Beautiful pictures of the Prinsentuin

Hello everyone,

This time we are going to focus on the Prinsentuin. A beautiful garden near to the Martinitoren and Martinikerk which is especially in spring a beautiful place to visit.

This article will touch upon a research that has been conducted to investigate whether the amount of existing geolocated photographs posted to the online photo-sharing website flickr is able to reveal where people go to. ¹ Geolocated photographs are photographs that are tagged together with a location, so that you know exactly where the picture is taken. They investigated on a worldwide scale which locations where tagged the most often and therefore, the most popular to go to. Despite that this research is still far from perfect, I found it striking that they were now doing research based on Flickr, an app on a mobile phone! This a very good example of web 2.0, social media is functioning in multiple and different ways than before!

Since I was inspired by their research, I became curious about Flickr and its photographs of the Prinsentuin. I have never visited the Prinsentuin before and during my visit in the winter, everything was not growing so there was not a lot of beautifulness to see. When I was searching on Flickr for the Prinsentuin I saw beautiful pictures and I need to show them.

You can see how many faves and comments the picture has and in this one you see the geotag! I like the flower very much since it’s almost my name MelissA haha.

I am triggered by the research which has been done and I like the idea of using social media as a foundation for data collection. I was surprised by the fact of the amount of photos on Flickr of the Prinsentuin but this is a good sign for the popularity of the Prinsentuin.

Hope to see you next time again,

Melisse

I visited some years ago a garden as well and there I found the match with my name! It's a kind of tea.

References:
1. Wood, S., Guerry, A., Silver, J., & Lacayo, M. (2013). Using social media to quantify nature-based tourism and recreation. Scientific Reports , 12-21.

Groninger Museum is sold out!

Hello everybody,

I have visited the Groninger Museum and I want to consider the social media of Groninger Museum.

The Groninger Museum offers several things such as collections that deal with the history of Groningen, atelier and exposures. At the moment there is an very popular exposure of David Bowie which immediately caught my attention when I visited the Groninger Museum. This was the first time I saw huge posters promoting an activity for themselves which is in my idea a good way to get attention of people. Likewise, the exposures for 28, 29 and 30 December are sold out, so this indicates the popularity of the exposures.

Also, on Facebook it is clear that Groninger museum is very popular! It has 12105 likes and is very active on Facebook. It posts daily updates on the David Bowie exposure and this is a good way to maintain relationships with the public. This is the same for Twitter with 69900 followers, this is clearly more than for example the Martinitoren.

The Groninger Museum is a very modern museum due to the design of the building. The building is very colourful and weirdly shaped. The website is colourful as well and very informative for people who don’t know what to expect from the Groninger Museum since it offers a variety of activities. Furthermore, the website refers to all their social media which include Tripadvisor, Vimeo and Zoover as well!

I find it surprising that they’re actively involved in a range of different social media, but this is actually how one should deal with the opportunities that it gets! The Groninger Museum does a very good job considering the supplier side of social media. They actively post on a lot different pages and media, and people post good reviews on popular sites like Zoover and Tripadvisor, which Groninger Museum refers to on their website.

I hope you enjoyed reading,


Kind regards

Melisse

In a museum in Denmark a long time ago haha.

Stadspark Camping, would you stay over there?

Hello everybody,

Today I’m going to discuss the stadspark camping. I always used to go on vacation for 2 weeks together with my family and we always stayed with a caravan on a camping. So I’m an expert on the field of what attractive is for children and what isn’t.

Camping Stadspark is for tourists not comparable with for example Hotel Prinsenhof, so we are looking to a totally different branche of people. These people have probably a lower budget and will be pickier about choosing a camping. Therefore, for Camping Stadspark it’s even more important to have a good image on the internet.  A dutch site called Zoover.nl is the website for people to give ratings and post comments. On zoover.nl camping stadspark has an average score of 7.5 which I find decent. It also has only 13 reviews, which I find low compared with more popular campings where I have been such as de Molenhof and de Kleine Wolf, they approximately have 700 reviews.

