Adnams - Social Media and Sole Star

Adnams is a brewery with a lot of history. However they are a brewery that has also shown a desire to move with the times, be that through the beer they're brewing, their branding, or how they engage with their customers. They produce a range of traditional ales, interspersed with some interesting, modern twists and the occasional special release. Since being acquired by the Adnams family in 1872, they've remained independent and focused on retaining their links to their Southwold, Suffolk home, although their beers are available nationwide these days.

Over the past few years, I've enjoyed a good number of their beers, with the delicious Ghost Ship on cask (first sampled in a Wetherspoons in a West London business park of all places) being a particular favourite. Fittingly, it's a recipe based on one from Adnams' archives with Citra and other American hops providing a modern twist. This was originally a seasonal beer intended to available in the Summer months. However, the response of the drinking public saw it become a permanent fixture and made available in both bottle and more recently canned form. 

Its permanent launch in May of this year was marked with an innovative social media campaign, #showmetheghostship, which had a huge online response. Adnams worked with Spring Agency (case study here) to come up with the content, which climaxed in a ghost ship being projected onto the side of the brewery at a special launch event. Adnams (@Adnams) gained over 1000 twitter followers during the campaign, which can be seen in the graph below:

@adnams twitter follower over time,  graph courtesy of wildfire

Adnams, in my view, have a fantastic online and social media presence and are one of the most engaging of the breweries I follow across all platforms. As an example, a couple of years ago, a friend mentioned in a tweet that he was looking forward to visiting the brewery on his birthday. Their marketing team saw this tweet and made him feel special on the day, sending him away with a few beers to celebrate. That kind of engagement is priceless in terms of driving loyalty and he still talks and tweets about them. Sarah Howe (@sl_howe), who tweets for Adnams, attended the European Beer Blogger's Conference this year (coincidentally, also in May) to present the newly launched Ghost Ship as part of the speed tasting session and it was interesting talking to her about the importance they attach to how they engage with customers on social platforms.

Anyway, on to the beer in hand! With increasingly high beer duty being a hot topic at the moment, the recent halving in duty for beers below 2.8% ABV has provided a rare break in the storm. The fact it was offset by a huge increase in duty for high strength beers is not lost on me, but the cut, most likely made to favour supermarkets and other mass producers, has provided an incentive for brewers to innovate in arguably the most technically challenging of categories - flavourful low strength beer. With no significant malt base to underpin them, low strength beers can be watery and can also struggle to maintain mouthfeel, head and any lasting flavour on the palate. A guardian blog post discussed some of the products released in light of this drop in duty, and it doesn't make good reading. 

Adnams' effort, Sole Star, is described in their tasting notes as a 'full-flavoured and great tasting pale amber beer, with a light floral/citrus aroma, gentle caramel notes and a good level of bitterness'. It comes in at 2.7%, so qualifies for the lower duty rate, enabling Adnams to sell it online at a very reasonable £10.99 for 8 bottles.

So, what did I think of it? The beer pours a very clear amber/copper colour with a small white head. The floral/citra aroma is certainly there amongst some caramel notes from the malts, which also carries through to the initial flavour. It has a nice bitterness, which is well balanced and not overpowering, but it fades fairly fast, which is to be expected given the thin body. Here's a wordle word cloud pulling together the collective view of those who've reviewed the beer on ratebeer:

The bottle I sampled was decent enough, and my glass emptied quickly and left me wanting another, but in all honesty this is not probably a beer I'd drink lots of. If you go up another percentage point, you'll pay more for the pleasure given the standard rate of duty, but can enjoy much more flavour in beers such as Brewdog's Dead Pony Club, Redemption's Trinity and Kernel's Table Beer in what I'd still consider the sessionable 3.x% ABV bracket. I applaud Adnams and other breweries who've released products in the lower duty bracket but hope and pray that the government increases the lower duty threshold an extra ABV percentage point (or even half a point!) in future. Flavourful beer within this lower duty rate category remains something of a holy grail.

Thanks to Adnams for sending the bottle through for sampling.

Durham Brewery White Stout - analysis of twitter launch

In my last post I previewed an event Durham Brewery had come up with to launch their new beer, White Stout, both in pubs and on twitter at 8:30pm on the 8th February. The idea was to get as many people as possible drinking and sharing opinions on White Stout. This post analyses how successful that was.

This post won't discuss the beer itself. If you'd like to read about that, Barl Fire has written a great post about it which you can read here. Also well worth a read is Phil Hardy's post about the fantastic beer and cheese matching event he set up on the evening here.

If you've read my previous posts, you'll know I like numbers and analysing data. If it can be munged into an excel pivot table, I'm game! After the event, I greedily snaffled a week's worth of tweets mentioning White Stout, or using the #whitestout hashtag and set about trying to make sense of it all. For the curious out there, I did that with the Windows version of Archivist, which lets you search using the twitter API and spits the results out in a tab delimited text file, which excel will suck in with a few clicks.

