The Festival Impact Monitor program

1. Festival Impact Monitor
Nwilliams@bournemouth.ac.uk
Nferdinand@bournemouth.ac.uk
www.bournemouth.ac.uk

2. Why this process?
• Benchmark Events and Festivals social
media engagement
• Understand the impact of hallmark events
and festivals using social media
• Understand the nature of audiences at
Festivals and Events
www.bournemouth.ac.uk

3. FestIM
www.bournemouth.ac.uk
FestIM
Evaluation
Methodology
Reusable
Learning
Objects
Trained
Individuals

4. Work to date
• UK Festivals and
Events
• Birmingham Mela 2013
• Bournemouth Air show 2013
• Edinburgh Fringe 2013
• Glastonbury 2013, 2014
• Luton Carnival (2012,2013,
2014)
• Notting Hill Carnival
(2012&2013)
• Ponty’s Big Weekend 2013
www.bournemouth.ac.uk
• International Festivals
• Amsterdam Dance Event 2013
• St Patricks Day 2014
• Calabar Festival 2013
• Nice Carnival 2014
• Trinidad Carnival 2013, 2014

5. Current Event Management
Research
• The events industry is established
• Expositions,
• Sport marketing
• Concert productions,
• However, still new as an academic field of
study and a research topic ( Mair and
Whitford 2013)
www.bournemouth.ac.uk

6. Current Event
Management Work
• Impact and evaluation studies including forecasting
assessing and evaluating economic and non economic
impact such as social development, community
structure, social capital, group and place identity
• Motivation and perceptions of visitors and residents
• Environmental studies. Sustainability and greening
• Political studies. Power and politics relationships
between governments, event organizers and
communities
• Management studies: Festival management,
destination management, stakeholders, marketing,
CSR and competition
www.bournemouth.ac.uk

7. Existing Event
Management Research
Methods
• Most research based on single or a few cases, generally within the same
culture and environment as the researcher. (Getz 2010)
• Convenience Samples
• Structural Equation Modelling
• Few whole-population studies have been attempted in the festivals and
events sectors.
• Little research on actual experiences
• Few Cross-cultural comparisons of festivals
www.bournemouth.ac.uk

8. Non Economic Impact
Evaluation Approaches
Evaluation
Method
www.bournemouth.ac.uk
Conventional
Usage
Strengths Possible
Limitations
Survey Stakeholder
analysis,
Participant
Motivation
Low cost,
Multiple options for
distribution
Ignore segments of
population, Relatively
low response rates
Focus
Group
Explore attitudes,
beliefs and
sentiments
Broad exploration
of issues
Difficult to determine
validity of findings,
Relatively expensive
Interviews “” Rich data, Broad
exploration of
issues
Relatively expensive,
Time consuming
Content
Analysis
Value and
sentiment of media
coverage
Wide coverage
and Deep
exploration
Resource intensive,
Relatively slow

9. Example: Notting Hill
Carnival
www.bournemouth.ac.uk

10. Emergence of Online
Computer Media Interaction
• Changes in information technology and
devices enable new forms of interaction
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Social network sites
• Virtual Communities
• Community of interest
• Common interest
• Other social or emotional ties may not be
necessary
www.bournemouth.ac.uk

11. Social Media data has
been used to predict
• Purchases
• Illness
• Disaster relief efforts
• Stock market
• Why not events?
www.bournemouth.ac.uk

12. Online Event research
• Events increasingly host a hybrid
virtual/physical community
• Volume of data
• Census approach vs Sampling
• Authentic (can be sent from festival site)
• Low cost to process
• Supports comparison/benchmarking
• Enables open research: Methods and data
can be made accessible for review
www.bournemouth.ac.uk

13. Researching Online
Communities
Researcher
Presence
www.bournemouth.ac.uk
Quantitative Qualitative
Obtrusive/ Reactive Online surveys Online interviews
Online lab experiments Online focus groups
Online field research
Unobtrusive/ Non
Reactive
Quantitative web
content analysis
Qualitative web
content analysis
Social Media network
analysis
Online field
experiments
Online natural
experiments

