23/04/09 671 106 2,871 27.10

Malibu_Rum 03/09/09 429 72 551 7.70

Mean 898.70 79.70 8,210.00 165.80

Median 641.00 88.00 3,635.00 59.50

SD 740.00 38.80 8,827.00 269.90

Difference

Mood Median Test p>.100 p>.100 p=.021 p>.100

Table 2: Influence: Retweet Count and Frequency of Account Listing

Account Mean Maximum Times Listed

(at May 2011)

Pro-Health

Sober_Services .25 3 20

MADDOnline 1.01 10 116

aa_reflections .08 1 17

aa_bigbook 1.30 6 42

quitdrinkingnow .01 1 19

LifelineProject .81 7 126

Mean .58 4.67 56.67

Median .53 4.50 31.00

SD .54 3.61 50.75

Alcohol Brands

Bacardi 1.61 15 710

Smirnoff .54 19 430

absolutvodka_us .59 5 106

GuinnessIreland .97 50 78

TheGooseInsider .92 92 80

Malibu_Rum .37 8 20

Mean .83 31.50 237.33

Median .76 17.00 93.00

SD .44 33.72 273.92

Difference

Mood Median Test Chi-sq = 118.75

p<.001

Chi-sq = 1.33

p>.100

Table 3: Interactivity: Link and Hashtag Use

Account Tweets with links

(%) Tweets with

hashtags (%) Total hashtags

Total hashtag topics

Pro-Health

Sober_Services 15.50 1.00 4 4

MADDOnline 36.50 46.00 97 13

aa_reflections 100.00 96.00 303 13

aa_bigbook .00 .00 0 0

quitdrinkingnow 85.50 .00 0 0

LifelineProject 100.00 2.00 7 7

Mean 56.30 24.20 68.50 6.20

Median 61.00 1.50 5.50 5.50

SD 44.50 39.60 120.90 5.90

Alcohol Brands

Bacardi 67.00 70.00 257 62

Smirnoff 17.00 20.00 42 19

absolutvodka_us 34.30 57.50 166 37

GuinnessIreland 89.00 17.50 36 6

TheGooseInsider 12.50 12.00 26 7

Malibu_Rum 54.50 59.00 50 23

Mean 45.70 39.30 96.20 25.70

Median 44.40 38.80 46.00 21.00

SD 29.90 35.50 94.20 21.10

Difference

Mood Median Test Chi-square = 46.70

p<.001

Chi-square = 118.80

p<.001

Chi-square 1.33

p<.001

Chi-square 1.33

p>.100

Table 4: Qualitative Content Coding

Account Promoting Drinking

Promoting Safe-

Drinking Neutral

Brand Promotion

All

n % n % n % n % n %

Smirnoff 76 38.0 10 5.0 113 56.5 1 .5 200 100.0

GuinnessIreland 8 4.0 0 .0 57 28.5 135 67.5 200 100.0

absolutvodka_us 104 52.0 0 .0 63 31.5 33 16.5 200 100.0

Malibu_Rum 130 65.0 3 1.5 45 22.5 22 11.0 200 100.0

Bacardi 133 66.5 2 1.0 54 27.0 11 5.5 200 100.0

TheGooseInsider 4 2.0 0 .0 179 89.5 17 8.5 200 100.0

All 455 37.9 15 1.3 511 42.9 219 18.3 1,200 100.0