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@Spain is different. Co-branding strategies between Spanish national and regional DMOs on Twitter

Frederic Guerrero-Solé

José Fernández-Cavia

Department of Communication

Communication, Advertising & Society Research Group

UNICA Research Group

Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain

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Agenda

• Introduction

• Data Collection and Method

• Analysis and Evaluation results

• Conclusions

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Introduction

Levels of territory as Russian dollsL1. The national brand SpainL2. 17 regional brands (autonomous communities)L3. The provinces and islands (territories) and the cities

Twitter into DMOs’ Communication Strategy

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Objective and RQsRQ1a: What is the activity of the Spanish State-level DMO

account?

RQ1b: To what extent Spain’s activity is related to the diffusion of information published by the Autonomous Communities?

RQ2: To what extent the Autonomous Community-level DMOs are related to the diffusion of information published by Spain?

RQ3: To what extent Autonomous Communities mention Spain or diffuse the information where Spain has been mentioned?

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SampleAnalysis of the official Twitter profiles of 17 Spanish destination brands:

@viveandalucia

@asturiasturismo

@turismebalears

@aragonturismo

@canarias_es

@cant_infinita

@catexperience

@Turgalicia

@Extremadura_tur

@CyLesVida

@turismoclm

@TurismoMadrid @c_valenciana

@murciaturistica

 @lariojaturismo

@TurismoNavarra

@i_Euskadi

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Method and Data

Collected

(1)the original tweets posted by Spain;

(2)the retweets of messages posted by Spain;

(3)the original tweets where Spain was mentioned; and

(4)the retweets where Spain was mentioned.

Data Collection Period: from 1st January to 30th June 2014

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Method and Data

Dataset: N= 127,337 posts

NT= 22,728 (3,124 posted by @Spain)

NR= 104,609 (77,593 to @Spain)

Exported the dataset to a customized database that calculates: activity, retweets and mentions of all those users

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Distribution of tweets and retweets collected by date

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ResultsTable 2. Number of times Spain mentions the Communities.

Autonomous Community MC Andalusia 41 Aragon 29 Asturias 0 Balearic Islands 8 Canary Islands 27 Cantabria 17 Castilia-La Mancha 20 Castilia León 54 Catalonia 13 Extremadura 25 Galicia 41 La Rioja 5 Madrid 58 Navarra 22 Basque Country 18 Murcia 15 Valencia 18

Of the 3,124 messages posted by Spain, in 411 the user Spain mentioned any of the Community users, the 13.16% of the total.

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Co-branding strategies

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Discussion and conclusions • The Spanish NTO official tourism account on Twitter has a good

level of activity, with 3,124 messages posted in the six months analysed. But regarding to the times the NTO account mentions the regional accounts, results are uneven.

• Spain diffuses information about the Communities, and the Communities diffuse information about Spain. However, this mutual contribution is not balanced.

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Discussion and conclusions

• Some regional accounts (especially Castilia-La Mancha, Castilia León, Basque Country and Galicia) are frequently mentioned by Spain but, in their turn, they seldom –or never- mention Spain.

• We also found that the Communities that appeared together with Spain were Andalusia, Madrid, Canary Islands, Castilia León and Aragon. We may note that there were certain communities that practically do not contribute to the conversation around Spain. In particular, Asturias, La Rioja and the Balearic Islands.

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Discussion and conclusions • Obviously, a future work should consider to what extent these

strategies respond to mutual collaboration and agreement, to political alliances or discrepancies or have a spontaneous nature.

• Apart from the Communities, we also found that there are many other users related or not to Tourism activities (media, celebrities, museums) that participated in the conversation around Spain. Some of them were more influential than the State-level account itself. Thus, we have to consider that tourism national brands in Twitter are also influenced by those users that consciously or not mention it in their tweets.

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ThanksFrederic Guerrero-Solé

@guerrerosolef

José Fernández-Cavia

Universitat Pompeu Fabra de Barcelona