Social Media and Strategic Market Communications of Festivals

Since the emerging omnipresence of social media usage in Western societies,
marketers have been eager to harness the strategic communication potential of
new media (e.g. blogs, wikis, visual content sharing sites and online
communities. This is also apparent in event tourism; for instance music festivals
have proved to be early adopters of Facebook fan sites and Twitter in order to
distribute information, campaigns and celebrity rumors to their potential visitors
in an inexpensive way. On the other hand, the strategic use of social media has
also been hypothesized to be paved with a number of challenges.
In order to fill a void of empirical studies of managing festival
communications, this paper explores how social media is used as a tool for
marketing and service innovation. By conducting focus groups and personal
interviews with larger music events (Storsjöyran, Way Out West and Roskilde
festival), we investigate current practices, perceived risks and opportunities for
revitalizing event communications in general. During the inventory phase of the
research project, two distinctive fields of knowledge gaps have been identified,
namely (1) the effect and efficiency measurement methods in a social medial
mix and (2) dilemmas of crowdsourcing as an institutionalized practice.