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

Digital Engagement Conference: A Road Map for the Future of Festivals, July 9-11 2014, Bournemouth University, Talbot Campus, Poole, Dorset, United Kingdom Nicole Ferdinand Janelle Tucker Article information: To cite this document: Nicole Ferdinand Janelle Tucker , (2015),"Digital Engagement Conference: A Road Map for the Future of Festivals, July 9-11 2014, Bournemouth University, Talbot Campus, Poole, Dorset, United Kingdom", Journal of Tourism Futures, Vol. 1 Iss 2 pp. 162 166 Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JTF-12-2014-0012

recognize that the balance of power has shifted from the owners of events to their audiences because virtual engagement is increasingly blurring the boundaries between audiences, performers and producers.Festival organizers must therefore develop strategies to respond to and shape the stories being told about their events online (Figure 1).Aminu Bello, a doctoral candidate at the University of Bedfordshire through a structured conversation with conference attendees highlighted possible lessons that could be learned from Virgin Atlantic, a consumer brand perceived to be the epitome of customer orientation.Bello shared with the audience his experiences which were acquired first through netnography and then through ethnography.He explained that traditional marketing and branding still has a role to play because even with a youth-oriented brand such as Virgin Atlantic, a significant proportion of customers are not digital natives, as described by Prensky (2001).However, he did emphasize that festival organizers like other businesses have no choice but to engage with the digital environment as digital engagement is here to stay.Bellow suggested that the challenge in the future will be to further digitize the customer experience.
attendees and emphasize freedom of expression and that celebrity endorsement of social causes needed to be deployed carefully.
10 July 2014 -day two: digital engagement and the future of festivals The second day of the conference started with a keynote from Professor of Scenario Planning, Dr Albert Postma of the European Tourism Futures Institute.His presentation on the Digital Futures of Events utilized the scenario planning process to predict the future of events.Scenario planning uses key uncertainties as a starting point to develop multiple versions of the future.For festivals Postma highlighted the mode of attendance and nature of audience engagement as key drivers of uncertainty.He then presented four contemporary festivals which provide a glimpse of some possible future types of events.These were: the Lowlands Festival, characterized by a large-scale, spectator-type and local audience; Oerol, described as local and small-scale with a strong emphasis on co-creation; Hatsun Miku, a large spectator event which combines virtual and live attendance and uses technologies such as augmented reality and holographic techniques to enhance the viewing experience of the audience and the Xbox 720 IllumiRoom shown at CES Festival 2013, which showed the possibilities of virtual reality and interactions amongst participants engaged in online activities (Figure 2).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.Skinner recommends that those engaged in developing digital event market strategies need to take a step back from focusing on the technology and the various social media platforms and get in touch with the needs of festival organizers and attendees.Dr Herbert Daly, Senior Lecturer in Computing at the University of Bedfordshire in a similar vein encouraged conference attendees to take a step backwards to remember the source of inspiration for the technologies that facilitate digital engagement.Daly reminded the audience that many of the technologies being used today were first dreamt up by science fiction writers.For example, William Gibson's (1984) Nueromancer is the origin 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.It is an exploratory study focused on the Twitter conversations about the Bournemouth Air Festival 2013.Findings revealed that festival organizers and their partners have yet to achieve significant online engagement from Twitter users.The traffic generated on Twitter about the festival showed a "broadcast" pattern in which a few official stakeholders shaped the conversation and content, indicating that the social media platform was being used like traditional media outlets and was limited to mainly distributing official content about the air show.
Dr Alexandra Ott, Learning Technologist at Bournemouth University delivered the final presentation of the conference which focused on the development of the Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs) for the FestIM project.She demonstrated the Xerte Online Toolkit developed by University of Nottingham, which was used extensively in the development of the RLOs.The RLOs included basic lessons such as getting a research project started and an explanation of the SNA approach used by the FestIM project.
Dr Nigel Williams closed the conference by briefly talking through the research gaps highlighted by the conference which would form the basis of the road map for the future of festivals and digital engagement.These gaps included: specific tools and techniques for smaller festival organizations, how online conversation about festivals affect what happens at the live festival sites and opportunities and issues surrounding the integration of personal, public, social and sensor data.

Figure 2
Figure 2 Future scenarios for festivals