Managing social media in festivals: A co-creation approach

The Internet has facilitated a cost-effective mechanism to enable interactions between customers and organisations and among customers (Blazevic & Lievens 2008), which implies that customers and organisations increasingly coproduce information, knowledge, products and services. As such, social media carry many opportunities; on the other hand, their strategic use is paved with a number of challenges. Many managers are overwhelmed and lack a full appreciation or knowledge about the potentials of social media such as how to control content, timing and frequency of information (Muniz & Schau, 2007; Meerman Scott, 2010). The current disorientation of practitioners yielded a vast body of consultancy literature and airport bestsellers advocating success recipes for dealing strategically with social media (see for example Falls & Decker 2011; Bradley & McDonald 2011). On the other hand, there exists very little published research that conceptualizes this field and provides empirical analyses of how social media becomes a part of integrated marketing communications.
The purpose of this paper is to address this research gap and to explore how festival organisations use social media to rearrange their marketing activities. In particular it is focused on whether and how unidirectional mass marketing practices are replaced with more personalized and visitor-involving value co-creation processes.