Assessing the role of social media in tourism recovery in tsunami-hit coastal areas in Tohoku, Japan

Abstract

Social media have become increasingly popular. However, there has been little investigation on how to effectively mobilize this newly emerging tool to promote tourism in rural areas. The aims of this article are twofold. First, among social media, we explore the role of Twitter for tourism promotion, especially by focusing on the recovery process of tourism in a rural area affected by the huge earthquake and tsunami, Magnitude 9.0, which hit eastern Japan in March 2011. Second, to approach the first purpose, we compare two types of tourism: ordinary tourism and ‘volunteer tourism’. As to the latter, a massive number of volunteers came to these areas to help in the recovery work from the devastation such as removing debris and helping evacuees rehabilitate their lives in Iwate prefecture. We employed a text-mining method to find keywords used in the official Twitter account issued by the Iwate Prefectural government and time-series regression models to identify factors that promote the two types of tourism. Data were collected using official statistics on incoming numbers of ordinary tourists and volunteer tourists. Tweeted information was provided by Iwate Prefecture. The results revealed that, first, tweeted information on cultural and natural heritage had a positive relationship with the number of incoming tourists while information on disaster-related words had negative effects. In contrast, second, tweeted information on tourism resources worked negatively toward the number of volunteer tourists while that on rehabilitation/reconstruction and on volunteers worked positively. Consequently, it is important to design support measures that enable the local tourism sector to attract incoming tourists after a drop-in volunteer tourism as reconstruction of the disaster area progresses. In this context, our results suggest how to effectively utilize Twitter for this purpose.

Social Media and Crisis Communication in Tourism and Hospitality

“…The literature examined how tourism organizations use social media for disaster recovery (Fukui and Ohe 2019) and crisis communication by hotels Liu et al 2015b;Liu et al 2019) and DMOs (Barbe et al , 2019. The effectiveness of crisis communication in these studies has more frequently been assessed using Coombs' (2007) Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT).…”

Global Citizens and World Heritage: Social Inclusion of Online Communities in Heritage Planning

“…A summary of the publications with the label of either "activated" or "both" could be seen in Table 1. Like the example of fire and flood as radical events shown in Section 1, a plenty of activation came as consequences of natural disasters (Fukui and Ohe, 2019;Park et al, 2019;Taecharungroj and Mathayomchan, 2019). However, activated public engagement on social media could also happen after political events (Chaabani et al, 2018;Claster et al, 2010;Monteiro et al, 2014), largescale cultural activities (Amato et al, 2016;Gabrielli et al, 2014;Vassakis et al, 2019;Williams et al, 2017), or even general daily events (Battiato et al, 2016;Campillo-Alhama and Martinez-Sala, 2019;Chianese et al, 2016;Barbagallo et al, 2012), therefore not necessarily negative, nor radical.…”

“…Researchers mainly used the content-based information (e.g., words, pictures), network structure (e.g., user interaction, connectivity, temporal dynamics) and contextual aspects (e.g., geo-location) from the social media platforms to draw their conclusions in activated scenarios (Aggarwal, 2011), mainly from Twitter due to its timeliness and low time lag for updates (Williams et al, 2017). Natural language processing tools such as sentiment analysis and topic models were applied to mine the public opinions of heritage properties triggered by events (Gabrielli et al, 2014;Taecharungroj and Mathayomchan, 2019;Monteiro et al, 2014;Fukui and Ohe, 2019;Claster et al, 2010;Chaabani et al, 2018), and graphs/networks were constructed to find out the community structures (Williams et al, 2017;Barbagallo et al, 2012), critical influencers (Barbagallo et al, 2012;Campillo-Alhama and Martinez-Sala, 2019), popular destinations (Gabrielli et al, 2014), and to make personalized recommendations (Amato et al, 2016;Battiato et al, 2016). However, none of the presented studies in Table 1 have applied or developed heritage-specific tools targeted at revealing cultural significance, i.e., values and attributes of heritage properties, which should become an important initial step for the proposed framework (Bai et al, 2021).…”

Effectiveness of social media marketing on enhancing performance: Evidence from a casual-dining restaurant setting

“…It is important to note that more marketers are shifting their focus from traditional media to SNSs to make their customers engaged in the development of their marketing mix (Hanna et al, 2011). Compared to traditional off-line marketing communication, social media marketing allows for more interactions with potential consumers and relies strongly on the Internet for communication (Fukui and Ohe, 2019; Gunter et al, 2019). One of the goals of marketers’ efforts in the context of social media or in online social interactions is to strengthen the level of customer engagement (Cvelbar et al, 2018; Davis Mersey et al, 2010).…”