An iconic case study on the Glastonbury Music festival 2013. Festim presentation by Rogan Sage.

1. Festival Impact
Monitor
Exploring the Social
Impact of Events on
Social Media
Communities:
An Iconic Case Study: Glastonbury Music
Festival 2013 (26th – 30th June)

2. Social Event Impacts
 Social impacts are commonly
associated with the local
community
 They are hard to measure /
quantify
 Expensive to conduct research
 Becoming more popular…
Building
community
resources
Social
cohesiveness
Celebration
How events generate social capital (Stone 2011)

3. Online Social Revolution
 Globalisation of social interactions through the web
 Creation of ‘communities’ without clear demographic or
geographical commonalities
 International social interactions
and flows directly linked to events
from all around the world
Twitter
user #1
Twitter
User
#9 Twitter
user #2

4. Wider Community Impacts
 Wider communities impact focuses on
benefits to tourism and destination image
 But to what degree does social impact
extend across the online platform?
Event
consumers
Local
Community
Wider
community

5. Stakeholder Classification:
Power
Interest
High
High
Low
Low
Online Micro-blogging
Community

6. Online Communities
 They have the potential to be impacted by, and/or have
impact on the event and it’s organisers
The FIFA
World Cup
Notting Hill
Carnival
Glastonbury
Music
Festival
Social Change
 However no specific research
exists on microbloggers as
peripheral events stakeholders
 Need to address the propensity
for events to be a catalyst for
change

7. Twitter & Microblogging Sites
 Limited academic knowledge around dynamics of
Twitter and other Microblogging sites
 Focused on Twitter as a marketing platform
 Overlooked potential as catalyst for social change

8. Aims and Objectives
AIM: To develop an understanding of the
social impact of festivals on online social
media communities and networks
To understand the
mechanisims of
how social
messages are
distributed
/propagated in
event-based social
media discussions
To establish topics
and issues that are
shared in event-based
social media
discussions
To discover
whether a disparity
exists between the
actual and
potential usage of
social media for
social reform
To make
recommendations
for events
organisers
regarding their
approach to
realising the
potential of social
media for social
reform

9. Case Study: Glastonbury
The Glastonbury Festival aims to encourage and stimulate youth culture from around the world in
all its forms, including pop music, dance music, jazz, folk music, fringe theatre, drama, mime, circus,
cinema, poetry and all the creative forms of art and design, including painting, sculpture and textile art.
A large area of the Festival (the "green" area) is set aside for complementary and alternative medicine,
demonstrations and displays of environmentally-friendly technologies and techniques,
various forms of religious expression, and a forum for debating environmental, social and
moral issues.
The Festival organises market places, selling an enormous range of wares, and which place particular
emphasis on offering high quality prepared food and hand-made goods, including clothes and jewellery.
The company makes films and recordings of the event, which are sold all over the world.
In addition to all of this, the company actively pursues the objective of making a profit. And in so doing is
able not only to make improvements to the site, but also to distribute large amounts of
money to Greenpeace, Oxfam, Water Aid and other humanitarian causes which
enhance the fabric of our society. In the running of the event the Festival deliberately employs the
services of these organisations, increasing the amounts they can raise towards their objectives.

10. Research Methods - Mixed
 Extrapolate the non-local data into groups using NodeXL
 Run content analysis on text to find keywords relating to
social issues – ‘What are they talking about?’
 Identify important members based on ‘betweenness
centrality’ – ‘Who is doing the talking?’
Tweets Topic
Groups

11. Findings…
 Limited use of Glastonbury as a catalyst for raising of
social issue on twitter
 Strongest ‘ripples’ made when issues are promoted by
artists

12. Recommendations…
 Event organisers should consider the balance of risk /
reward…
 Risk of damage to brand reputation
 Propensity for significant reward

13. …Thank you…