The analysis below covers 1332 tweets which were sent between 08:52 on 2nd February and 22:00 on 8th February.  The below chart shows the distribution of those tweets by date (note: you can click on any of the images below to see them full size):

So the above tells us, unsurprisingly, that the bulk of those 1344 tweets (983 to be exact) were sent on the 8th. Carrying this forward to midnight shows there were actually more than 1000 tweets sent on the 8th. That's a lot of tweets. So let's break those down by hour. The below graph shows how these 983 tweets were distributed between midday and 10pm:

For clarity, 20 on the x-axis above covers the period between 20:00 and 20:59. So there was a huge spike in that hour - which is where our launch time of 20:30 lay. Let's look more closely at that. The below chart shows the number of tweets per minute during that hour:

So the volume of tweets actually peaked at 20:39, where there was one sent just about every two seconds!  Who was sending them? The below pie chart shows the distribution by username throughout the whole period, with the top 20 odd tweeters called out by @name. It's followed by a list of users with the number of tweets sent total:

 

Looking at the above, the top 10 users sent a total of 664 tweets to their cumulative count of 5115 followers. Now, consider that a total of 162 twitter users took part and you start to get a feel for the reach of those tweets - probably well in excess of 10,000 people saw a #whitestout tweet! In summary, this event was a massive success and I believe #whitestout could well have trended if a certain England manager hadn't resigned an hour or so before the event kicked off.

Now onto the fun part. I used wordle to create some word clouds which show the words used most often in those tweets. The first one below covers all the tweets and isn't filtered, other than removing the tag itself:

The second cloud below, to me is the most fascinating part of this analysis. It takes the descriptive words used in tweets around the time people were opening and tasting the beer and aggregates them, again, the larger the word the more frequently it was used. To me this is like the 100+ people all talking loudly in the virtual #whitestout pub, sharing their views on the beer - the very essence of what the event was trying to achieve:

So there you have it, a number and word crunching view of the how the night went down. If you took part, what did you think? Is this an effective way of using social media to promote beer and engage with consumers? If you're a brewer, would you consider doing the same or something similar in future?

Durham Brewery White Stout twitter tasting

The innovative Durham Brewery have come up with a fabulous idea to promote their latest beer using social media. As they describe on their website, at 8:30pm on Wednesday 8th February, they're encouraging twitter using beer drinkers to crack open a bottle of White Stout and share their thoughts interactively.

Twitter is a great tool for this type of engagement. A lot of TV shows encourage viewers to interact while a show is on-air to great success, with hashtags often driven to pole position in the top trending topics. There's already a strong beer community on twitter and lots of interaction of an evening but typically, we'll be drinking different beers. This event will be really interesting to see what happens when we're all drinking and tweeting about the same beer. Last year's beer bloggers conference featured live blogging during a tasting session which was fun to follow (if a little challenging with having to refresh multiple browser tabs) and this idea is a nice extension to that, using a media which is far better suited.

The brewery will be represented by Manager Elly, Director Steve and Brewer Sean who will be present online and physically installed in a participating pub to engage real-time with those taking part.

The hashtag #whitestout has already seen plenty of action since the event was announced last week. As of 8am on Thursday 2nd February, it had featured in 98 tweets from over 20 individuals. The below chart (created with Archivist) shows the distribution of these:

distribution of tweets using #whitestout

There's also a nice upward trend forming, with six days still to go before the actual event. The graph below shows this growth:

 tweets per day

The general content of those tweets is positive, as shown in the graph below which plots frequency of words used:

 frequency distribution of words in tweets using #whitestout

So what of the beer itself? Durham Brewery tell us that "two hundred years ago, before the porter brewers commandered "stout" to mean stout or strong porter, a stout beer was a strong beer. It did not have to be black. We have re-created the style using modern hops and a full malt body". Brewed with maris otter malt and columbus hops, it's described as a "very drinkable strong ale".

The beer is already getting attention and Richard Fletcher wrote this great article for Journal Live in which he comments on the history of stout and the idea of innovating with traditional recipes.

It's bottle conditioned and weighs in at a hefty 7.2% - ideal for sharing during the event.

To take part, get following the profiles of those linked above. They'll tell you which pubs will have the beer on, or if you'll be taking part from home, where you can get your hands on a bottle. Then at 8:30pm next Wednesday, join the action by tweeting using #whitestout and share your opinions with like minded people.

After the event, I'm planning a follow up post to comment on the proceedings and analyse the activity it drove, so check back next week and tell me what you thought!

Are you planning to take part? If so, will you be in a pub or at home with a bottle? What do you think about using social media for this type of event? Have you seen it used successfully elsewhere?

