Social Media and Strategic Market Communications of Festivals

Szilvia Gyimóthy, Mia Larson

    Research output: Contribution to book/anthology/report/conference proceedingConference abstract in proceedingResearch

    Abstract

    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.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationProceedings of the 19th Nordic Symposium in Tourism Research
    Number of pages1
    Place of PublicationIcelandic Tourism Research Centre
    Publication date1 Sept 2010
    Pages65
    ISBN (Print)978-9979-834-78-6
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Sept 2010

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