Considering their social media pages, they are doing ‘better’. Although they are closed at the moment, they still post actively on Facebook. Also, on Twitter there are occasionally some tweets. On Facebook they also have a rating of 5 stars out of 5. However, there are only 4 people who voted.

Camping Stadspark has also their own website. I find this a clear website with sufficient information. They also refer to other tourist attractions like the Martinitoren, Noorderplantsoen and Groninger Museum because they are situated closely to these attractions. This is very smart to attract more tourists.

In conclusion I can say that Camping Stadspark isn’t very known by a lot of people, therefore it has not a lot of ratings on Zoover.nl. However, they do sufficient in terms of social media to attract tourists. Despite this, they could promote more to review and vote for them on popular review sites.

Kind regards,

Melisse

Our beautiful caravan! 

The future of social media and tourism

Hello everybody,

Today I want to have a discussion on social media and tourism and its future. On my blog I have investigated for 6 tourist attractions their social media usage. However, will social media last longer? And why?

Well for suppliers it may be clear, it’s just a very quick way to promote yourself and doesn’t cost a lot of money. Considering the consumer side, there have been huge changes due to Web 2.0 as I have mentioned earlier. There has been done more research that investigates the intention to use social media as a tourist and their conclusion is crystal clear. Sharing photos and videos, blogging, using podcasts and reviewing and rating to enhance the touristic experience is becoming normal and is defined as Travel 2.0. ¹ The main reason for using social media is the benefits such as functional, psychological and hedonic, and social, that you perceive when using social media. Suppliers should listen to the consumers to in cooperate their ideas and to fulfil their needs. This will in order increase the tourists’ utility. Similarly, suppliers can enhance the perceived social benefits by offering interconnectivity, by participating in the conversation and managing fans and followers. Additionally, they should give the consumers possibility to use in social media. Additionally, the costs of using social media don’t impact the willingness to use social media. This is an important finding, since this indicates that consumers find the benefits more important than the costs for using social media.

In conclusion, I can say that social media and tourism will continue. It’s clear that consumers and suppliers both benefit from engaging in social media. Therefore, it’s important that suppliers will keep on improving with providing the consumers the things they need and want in order to keep on engaging in social media.

See you the next time,

Melisse

I'm flying on top of the world in South-Africa in Capetown!













Reference:
1. Parra-Lopéz, E., Bulchand-Gidumalb, J., Gutiérrez-Tañoa, D., & Díaz-Armasa, R. (2011). Intentions to use social media in organizing and taking vacation trips. Web 2.0 in Travel and Tourism: Empowering and Changing the Role of Travelers, 27(2), 640-654.

Goodbye readers!

Goodbye readers!

This will be already my last blogpost. In this blogpost I will give an overview of my 6 different visits and its different usages of social media. Furthermore, I will give an conclusion with an eye on the objectives that I have stated beforehand.

I have visited the Martinitoren, het Noorderplantsoen, de Prinsentuin, Hotel Prinsenhof, Stadspark Camping and Groninger Museum. I enjoyed looking to all these tourist attractions from a different angle than I normally would do. Each attractions used social media in different ways and I will discuss this shortly in the following section.

The first objective was to find out if social media is an effective tool to attract consumers. I would say that it’s definitely effective, evidence is given by Groninger Museum and research has multiple times revealed that interaction between suppliers and consumers enhances the touristic experience for consumers and therefore sales for suppliers. However, still not all the tourist attraction optimally use social media to attract consumers such as the Martinitoren.

The second objective was to investigate whether the usage of consumers impacts the popularity of tourist attractions. This is of course hard to say, however Hotel Prinsenhof, de Prinsentuin, Groninger Museum all had a lot of positive reactions and feedback on the internet and this will definitely have influence on tourists.

Finally, the last objective was to find out whether the tourist attractions put somehow attention on their social media. This was not as evident as I expected. Groninger Museum had big posters, het Noorderplantsoen some signs and de Prinsenhof had an recognition sign of a good quality hotel.