Breweries and Social Media - Facebook

Last weekend I posted an article comparing three UK craft breweries, BrewDog, Magic Rock and Thornbridge.  Rather than focusing on their beer, I looked at how they used Twitter as a vehicle for engaging with customers and promoting their products.  Each was found to have very contrasting styles and there were differing views as to which was most effective both in the comments and on Twitter. What wasn't contested, however, was that Twitter is a very effective vehicle for breweries wishing to engage with consumers and get their message out there. Magic Rock's MD, Richard Burhouse, noted:

There was agreement from Hardknott's Dave Bailey regarding the impact on his business. In a future post, I'm going to look at this impact in more detail but in today's post, I'm going to turn my attention to the behemoth of a social media network that is Facebook, using the same three breweries' fan pages. The depth and reach of Facebook far exceeds that of Twitter, with this BBC article suggesting 10% of the population has an account. This was driven home to me recently when I received a friend request from my mother!

Facebook clearly works very differently to Twitter on many levels, but fundamentally the principles are the same for a business wishing to reach out to and engage with consumers. Facebook provides private and business users with the ability to create 'fan' pages. Users can then 'like' these pages and the updates the creator (and optionally others) post to them will then appear in their 'news feed'. Users can comment on and 'like' posts to these pages to engage with the creator and other 'fans'. 

Brewdog, Magic Rock and Thornbridge all have fan pages with differing numbers of 'fans', as shown below along with the growth rate:

As a relatively young business, Magic Rock has the fewest Facebook 'fans' with BrewDog far and away the most. Looking at growth over the last month graphically shows the following:

Graph courtesy of http://statistics.allfacebook.com/

The first thing to consider is how frequently each brewery posts to their fan page. The below graph shows the number of posts split by day of week for the period from the 1st to the 12th January 2012 inclusive:

So BrewDog posted 28 times, Magic Rock 6 times and Thornbridge 35 times in that 12 day period. Thornbridge, as observed in the previous post, usually posts exactly three times per day during the week. BrewDog vary their posting rate and Magic Rock seem to prefer Twitter to Facebook.

Facebook provides in-depth analytics to owners of pages which allows them to understand the engagement and reach of each post they make and there are many articles out there which detail how to do that. However, comparing engagement across pages you don't 'own' is more of a challenge. This article caught my eye as it contains a formula for systematically measuring and comparing the engagement of posts across pages with differing numbers of fans. The formula is as follows:

The comments are weighted double compared to likes as the assumption (which seems reasonable) is that a comment takes more effort and therefore suggests more engagement. So, let's compare the engagement each brewery got on average across the posts they made:

This suggests that Magic Rock's engagement is high, despite the number of 'fans' and posts being relatively low. Reasons for this could be many and I'm not going to speculate on those. What is interesting though is that BrewDog and Thornbridge have similar overall engagement and a similar number of posts, so let's look at those in more detail. In order to do that, I analysed each post and classified them by type. The below tables compare BrewDog's and Thornbridge's engagement across each type:

In both cases 'questions' are the most engaging posts.  The below graph averages the posts of both breweries to illustrate this:

Questions are a clear winner compared to the other categories. Let's drill down into the most engaging posts from each brewery. Below are the three most and least engaging posts from BrewDog and Thornbridge:

BrewDog's three most engaging posts

• [37.7, Question] If you aren't having a dry January, 'like' this status
• [34.4, Question] What would you most like to see 1) A BrewDog Lambic? 2) Nara on Twitter 3) A Triple IPA 4) A Grandiloquent Fox? 5) A BrewDog Scotch Whisky?
• [16.1, Question] What are you drinking tonight?

BrewDog's three least engaging posts

• [0.3, Statement] Well would you look at that, we're also on Twitter AND Google+. You know what to do.
• [0.5, Link] My Year in BrewDog http://www.brewdog.com/blog-article/my-year-in-brewdog-2011 with @brewdogbarbruce @meh_peh @brewdogbark @BeerSweden @BrewDogBarBecca and @MartinDickie
• [0.7, Link] Brew at the Bog @BrewBog http://www.brewdog.com/blog-article/brew-at-the-bog

Thornbridge's three most engaging posts

• [19.3, Question] Do you prefer the traditional interior or a modern finish in a local pub?
• [19.0, Statement] We started the week brewing Jaipur. We're sure many of you will approve!
• [17.8, Question] The price of beer is.....?

Thornbridge's three least engaging posts

• [0.3, Statement] The winds are still going strong watch out out there!
• [0.6, Link] Real Ale in 140 (and some). Thornbridge - Versa Weisse Beer [link to blog post]
• [0.6, Link] A speachless review of Thornbridge Kipling.... [link to blog post]

Perhaps finding that links lead to the least engagement is not surprising as Facebook users may simply click on them rather than comment and/or like. It's clear though that asking 'fans' questions is what really drives engagement which makes perfect sense.

