Abstract
Social media and mobile technologies have revolutionised communication and particular attention has been given to user-generated content (UGC) and the formation of online communities; however, little attention has been given to tourist events entirely generated by users through social media. This paper aims to define and characterise the phenomenon of tourism user-generated events (UGEs) through social media around the user’s new empowered role and to assess user-generated social media events’ online socialness. It is also our aim to provide a useful mixed-methodology analysis framework for UGEs in relation to social media and to highlight their interest for organisations. The methodological approach includes a quantitative model to store, analyse and compare events’ online socialness, which is combined with qualitative, participant observation at the events. This approach is applied to the analysis of three Instagram meetups organised by a specific online community at Catalan ski resorts. The paper’s results show the differential characteristic of tourism UGEs: user initiative and empowerment, full organisation and structure, great social media use and UGC production, brand dissemination, attraction capacity, strong online community bond and faithfulness. With UGEs, an event management paradigm shift occurs as organisations are no longer the main initiators and controllers of the event.
Highlights
Something unprecedented and wholly unexpected occurred when, in 2008, an Australian teenager’s invitation to a party via MySpace went viral
This study adopts a mixed methodology, including positivist and interpretive approaches [21] to analyse and characterize the socio-cultural phenomenon of user-generated events (UGEs), including the proposal of a quantitative analysis framework to store, analyse and compare an event in relation to its online socialness, as well as the people actively participating in the event as social media users, along with a qualitative approach to complement the quantitative analysis based on participant observation in the events to gain deeper understandings of the events’ online socialness and users’ role of empowerment
user-generated content (UGC) through social media (Figure 7b): The results showed that tourist UGEs are intrinsically related to the production of online UGC through social media and generate user engagement and interactivity through likes and comments
Summary
Something unprecedented and wholly unexpected occurred when, in 2008, an Australian teenager’s invitation to a party via MySpace (an early social media platform) went viral. Events wholly generated by users and promoted through social media have been growing, but have become more formal, organized and specialized in certain subjects [5,6], fostered by the generalized use of mobile devices. Many are eminently touristic and have the capacity to attract people, generate income for tourist businesses and destinations and promote brands. In this respect, social media have revolutionized the way we communicate and publicize in travel and tourism [7], but have changed the way we see tourists and their role in the tourism arena [8], from relatively passive agents to empowered agents actively generating content and engaging with one another through mobile devices [9,10]
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