Last week I visited Museums and the Web 2013, the annual conference about digital technology and museums. We were invited to give a talk about the results of our social media monitor, which was developed in the context of the project ‘Museumkompas’. But before I explain more about the presentation, I like to tell a little more about a number of other presentations that I attended.

This is part of an extended abstract which was submitted by Marieke and myself to “The 13th International Research Symposium on Service Excellence in Management” which will be held in june 2013.

Social media are rapidly becoming a viable way of service marketing and customer engagement in the hospitality industry. Facebook, for instance, allows restaurants to publish information, multimedia content and engage with their customers e.g., to answer questions or learn about their preferences. Being active on social media has become increasingly important as customers more frequently turn to social media and the Web for restaurant reviews before deciding to visit (Lewis and Chambers, 2000).

Together with Marieke I submitted an abstract to the QUIS13 conference in Karlstad Sweden. This abstract got accepted which gives us a great platform to discuss big data in the hospitality industry.

Abstract:

Social media is rapidly becoming a viable way of service marketing and customer engagement in the hospitality industry. Many businesses in the industry have created accounts for popular platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (Kasavana et al., 2010). While many already use the Web as a promotional tool, social media enable the opportunity to directly build customer relationships. Facebook for instance, allows businesses to publish information, multimedia content and engage with their customers to e.g., share their experience, answer questions or learn about their preferences. Being active on social media has become increasingly important for the hospitality industry. Customers turn more frequently to social media and the Web for evaluations of a restaurant before going out to eat there (Lewis & Chambers, 2000). For them: “the most powerful tool is word of mouth from a friend, and social media are an extension of this” (McCarthy et al., 2010).

Ever since I started working for the Crossmedialab, I’ve been wondering about research methods to measure the efficacy of crossmedia campaigns. You see, my research interest is methodology. Which factors influence the reliability and validity of your methods? I’ve started with usability evaluation methods, and heuristic evaluation in particular (shameless selfpromotion via link and link , but now my attention is shifting towards crossmedia success efficacy. Unfortunately, so far it seems that there aren’t that many methods you can use.

Nowadays the majority of the world is aware of the contributing value of social media: they enable interaction between senders and receivers. Many organizations, both in the private and public domain, are looking for the best way to interact with the public and to improve their relationship. At the moment, social media have become elemental in the communication mix. In fact, most communication professionals believe that interaction –and participation- has become essential to build a sustainable relationship with the public. One of the elements that leads to the success of a festival is for example also attributed to the degree of interaction with the audience, as you can read in our recently published book about festival experience. While businesses are at the forefront of the latest developments, governmental organizations mostly lag behind the newest developments.

I’m writing on apparent ridicule examples of today’s media world. I call it Over the Edge. An example, today, and this story is true, the commentators of NOS television for the Tour de France, told all viewers at channel 1 (public broadcast) that bystanders who hinder the ‘peleton’, the cyclists who race by, must be publicly be trialled through – or by means of – social media. This, as the commentators (and former cycle pro’s) Maarten Ducrot and Herbert Dijkstra)  is already happening in Belgium (and not just in the case of cycle races); the public as the judge and the audience as the executor. For me, this example is very much over the edge! Do you have any examples I might use? Please comment on this post or visit http://futurecase.wordpress.com/ 

I’m currently in the process of wrapping up my paper about Flickr the Commons. Retrieving a large dataset really has been beneficial in regards to my research. I’m not going to blog any spoilers but it is fun to look at the data especially in regard to the location of the Flickr Community members. To get a better understanding who contributes to the Commons we analyzed 167,871 accounts. This was the total amount of accounts who actively did something with the content of the institutions. One of the more interesting things was to see if we could determine the users locations and see which countries participate more.

Monitoring activities on the web is not new or unique. You have probably heard of Google Analytics (GA), a service that allows to monitor the traffic on a website. Nice graphics and tables show how many people have visited a particular page, where they come from, how long they stay on a page, and so on. This gives a certain impression of the success of a website.