The final thing I wanted to analyse, was whether engagement on the two fan pages varied depending on the day of the week. The below graph depicts that data:

This is pretty interesting. Engagement seems to be better towards the end of the week.  So, what have we learned through this analysis:

1. Fans are most likely to engage with questions, especially those related to the products or industry
2. Fans are least likely to engage with announcements and links to other external content
3. Fans are more likely to engage towards the end of the week

How do you engage with breweries on Facebook? Do you prefer engaging via Facebook or Twitter? If you're a brewery, how much importance do you attach to each and does this impact the effort you put into the respective social networks?

If anyone's interested in the raw data (I can't be the only one who loves a good pivot table!), I'd be happy to email the excel spreadsheet. 

Breweries and Social Media - Twitter

As someone who has discovered a lot of beers and breweries through use of social media, how breweries use Twitter, Facebook and other such sites is a subject which interests me. This post performs a direct comparison between three British craft breweries - Brewdog (@brewdog), Magic Rock (@MagicRockBrewCo) and Thornbridge (@Thornbridge) and their use of Twitter during the month of December 2011.  I'll cover their respective use of Facebook in a later post.

This is not about the products of these breweries or any preferences or favourites I may have among their beers (for the record, I like beers from all three!) so I won't be discussing those. It's really about producing a view of how they use these tools to promote their products and engage with customers.

First of all, let's compare the number of Twitter followers, follows and Facebook 'likes' they have:

Brewdog
Followers: 7,369
Follows: 803 (11%)
Likes: 16,398

Magic Rock
Followers: 1,562
Follows: 150 (10%)
Likes: 433

Thornbridge
Followers: 3,725
Follows: 121 (3%)
Likes: 3,280

General use of Twitter

I'm going to focus on use of Twitter in December 2011, purely because that's the most recent complete month. The below three charts, created with Tweetstats show the number of tweets total and how many those were @ replies or retweets:

Brewdog

Magic Rock

Thornbridge

These graphs suggest the three breweries use twitter very differently indeed. Brewdog, who averaged 6.8 tweets per day have predominantly outbound authored tweets but with a fair percentage of @ replies and re-tweets, suggesting some engagement with those mentioning and replying to them (the graph alone doesn't let you draw that conclusion - but a glance at their feed seems to correlate). They mostly use Twitter to communicate out to followers.

Magic Rock's Twitter usage during December (averaging 19.4 tweets, the most prolific of the three by far) was made up of mostly retweets, which again is backed up by looking at their feed. However, contrary to what the graph shows (the line is hidden), they also sent plenty of @ replies. They don't seem to send many outbound authored tweets to all followers, preferring to retweet what others have written.

Thornbridge, well, it's very curiously almost always exactly three tweets per day and it's one way traffic suggesting no engagement.  We'll look more closely at this in the next post - Thornbridge have a one way feed set up from Facebook and don't' appear to use the Twitter account directly at all.

Tweet Density and Distribution

Next, we'll look at when these breweries are tweeting. They're all UK based and the times below are GMT. A bigger 'blob' corresponds with more tweets at the time shown:

Brewdog

Magic Rock

Thornbridge

Looking at the above, Brewdog mostly tweet between 8am and 8pm Monday to Friday but have a preference for tweeting in the morning.  Magic Rock are the most likely of the three to tweet during evening 'drinking hours', particularly later in the week when their tweet density increases. Thornbridge, well, you could set your watch by their morning tweet (yes, singular). It almost always goes out between 7 and 8am.  To correlate the above, the below graphs (I've excluded Thornbridge) show the aggregate tweets per day in December 2011:

Brewdog

Magic Rock

Engagement 

So who are Brewdog and Magic rock interacting with. Let's look first at @ replies:

Brewdog

Magic Rock

So Brewdog hearts Gizzi Erskine and Magic Rock hearts Zak Avery. Hmm. Seriously, there's not much to draw from this, other than to observe that both are engaging with trade customers and end consumers.  So, let's look at retweets:

Brewdog

Magic Rock

This is more interesting. Magic Rock is mostly retweeting pubs and pub landlords. Looking closer, they're letting people know where to find their products. Brewdog on the other hand are mostly retweeting @BrewdogJames.  This marries up with their general usage at the top of this post, with Brewdog mostly using Twitter for outbound communication and Magic Rock mostly using it for retweeting.  I wonder how many followers of BrewdogJames also follow Brewdog?  There's an app for that! They have 1200 odd common followers, so about 20% of those seeing the retweets have already seen the original message.

So what can we learn from this? Probably not much but it's interesting to see how usage of Twitter varies significantly between the three breweries. This may be down to a defined social media strategy or purely incidental.

How effectively do you feel each uses Twitter? Which approach of the three do you prefer? How does engagement via Twitter change or otherwise shape your perception of a brewery and their products?