14. www.bournemouth.ac.uk
Underlying topic/
interest communities
Statistical Text
Analysis
Sentiment (Number
of positive and
negative words)
Topic Content
Social Media
Narratives + User
Profiles
Social Network
Analysis by user
location and topic

15. Social network
perspective
• Emphasis on structure of social relations
• Relationships are unit of analysis
• Interdependence of actors
www.bournemouth.ac.uk

16. Extracting relationships
from Social Media
• Follows
• Mentions
• Retweets
Person
A
www.bournemouth.ac.uk
Person
B
Person
C
Person A follows
Person B
Person C mentions
Person B in tweet
Person C comments on
Person B’s Facebook
Post
A B C
Social network: Directed, unweighted graph

17. Real World Networks
• Scale Free
• Distribution of connections may follow a power
law
• Preferential attachment
• Form subgroups with a specific demographic or
topic focus
• These properties can be used to identify
the stakeholder groupings in online event
conversations
www.bournemouth.ac.uk

18. Statistical Text Analysis
• Use statistics to add a numerical
dimension to unstructured text
• Analyze content of conversations in
stakeholder groupings
• Understand the topics of conversations
in online stakeholder groupings
www.bournemouth.ac.uk

19. Online Event
Classification
• Size (volume of tweets)
• Span (pattern of topic engagement)
• Scope (Geographic range of online
participants )
www.bournemouth.ac.uk

20. Size: Large Virtual Audience > 100,000 interactions
Luton Carnival
www.bournemouth.ac.uk
(2013)
Amsterdam
Dance Event
2013
Glastonbury
2013
Edinburgh Fringe
2013
Notting Hill
Carnival
2012/2013
Birmingham
Mela 2013
Ponty’s Big
Weekend
2013
Bournemouth
Air Show
(2013)
Luton Carnival
(2012)
Large Live
Audience
>250,000
(Relatively)
Small Live
Audience
< 50,000
Small Virtual Audience < 10,000 interactions

21. Span: Multiple distinct topic communities
Luton Carnival
www.bournemouth.ac.uk
(2013)
Edinburgh Fringe
2013
Notting Hill
Carnival
2012/2013
Birmingham Mela
2013
Ponty’s Big
Weekend 2013
Amsterdam
Dance Event 2013
Bournemouth Air
Show (2013)
Luton Carnival
(2012)
Glastonbury 2013
Large Live
Audience
>250,000
(Relatively)
Small Live
Audience
< 50,000
Small Span of few large topic communities

22. Scope: Global Presence
www.bournemouth.ac.uk
Amsterdam
Dance Event
2013
Glastonbury
2013
Edinburgh Fringe
2013
Notting Hill
Carnival
2012/2013
Luton Carnival
(2013)
Birmingham
Mela 2013
Ponty’s Big
Weekend 2013
Bournemouth
Air Show (2013)
Luton Carnival
(2012)
Large Live
Audience
>250,000
(Relatively)
Small Live
Audience
< 50,000
Local Presence

23. Example 1: Love Luton
Festival 2012
www.bournemouth.ac.uk

24. Example 2: Notting
Hill Carnival 2013
• Social network analysis was used to
identify the key online communities for the
Notting Hill carnival
• Overall
• 5081 groups, 31,363 twitter user accounts
• 30 major subgroups within community
• High degree of modularity in network. This
means that individuals tend to speak to
members within the group far more than they
speak to members outside the group
www.bournemouth.ac.uk

25. Group
Number
Number
of
Members
Description Topics Discussed
1 1861 International Carnival Nation. Members come from all over
the world and participate in Carnivals in the Caribbean, US,
UK and Europe
www.bournemouth.ac.uk
Traditional carnival arts of
Steelpan, Calypso, Masquerade
2 1309 London Carnival Nation. Festival performers and fans from
the London Area
Traditional carnival arts of
Steelpan, Calypso, Masquerade
3 1056 Young Traditional Carnival Performers and Fans. Based in
London Area, university/college students
Traditional carnival arts of
Steelpan, Calypso, Masquerade
4 1034 Soundsystem and Reggae Fans. Range of age groups,
primarily London based with a few members in other parts of
the UK, Jamaica and Europe
Reggae Music, Sound Systems
5 1002 African Diaspora. Carnival participants from Ghana and
NIgeria
Afrobeats Music, Contemporary
African Music and Performers
6 864 Online media masters, coverage of Notting Hill Carnival by
blogs and online media companies
Soundsystems, Reggage,
Traditional Carnival Arts, Festival
Program, Transport
7 671 Media Coverage from Traditional Outlets Soundsystems, Reggage,
Traditional Carnival Arts, Festival
Program, Transport
8 653 Highly engaged online individuals. Young individuals (not
companies)
Visual and viral content of phots
and videos
9 596 Political and intellectual twitter users. Academics and
activists who see the carnival as a political platform
Ethnic issues, Policing, History
10 569 Club Promoters Club nights and parties affiliated
with Notting Hill Carnival

