Social media activities in tourism

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CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

With marketing strategies and techniques used in Web 2.0 applications potentially available to businesses, a wide range of social media activities continue to appear and develop on the Internet. Our study aims to assess the effects of social media marketing in tourism; hence, the first section will review the literature that elaborates the functionalities and characteristics of social media that can support different activities for businesses, and especially for tourism industry suppliers (e.g., hotels, transportation providers, attractions, travel agencies). Meanwhile, given the influence of product types on media marketing, we will also review relevant literature in the second section to identify important tourism products that should be considered in our study.

2.1 Social media activities in tourism

The original Web 1.0 allowed only one-way communication through static webpages;

hence, consumers could only view and could not contribute to the content of webpages. In a sense, website publishers communicated with users as if through lecture (Thackeray, Neiger, Hanson, & McKenzie, 2008). In contrast, today’s social media not only facilitate new firm-customer interactions but also expose these interactions to other users (Gallaugher & Ransbotham, 2010).

According to Culnan et al. (2010), social media can support multiple activities that include branding (including advertising, public relations, and content delivery), sales (including calls to action, e.g., links to purchase items), customer service and support, and product development. Furthermore, companies potentially gain business value from these activities when customers engage with them on a regular basis, co-creating content and sharing power. Kietzmann et al. (2011) proposed a framework that defines seven social media functionalities, including identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, and groups. Different social media activities can be defined by the extent to which they focus on some or all of these functionalities.

Companies launch social media activities for different purposes, which can be divided into diverse categories. According to Bernoff and Li (2008), there are five primary ways for companies to use social media: research and development (listening), marketing (talking), sales (energizing), customer support (supporting) and operations (managing). Furthermore, social media metrics have been proposed to measure performance in the above categories. Li and Soonius (2012) noted that

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companies conduct Facebook campaigns for similar reasons, and they further distinguish the following twelve campaign categories: news, history, corporate social responsibility, contests, winners, albums, promotions, recruitment, co-creation, likes, polls, and questions. The two studies above are summarized in Table 2-1 with respect to the five categories of using social media.

Table 2-1: Explanations of the Five Usages of Social Media Bernoff and Li (2008) Li and Soonius (2012)

Listening

Gaining insights from customers and using that input in the innovation process

Engaging customers to co-create products and services or simply improve existing ones (e.g., using questions, polls, co-creation)

Talking

Using conversations with customers to promote products or services

Making fans aware of companies’ brands and activities (e.g., using photos, contests, likes, news, history)

Energizing

Identifying enthusiastic customers and using them to influence others

Directly or indirectly selling products and services (e.g., conducting a promotion)

Supporting Enabling customers to help one another solve problems

Providing easier and quicker customer support

Managing

Providing employees with tools to enable them to assist one another in finding more effective ways to conduct business

Serving as an internal platform for sharing knowledge or attracting new employees (e.g., recruiting)

Tourism industry suppliers have implemented social media activities to reach some or all of the above objectives. For example, Malaysia's low-cost airline AirAsia conducted the Friendsy campaign to increase brand awareness of Sydney as a new Australian hub. The company developed a Facebook app showing a virtual plane that AirAsia’s fans could fill with 302 of their Facebook friends. The winner of the campaign would have an opportunity to take their friends from Sydney to Kuala Lumpur, where they would then spend three nights with accommodations paid for by AirAsia, before returning home on their private plane. As a result, the AirAsia Facebook fan base grew by 30 percent, and the Friendsy competition reached 2,291,483 people on Facebook. The campaign helped achieve an average 82.5 percent

Study Category

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load factor on all routes from Sydney, exceeding the initial goal of AirAsia (Facebook Studio, 2013).

Obermutten is another noted example of the use of social media marketing. This village, located in Switzerland's remote mountain region of Graubunden, uses Facebook to increase awareness of this place that has fewer than 80 residents.

Obermutten began a campaign that allows anyone who likes the village's Facebook page to have their pictures posted on the village bulletin board. Because generating the connection between the online world and this remote village attracts attention from users all over the world, the Facebook page quickly reached more 40,000 fans.

Additionally, this activity also draws traffic to the Graubunden tourism website, with visits increasing by 250 percent. An effort that cost 10,000 Swiss francs resulted in the media equivalent of $2.4 million, with approximately 60 million media impressions. Obermutten subsequently expanded this successful activity to attempt to promote the village as a long-term and enduring attraction. Therefore, Obermutten established a new landmark called the Obermutten International Museum of Friendship (OIMOF) using co-creation with its fans. All presents from fans around the world are stored in OIMOF and are also photographed, described and featured in the Obermutten Facebook photo gallery (Advertising Age, 2012).

Some activities can engage fans and provide tourists with a new way to travel.

For example, Gettysburg National Military Park uses Facebook to connect followers to some of the battlefield's lesser-known sites. Moreover, the park launched the “52 Footsteps” Facebook Challenge, which outlines a weekly story that can lead visitors to specific spots on the battlefield. Upon finding a spot, visitors are encouraged to take a photo and upload it to the park's Facebook page (Rowland & Rowland, 2013).

A company may also use official social media platforms to provide travelers with the latest news or inside stories about the company. As an example, in the Marriott on the Move blog (www.blogs.marriott.com), J.W. Bill Marriott, the chairman and CEO of an American diversified hospitality company, Marriott International, Inc., regularly updates articles. He replies to the comments posted by visitors and adds a personal touch, such as news about his family, to the blog (Thevenot, 2007).

An increasing number of travel providers use social media to address customer problems and to manage their companies. JetBlue, for instance, has hired six staffers to monitor missives from the company's 1.4 million Twitter followers. In one incident in which a JetBlue passenger tweeted about not being able to obtain a seat assignment next to his child, the airline quickly responded while the passenger was still in the boarding area (Laura, n.d.). Sometimes social media are also used to facilitate

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The above-mentioned examples show that various social media activities are conducted by travel providers to serve different objectives. We summarize these six cases in Table 2-2 based on the categorization made in prior literature (Bernoff & Li, 2008; Li & Soonius, 2012).

Table2-2: Social Media Usages in Different Tourism Cases

AirAsia Obermutten industry. According to Bernoff and Li (2008), increased sales can be used as a metric to evaluate the effect of social media applications with respect to talking and energizing. These usages also allow users to take part in conversations and create their own content, such as reviews, questions, compliments or suggestions, which are known as User Generated Content (UGC); hence, these campaigns can be characterized as firm-initiated but customer-implemented (Godes & Mayzlin, 2009).

We will identify these types of social media activities from all the campaigns conducted on the Facebook fan page of our case company and further explore their influences by examining changes in the sales of its tourism products. Moreover, we will explore whether these influences change with the promotion of different types of tourism products.