Abstract
The social web is more than a technological innovation, it is a social innovation—it has changed the ways people and the business world interact and communicate. Social media has literally exploded as a category of online discourse where people create content, share it, bookmark it, and network. New business models, new structures, and new hierarchies in tourism companies have been the consequence of this transformation. The environment of tourism has been permanently impacted by social media.
The big question is—what will the future of social media be? We would like to address this question by two perspectives—an economic perspective and a social perspective—and key challenges we see in these two perspectives.
Economically, we saw that revenue flows in tourism were shifted by the social web. Previously, linear value chains turned into complex value networks because customers started to make their decisions increasingly depending on digital information and electronic communication. Social media has also become a new competitor in the production of tourism-related information for the Internet. Clients started acting without using classic intermediaries like travel agencies, but rather rely on user-generated content when it comes to decision making. This implies a crucial transformation in the consumption of tourism products. This increased transparency of products implies an enormous potential for modifying a market and its pricing policy.
Socially, customers received the same status in the communication process as the previous gatekeepers (such as TV, radio, newspapers) and also transmitters (such as companies, public institutions). Communication processes are no longer unidirectional but they are multidirectional between consumers, and between consumers and gatekeepers. Within the framework of the social web, processes take place that constitute a parallel universe, that is, traditional social boundaries are dissolved. In future, it will be necessary to investigate how these parallel universes correspond with real-world situations.
According to our view, there will be three key challenges that the social media industry is facing in the future:
Scaling and measurement. Measuring social media return on investment (ROI) is easier said than done. Every company will continue to struggle with measuring results and reporting ROI. New social constructs will be needed to measure social initiatives.
Governance (security and control). Companies now understand that anything that can and will be said about them on the Internet will be the good, the bad, and the ugly. Companies will need to respect user’s privacy on one hand and—as a business—understand to be completely transparent on the other hand. Because if you are not transparent, you will have trouble establishing trust with your users. So there will be a strong need for governance.
Culture (human resources). It will be a huge challenge for businesses to switch over to “social” business. All organizations will continually fall somewhere on a spectrum of being “open” or “closed,” meaning that they are either more transparent in what and with who they operate and collaborate or they hoard knowledge internally.
However, given these challenges, the digital and the physical worlds will be more highly connected in the future than ever before. And social media in the future will continuously dominate the ways we (humans) interact. Of course, no one knows what the final destination of social media will be, but to say it with the words of Manuel Castells: “if we don’t care about social media, social media will take care about us!”
The following Special Issue will address current developments and trends in social media in different settings and will contribute to the literature that has emerged around this topic. The published articles are original contributions, which were presented on the occasion of the “2011 Conference on Social Media in Hospitality and Tourism,” held on 21–22 October 2011 in Verona, Italy.