So how would I define the link between tourism and social media in Groningen? In Groningen there is definitely interaction between consumers and suppliers via social media. However, this could be expanded very much, by more interaction which will increase the utility of consumers. So I hope that in Groningen social media will be seen as an effective tool to interact with consumers and will be playing a bigger role in the future.

I hope you enjoyed reading my blog, I hoped you enjoyed seeing my personal photos, in any case: I enjoyed writing this blog!

Melisse

Selfie-time in Istanbul! :)

Noorderplantsoen, still involved with social media?

Hey readers,

Here I’m again! This time I want to discuss the well-known Noorderplantsoen! I have cycled through the Noorderplantsoen with my goPro and made a short-movie to introduce the Noorderplantsoen.

Especially for the Noorderplantsoen I was curious about the usage of social media and if it referred to their social media, since the Noorderplantsoen seems not to need any of these, because who isn’t familiar with Noorderplantsoen?

Indeed, when visiting Noorderplantsoen I didn’t immediately see something that referred to social media! However, when cycling through the Noorderplantsoen I saw a sign with goodbye, and then the website of Noorderplantsoen. Later, I came across an almost identical sign with welcome.

I have investigated their website and actually it surprised me. They actively post on their website with news and other articles that are related with Noorderplantsoen. Additionally, they are sending news letters to everyone who signs up and they also regularly post tweets on Twitter.

Twitter is an interactive platform which also enables people to tweet about Noorderplantsoen. I searched for the tag #Noorderplantsoen and I came across for example this.

This tweet entailed a picture which promotes the movie about Noorderplantsoen. It’s a documentary about the Noorderplantsoen which takes place in a café.

Furthermore, I came across a lot of people tweeting photos which they have shot in Noorderplants and which they want to share.

Additionally, the account of Noorderplantsoen called @Plantsoenbuurt retweets which is equivalent to shares a lot of these tweets and in this way everybody keeps track on all the news around Noorderplantsoen. Eventually, they have 1098 followers.

So I would say, that Noorderplantsoen is quite active on social media and also interacting to the consumers to let them know what is still possible in Noorderplantsoen. Eventhough, it might seem to be unnecessary, I think this is a good way to keep people remembering that the Noorderplantsoen remains beautifull to visit!

See you next time,

Melisse

Not a similar park as the Noorderplantsoen, but still the idea is the same! I have visited this in Chenzhou which is in China. 

Martinitoren, a touristic place itself

Dear followers,

In this article we’re going to talk about the Martinitoren! I have to admit, that I have never climbed the Martinitoren, so maybe I should feel a little bit ashamed. However, I will be writing about the Martinitoren’s social media! Because one of the first things tourists would like to see in Groningen is the Martinitoren, so is social media still relevant?

My visit to the Martinitoren was very short, since you needed to pay when you wanted to enter the Martinitoren. I wanted to make a picture of the Martinitoren, but due to its height it was very difficult to see the Martinitoren in one shot! Therefore, I made a short movie.

I definitely had to search for things that could refer to social media, and in the end I came to the conclusion that there was just nothing that was referring to their web page or other social media. When searching on the internet, there’s indeed no website specifically for the Martinitoren. Kind of strange, but probably this could be explained by the fact that it’s part of the Martinikerk. In fact, I was able to find something that referred to the website of the Martinikerk. 

This QR-code is for the people with a smart phone convenient to use, however for the elderly this will be useless. On the website, I had to search for a while before I could find the part on the Martinitoren. Additionally, when considering the other social media, I could not find very active usage. The twitter page was lastly used in 2013 and Facebook posts no messages. Despite this, on Facebook it has a lot of positive ratings and people post photos on Facebook located at the Martinitoren are also shown. However, in short I would say that the Martinitoren is just very popular and does not put a lot of emphasize on social media to increase its visitors. 

Hope you enjoyed this article, 

Melisse 

Although I haven't climbed the Martinitoren, I have climbed (part of) the Chinese wall!