Digital Engagement Conference: A Road Map for the Future of Festivals, July 9‐11 2014, Bournemouth University, Talbot Campus, Poole, Dorset, United Kingdom

• Published in: Journal of Tourism Futures Vol. 1; no. 2; pp. 162 - 166
• Main Authors: Ferdinand, Nicole, Tucker, Janelle
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bingley Emerald Group Publishing Limited 16.03.2015; Emerald Publishing
• Subjects: Audiences; Celebrities; Conferences; Ethnography; Festivals; Futures; Marketing; Social activism; Social network analysis; Social networks; Tourism
• ISSN: 2055-5911; 2055-592X
• DOI: 10.1108/JTF-12-2014-0012

The academic and also professional communities attached to festivals and events have little understanding of the interactions of these online communities and their impacts. [...]this conference was devised as a means of exploring the issues that arise when the digital world and the live experiences of events and festivals collide (Williams, 2014). Dr Robin Croft, Reader in Marketing at the University of Bedfordshire was the keynote speaker on the opening day of the conference and provided a fitting start to the discussion around digital engagement by presenting a Virtual Engagement Typology, which builds on Croft's (2013) ethnographic research into Web 2.0., which explores his experiences in a number of social media platforms. Dr Heather Skinner, a tourism consultant in Corfu, Greece presented Destination Engagement and Destination Event Strategy and highlighted the problems of developing event marketing strategies which include digital engagement in societies in which social media usage is not as pervasive as in other European countries. Daly recommended that they should not wait passively for what technology experts develop and that like science fictions writers of the past they should be dreaming up the technologies they would like to see in the future. 11 July 2014 – closing: first steps towards the future of festivals The closing day started with a presentation from Dr Nigel Williams from his paper Social Media and Festivals as Destination Marketing Tools: A Study on Twitter Conversations, which represented the first major research output to come out of the FestIM project.