Abstract
Smart cities and smart tourism destinations integrate technological infrastructures and end-user devices with the aim of providing more satisfying experiences. They generate expectations of superior innovation, greater interactivity, participation and a better image. Therefore, they need to communicate their smartness and include it in their branding. The study analyses the smart content present in the tourist and non-tourist official Twitter accounts of a selection of smart cities and smart destinations, through semantic analysis, in order to find out which smart concepts are strategically branded to create a smart tourism destination image. The results show that the best cities in the ranking for each smart topic are not the ones with highest percentages of tweets on that topic. The study also shows that the number and percentage of tweets that communicate smart aspects on the platforms analyzed are low, showing the smartness is not included in their branding. It has also been observed that, almost all cities communicate or do not communicate the same concepts, evincing an undifferentiated branding strategy. The results of this study are interesting for urban policy-makers and tourism destination marketers to improve their branding.
Highlights
The aim of this study is to analyze the smartness or smart content included in the place branding of Smart cities (SCs) and smart tourism destinations (STDs) through the semantic analysis of their official Twitter accounts, in order to ascertain which smart concepts are strategically branded to create a smart image; and to find out if the smart cities best positioned in the ranking for each smart aspect communicate more content about it revealing a communication strategy based on their identity
The tweets sent from the official Twitter account of a destination are retrieved and pre-processed
These results corroborate previous studies [65,66] that showed that smartness or smart concepts are still hardly introduced in the branding of cities
Summary
Smart cities (SCs) apply technology and information technologies (ICTs) [2] to achieve resource saving, sustainable development [3] and improvement of the residents’ quality of life [4], generating added value and better experiences for tourists [5]. As Encalada et al [1] stated, the ICTs adopted by SCs facilitate access to information and services for both tourists and residents. The development of SCs foments the emergence of smart tourism destinations (STDs) [1]. STDs are SCs which take into account both residents and tourists in their effort to support mobility, resource availability, sustainability, and the quality of life and visits [6,7]
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