Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
greater customization. Both are essential for survival in the increasingly competitive
tourism domain.
Social media marketing builds on these assumptions of interactive marketing, but the inter-
active media it takes advantage of are fundamentally different from the websites available when
the fi rst interactive marketing strategies were developed. Social media marketing is essentially
interactive marketing 'on steroids', with a much greater focus on relationships and a more active
role of consumers in creating and distributing marketing messages than in traditional forms of
marketing. It is fuelled by an increasing number of interactive media that support social inter-
actions such as co-creation and content sharing and a growing number of users worldwide. For
example, eMarketer (2012) predicted that in 2012 about one in every fi ve people worldwide
will use social networking sites, with the largest populations of users residing in China and the
United States and growth rates being the highest in India and Indonesia. Given this massive
adoption of social media around the globe, social media marketing will soon become a standard
way for marketers to interact with consumers. This means that a fundamental shift in commu-
nication approaches across all media and in the structure of company-customer relationships is
to be expected. To anticipate this change, it is important to understand the basic social media
marketing principles.
This chapter will give a basic overview of social marketing principles and strategies, discussing
its premises and promises specifi cally in the context of tourism, where the nature of the product
and the context of interactions create unique opportunities but also lead to enormous challenges
for social media marketers.
Social media marketing defi ned
Social media marketing discourse is full of acronyms that are often used interchangeably but
sometimes refer to slightly different things or perspectives. Also, while in-depth knowledge
of the technology that drives social media marketing is not necessary, it is important to
recognize the technological basis of these marketing initiatives and how the marketing approaches
are intertwined with the developments and resulting cultures of the Internet and its specifi c
applications. This section of the chapter provides defi nitions and presents fundamental assumptions
that shape social media marketing philosophies.
Web 2.0, the Social Web, social media, CGM and UGC
Web 2.0 refers to Internet technology and applications that allow users to be actively engaged in
creating and distributing Web content (Gillin 2007). While the Internet and the Web have always
emphasized content creation and sharing, Web 2.0 technologies (e.g. XML, Ajax, API, RSS,
mash-ups, etc.) make it a lot easier for data to be exchanged. Contents are much more moveable
and interactions more visible, giving rise to what is often referred to as the Writable or Social
Web (Gillin 2009). As such, the term Social Web describes the totality of the phenomenon,
including technologies, contents and connections. Safko and Brake (2009: 6) describe the Social
Web as 'activities, practices, and behaviours among communities of people who gather online to
share information, knowledge, and opinions'. The notion of the Social Web therefore emphasizes
aspects of the Web that make it a networked conversation space in which social dynamics play
an important role.
While Web 2.0 refers to the technological base including programming languages and
protocols that support the participatory nature of the Web, social media represent the platforms
and channels through which content is created and shared. Thus, social media are Web-based
