Social Media Reactions to Festival Cancellation Announcements

Abstract

There are many reasons organizations cancel a festival. Regardless of the rationale, the organization's reputation can be preserved by communicating this crucial message in an appropriate way and by understanding people's perception of a cancellation announcement. The purpose of this research is to find out how festival administrators communicate a festival cancellation on social media and how the attendees, who will ultimately determine the success or failure of a festival, react to this message. Between January–June 2018, we collected 47 festival cancellation messages on Facebook and the 8,886 replies to these messages. We undertook a content analysis of both the cancellation message and the comments on the Facebook cancellation post. We found that most of the organizers used a primary response strategy, characterized by accepting blame to communicate the cancellation of the festival. This kind of response has a significant positive association with the comments characterized by building relationships. The sentiments in the cancellation posts were mainly shame and sadness and the comments on these posts were most often negative with sad and disgusted sentiments. Findings were somewhat consistent with past research and recommendations provide insight for further theoretical development.