Mapping the Web Presences of Tourism Destinations: An Analysis of the European Countries. Extract from the presentation ENTER 2011

1. Mapping the Web Presences
of Tourism Destinations:
An Analysis of the European Countries
Luisa Mich, Nadzeya Kiyavitskaya
luisa.mich@unitn.it, nadzeya@disi.unitn.it
University of Trento
http://etourism.economia.unitn.it

2. The problem
• Defining and building a comprehensive Web
presence for a tourism destination exploiting
Web 2.0 ‘spaces’, going beyond the website:
– Web 2.0 largely extended the types of Web
presences for an organization: institutional
websites vs. blogs, wikis, social platforms,
podcasts, forums
– Traditional marketing and branding scenarios must
be revised

3. Tourists and the UGC
... social networking is one of the most powerful forces driving travel planning
today. … social media use among travellers is growing far faster than the
travel industry itself. Unique monthly visitors to social travel sites jumped 34%
between the first half of 2008 and the last half of 2009.
(PhocusWright)
Which of the following do you use most frequently when travelling?
- Mobile maps: 56% (US) and 63% (non-US)
- Social networks: 38% (US) and 64% (non-US)
- Virtual/3D tourism: 30% (US) and 27% (non-US)
- Blogs: 32% (US) and 22% (non-US)
- Podcasts: 9% (US) and 7% (non-US)
- Virtual worlds: 0% (US) and 10% (non-US)
- RSS feeds: 7% (US) and 11% (non-US) (tnooz.com, August 2010)

4. Critical decisions
• choosing which social networks are worth
investing in to yield a positive return in terms
of promotion and commercialization of the
destination, and
• defining how to connect the destination’s
site(s) and its presences on social networks

5. An example
Segui VisitSweden su

6. (Non) Strategies of Web presence
• Ignore
• Wait
• Copy
Loss of competitive advantage
Image damage
Costs
Crisis

7. Research Objectives
• Define a framework for the classification and
analysis of online spaces to be included in a
web presence strategy (decision making):
– Provide a model to describe and analyze the
characteristics of different forms of Web presence
– Investigate the applicability of this model
– Elaborate guidelines and recommendations for
improving Web presences of DMOs

8. The framework
• An organization’s (DMO’s) Web presence is
determined by the online spaces ‘occupied’
• Online spaces are classified according to the
level of control the organization can exert on
them
• An effective Web presence must consider all
and only those spaces necessary for the
organization’s strategies
• Online spaces must be evaluated on a costbenefit analysis

9. Classification of the online spaces
1.Official spaces
– official websites (B2C, B2B), micro-sites
2.Semi-official spaces
– presences with partial control, e.g., YouTube
brand channel, fan pages on Facebook, a profile
on Twitter, wikis, Web communities, blogs …
3.Spaces beyond the organization’s control
– uncontrolled (Web 2.0) spaces, e.g., social
networks, independent blogs, forums, etc.

10. Presence matrixes and maps
• Focusing on the first two levels, the presence
map assigns the official and semi-official
(planned or actual) spaces occupied by a DMO
to nodes of a graph; connections among these
spaces are represented by links (directed
edges), obtaining a space connectivity map
• 15 European countries: those with more than
5 millions arrival of residents in 2008,
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu

11. Presence matrix
Finland
Official site
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Flicker
Official site
www.visitfin
land.com
[en, de, fr ..]
Quality:
High
Twitter
twitter.com/
ourfinland
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Facebook
www.facebo
ok.com/visit
finland
3408 people
like this; last
off. post Sep
10
Yes
Yes
818
followers;
last off.
tweet Sep 3
YouTube
www.youtube
.com/user/vis
itfinland
views 3302;
downloads
50275; last
off. video Jun
7
Yes
Flicker
www.flickr.
com/photos/
visitfinland
last photo
Sep 6