26. Analysis
• Carnival has an international online presence
with interactions from all over the world
• Overall network displays an egalitarian
structure:
• No overly dominant account. Largest group is
only 5% of overall accounts
• Top 5 Groups are fairly similar in size
• Diverse range of topics discussed
• Distinct subgroupings based on
demographics/interests
www.bournemouth.ac.uk

27. Challenges/Trends
• 2012 to 2013: Shift to Mobile
• Smartphone saturation is approaching
• Social media platform growth rates slowing
• Online interactions are incorporating visual
elements
• Cost of data collection/analysis is falling
• 2012: Manual
• 2014: Many companies offering on demand
access to streaming data, several offering
historical access
www.bournemouth.ac.uk

28. References
Boyd, D., Golder S. & Lotan, G. Tweet, tweet, retweet: Conversational aspects of retweeting on twitter. System
Sciences (HICSS), 2010 43rd Hawaii International Conference on, 2010. IEEE, 1-10.
Borgatti, S. P., & Foster, P. C. (2003). The Network Paradigm in Organizational Research: A Review and
Typology. Journal of Management, 29(6), 991–1013.
Burnett, C. 2001. Social Impact Assessment and Sport Development: Social Spin-Offs of the Australia-South
Africa Junior Sport Programme. International Review for the sociology of Sport, 36, 41-57.
Carrington, P. J., Scott, J. & Wasserman, S. 2005. Models and methods in social network analysis, Cambridge
university press.
Castillio, C., Mendoza, M. & Poblete, B. Information credibility on twitter. Proceedings of the 20th international
conference on World wide web, 2011. ACM, 675-684.
Clauset, A., Newman, M. E. J., & Moore, C. (2004). Finding community structure in very large networks. Physical
Review E, 70(6), 066111.
Crompton, J. L., & McKay, S. L. (1997). Motives of visitors attending festival events. Annals of Tourism
Research, 24(2), 425–439.
Getz, D. (2005). Event Management and Event Tourism. Cognizant Communication Corporation.
Getz, D. 2010, The Nature and Scope of Festival Studies, International Journal of Event Management Research
5(1)2010
Godes, D., & Mayzlin, D. (2004). Using Online Conversations to Study Word-of-Mouth Communication.
Marketing Science, 23(4), 545–560.
Hansen, Derek, Ben Shneiderman, and Marc A. Smith. Analyzing social media networks with NodeXL: Insights
from a connected world. Morgan Kaufmann, 2010.
Kwak, H., Lee, C., Park, H., & Moon, S. (2010, April). What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?. In
Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web (pp. 591-600). ACM.
www.bournemouth.ac.uk

29. References
Mair, J. & Whitford, M. (2013) "An exploration of events research: event topics, themes and emerging trends",
International Journal of Event and Festival Management, Vol. 4 I 1, pp.6 – 30
Rollins, R. & Delamre, T. 2007. Measuring the social impact of festivals. Annals of Tourism Research, 34, 805-808.
Sacha, R., Deborah, E. & Katie, S. 2005. Methodological considerations in pretesting social impact questionnaires:
Reporting on the use of focus groups.
Smith, A. 2009. Spreading the positive effects of major events to peripheral areas. Journal of Policy Research in
Tourism, Leisure and Events, 1, 231-246.
Stone, Philip J. "Thematic text analysis: New agendas for analyzing text content." Text analysis for the social sciences:
Methods for drawing statistical inferences from texts and transcripts (1997): 35-54.
www.bournemouth.ac.uk