Insight from the horsemeat scandal

Abstract

Purpose – Social media has become an important part of daily interpersonal communication in contemporary society. The purpose of this paper is to explore the attitudes of UK consumers by identifying the hidden information in tweets, and provide a framework which can assist industry practitioners in managing social media data. Design/methodology/approach – Using a large-scale dataset of tweets relating to the Horsemeat scandal of 2013, a comprehensive data analysis framework, which comprises multidimensional scaling and sentiment analysis, alongside other methods, was applied to explore customers’ opinions. Findings – Making jokes in social media was a main trend in the tweets relating to Tesco during the Horsemeat scandal. Consumer sentiments were overall negative and burgers were the most mentioned product in the week-long period after the story broke. The posting of tweets was correlated with the timing of news coverage, which indicates that the traditional media is still crucial to public opinion formation. Practical implications – This paper presents a progressive tweet-mining framework that can serve as a tool for academia and practitioners in crisis management. The proposed framework indicates the significant importance of timely categorising the topics, identifying the sentiment of tweets and understanding the changes of consumer opinions over time in a crisis. Originality/value – The research presented in this paper is one of the limited social media research to focus on a UK food fraud issue and adds to the limited body of literature investigating consumer social media use from the side of industry practitioners.

An investigation of social media data during a product recall scandal

“…A frequency table of keywords was generated simultaneously. Thirdly, the co-occurrences of high frequency keywords were evaluated, and the main discussion themes were identified by clustered groups, then a Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) diagram was created (Tse et al, 2016). Fourthly, to investigate the large volume of opinions made by customers towards Tesco during the horsemeat scandal, a machine learning technique was adopted to classify customers' comments into the relevant discussion theme.…”

“…The MDS approach is a useful tool for identifying potential themes for focus in a discussion group (Tse et al 2016). In Figure 3, the bubble represents important dataset keywords and lines between keywords represent the strength of their relationships to each other.…”

“…Nevertheless, companies may benefit to have good communications with customers post-crisis to restore customer trust, and this should still be the priority for companies. Therefore, understanding how customers feel is an essential step in developing an effective product recall and crisis communication strategy for professionals (Tse et al, 2016). In order to establish an effective risk management strategy in product recall crisis and win back customer trust, company managers need to investigate how their risk communication works among customers and monitor customer perception during the outbreak of a crisis.…”

“…In recent years, companies have paid much attention to managing relations with customers using social media (Zhang et al 2017;Jin, Liu, and Austin 2014). The data generated by social media and its potential in social media analysis have attracted a growing interest within academia, in part spurred by recent excitement over the concept of Big Data (Tse et al, 2016;Basili et al, 2017). This is at the top of the agenda for many business leaders who have sought to establish ways in which social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, can be used to improve the competitiveness of their organisations (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010).…”

“…Tesco suffered a lot during the scandal and was seeking a better method of interaction with customers to win back trust and lost market share. The reaction of customers towards Tesco during this crisis can provide important insights for crisis managers in affected companies when faced with similar crises in the future (Senadheera, Warren, and Leitch 2017;Tse et al 2016). Facebook was chosen as the social media platform in this analysis because Tesco used Facebook as one of its main platforms to communicate information to the customers during the scandal.…”