12. Presence map of Finland

13. Analysis of the official spaces
• B2C websites of the 15 European DMOs:
– Inspective evaluation: applying a table based on
the 7Loci meta-model (Identity, Content, Services,
Identification, Management, Usability, Feasibility)
– The quality of the websites resulted very different:
• there are websites with positive performances for
almost all the questions in the evaluation schema,
while others have significant gaps among the 7
dimensions (e.g., strong Identity, based on an effective
graphical design, good Services, but which Content or
Usability are not yet adequate)

14. Website quality and Alexa success
parameters MCA graph
Profile 1
Profile 3
Profile 2

15. Three ‘profiles’
• Profile 1: very high quality, at least one of the Alexa’s
parameters traffic rank (ranking) and sites linking in
(links) in the 1st (1) or 2nd quartile (2) (e.g., CH, UK,
NL, S)
• Profile 2: high quality, ranking and links 1 or 2; (ES, F,
N, A)
• Profile 3: medium, low quality, ranking and links 3 or
4 (PL, P, RO, I)
– The existence of 3 profiles is an interesting result and
somehow reflects the experience accumulated by the
European DMOs for their official website (see Baggio, 2003)

16. Analysis of the semi-official spaces
– Focus on the DMOs’ presences in:
• Facebook (all apart I; D, PL, F have a profile, UK has a
group page)
• Twitter (all apart I and GR; # followers lower than on
FB)
• YouTube (brand channel, all apart I, PT and RO)
• Flickr (only NL, GR and F)

17. Results
Nation
FB
fans*
FB
last
TW
TW
followers* last
Germany
France
Spain
United Kingdom
Sweden
Holland
Poland
Norway
Austria
Switzerland
Greece
Finland
Portugal
Romania
<1
<1
>100
<1
10-20
20-100
1-10
1-10
<1
10-20
10-20
1-10
20-100
1-10
days
days
today
days
days
today
today
today
today
days
today
days
today
today
1-2
<1
>10
>10
2-10
2-10
2-10
2-10
<1
1-2
today
today
today
today
days
days
today
days
today
days
<1
1-2
1-2
days
today
days 10-20
* In thousands
YT
YT
channel last
views*
<1
>20
10-20
>20
1-10
1-10
10-20
10-20
10-20
10-20
1-10
months
weeks
weeks
months
months
weeks
weeks
months
months
months
months
YT
total
views
<10
>300
100-300
100-300
10-100
10-100
>300
100-300
>300
100-300
10-100
months 10-100
#links
<3
3-6
>6
<3
>6
3-6
3-6
3-6
3-6
>6
3-6
>6
3-6
3-6

18. Website and social networks Web
presence MCA graph

19. Presence maps: three profiles
• the social networks spaces (nodes) are
connected to the destination website:
– by unidirectional edges (D, HL, UK)
– by (some) bidirectional edges (N, GR, A)
– (mainly) by bidirectional edges and there are
connections also among some of the social
networks (CH, E, F, S)

20. Conclusion and outlook
• We proposed a new model to map official and semi-official
online spaces included in the Web presence of a DMO:
– its application on a set of European destinations allowed to distinguish
different web presence strategies;
– it can support destination managers to make their decision on (a)
which SNs are worth investing in and (b) how to connect the
destination’s site and its presences on SNs
• Future works will investigate:
– the association between the experience of a destination on the
website and its social networks strategy
– the impact of differently directed edges (e.g., of a fully connected map
vs. a subset of connections)
– other social networks (e.g., tourism related ones)

21. References
L. Mich, N. Kiyavitskaya, Mapping the Presences of Tourism
Destinations: An analysis of the European Countries, in ICT in
Tourism 2011, Wien; New York: Springer Vienna, 2011, pp. 379390. Proc. ENTER 2011, Innsbruck, Jan. 26-28 2011.
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-7091-05030_31, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-7091-0503-0_31
L. Mich, Towards a Web 2.0 Presence Model for Tourism
Destination Management Organizations, in eChallenges e-2010,
IEEE , 2010, pp. 1-8. Proc. e-2010, Warsaw, Oct. 27-29 2010.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=5756
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