social media promoting tourism

My media management degree from Sweden was full of fascinating experiences but the most amazing learning during my master's program was the online internship with Action Global Dubai office. The duration for this internship was six months commencing in January 2010. During this period I worked on my master's thesis which was 'Promoting Tourism in Abu Dhabi using Social Media'. This captivating proposal was offered by Meredith Carson, Head of Digital Media at Dubai office. I had always been fascinated by the culture, life style and geographical location of United Arab Emirates. Although it is not large country by land area but the cultural mix offered by this destination is one of a kind. Their renowned luxury lifestyle and warm hospitality had always been a major attraction for the tourists.




When Meredith Carson recommended this research topic I conducted initial study and realized that long established rule of promoting tourism through traditional media is slimming down. Now clients prefer to collect information online from various interactive webpages and networks according to their needs rather than driving to a tour operator or agency. By using these social communities customer not only forms informational networks but social networks are also developed. These platforms allow potential tourists to collect desired knowledge from several sources as well as take advantage of other people’s experience.



But thinking on the line that how would social media be successful in exploiting the key strengths of Abu Dhabi, I figured out that there are more boon than I can think of. First of all it reduces the workload for tourism promoting companies as their burden is shared by users who can provide desired information to the potential consumers and secondly the facts and data provided by users to other consumers also strengthen customer’s degree of trust due to shared consciousness and a sense of moral responsibility.



Now the question under consideration was that what information do consumers look for? What is the road map of customers purchasing this service and what value do they assign to their priorities for selecting a destination? These perspectives were then taken into account but before that I had to define the target audience and methodology to be used in the study. According to Arabian B, the visitors from developed countries have been the potential clients therefore I decided to focus on European countries. For the methods section I selected both, qualitative and quantitative methods.



After having all these parameters set now was time to practically start my thesis. As I was investigating from the industry’s perspective first thing that I had to prove was that 21st century networked (Internet/social media) information economy was more influential than 20th century industrial (traditional mass media) information economy.



To demonstrate this I commenced by taking McGuire’s Information Processing Paradigm into consideration. In this section a comparison study was conducted concentrating on the variables of the McGuire’s Information Processing paradigm.