What We Can Learn From A Celebrity's Foray Into Wine
This is what happened when Elon Musk Tweeted a passing thought on wine
What EXACTLY does the average person think about wine? That is to say, if you listened to folks casually announce their thoughts on wine without them being in some sort of wine setting or responding to a pollster, what would you discover? It’s a tough question to answer because the occasion for hearing the unguarded thoughts of a lot of average people on the question of wine just doesn’t arise very often.
That occasion recently arose thanks to Elon Musk, owner of Twitter and with more than 127 million followers on the social media platform. I mention his followers only to note that when a person with 127 million social media followers (more than a 3rd of the population of the United States) you are bound to get a few responses to each and every one of their tweets.
Last Sunday, Mr. Musk had this to say about wine:
Musk’s mercurial relationship with tweeting is well known. While he has weighed in on politics, technology, media, and culture war issues in ways that inevitably have earned him the enmity of many, he also tends to comment on a wide variety of issues wholly unrelated to Twitter and politics and the culture. Like the above tweet.
It’s a fairly innocuous comment about wine. However, it spurred nearly 8,000 replies on Twitter. And when you examine those replies you notice immediately that a goodly percentage of folks’ reactions amount to their response to wine as though they are taking a Rorschach test. For example: