What Type of Birdsong Carries? Twitter: Source Credibility and its Links to Value Creation in the Wine Business – A Tentative Model

Organisations are facing the opportunities and challenges that social media has brought. To justify resource investment in adopting social media, organisations are appraising the potential value of this social phenomenon. Social media facilitates electronic word of mouth (e-wom) distribution of information, referrals and reviews through social networks such as discussion forums, blogs and micro-blogs including Twitter. As the quantity of information increases in the digital environment it becomes increasingly germane to determine the credibility of the message, the source and the medium in order to assess the believability of the communication overall.This paper builds on earlier work, published in 2012 and the focus of this second stage research is the exploration of the identified constructs of source credibility and their connection to value creation. Interviews with participants of Twitter both consumers and professionals within the wine industry were conducted. Timeline narrative analysis was employed and the raw data was evaluated against the Twitter content previously collected. A tentative model has been created which now requires further validation. This paper extends the limited knowledge on the potential business value of engaging with Twitter for the wine industry which, until very recently, has been sceptical of the potential of social media.