Do Social Media Influence Our Travel Decisions?

Associate Professor Ulrike Gretzel

From the success of social networking sites to the explosion in user-generated content, we have seen a dramatic shift in how consumers interact with the internet and with each other. Social media have transformed the way people communicate, search for information, make decisions, socialise, learn, and share experiences.  This also applies to consumer behaviour in travel and tourism. 

Growing numbers of travellers search and consume travel information created by other travellers for their travel planning and then share their experiences when they return from their trips. Given the experiential nature of tourism, the information created by other travellers is even more important and influential in the search and decision-making process than when considering other types of purchases. 

Over the past four years we have conducted a series of studies involving travellers with Internet access from around the world. We consistently find high levels of social media use for travel planning. 

Online travel reviews, such as the hotel reviews posted on TripAdvisor, are particularly popular sources of information and those who use them indicate that these traveller opinions greatly influence their accommodation choices. Activity choices and restaurant decisions are also increasingly affected by the opinions of review writers while decisions on where to travel are typically made before reviews are consulted. 

Other social media types such videos and podcasts are generally less influential, although gender and age differences come into play when looking at the influence of specific social media categories. 

Do travellers blindly trust the opinions of strangers?
Our research indicates that trust levels are very high and that a considerable number of people even prefer the opinions of unknown others over opinions of friends and relatives. However, many consumers are also aware of marketers posting reviews or paying professional review writers. They have therefore developed rather sophisticated strategies for evaluating whether they should take a posting into account or not. 

In general, if comments are too negative or too positive, travellers become suspicious. They are looking for balance and details and take subtle cues such as spelling and tone of writing into account. Experimental studies we conducted have also shown that individuals are pretty good at detecting false reviews, and this ability increases with the length of the review.

So like in the offline world, liars will only be able to influence travellers if they are brief. We also find personality differences, with individuals who exhibit neurotic tendencies being less trusting of social media and thus less influenced by them.

Do tourism marketers have to worry?
Our studies find that a majority of travellers think that social media contents are more up-to-date, more fun to read, more interesting, more relevant, more comprehensive, more specific and more helpful in making decisions than information provided by tourism marketers. However, that does not mean that marketers do no longer provide an important function. The travellers we surveyed actually trust social media content more if it is provided on official destination marketing websites.

This is a counter-intuitive finding but makes sense if you consider that destination marketers probably subject social media contents to a basic editorial process, or would at least comment on a posting if it provided false information.

In general, our research shows that tourism marketers can no longer ignore social media and have to carefully think about how to take advantage of social media marketing in order to exercise influence on travellers.

Social media are here to stay but their specific forms will evolve. Twitter and location-based social media applications like Foursquare and Gowalla are still in their infancy and Facebook continuously adds functions and changes its policies. It is important to monitor their impact on travel planning and behaviours at destinations, so that those who try to encourage and/or manage tourism to particular places can adjust their strategies.

Written by Associate Professor Ulrike Gretzel
The Institute for Innovation in Business and Social Research (IIBSoR)
Faculty of Commerce

Everything I need to know about my health is on TV – but most of it is wrong

Professor Sandra Jones, Director of the Centre for Health Initiatives, UOW

The average Australian home has 2.6 people & 2.8 televisions. We watch TV for more than 2 hours a day, and between 7.00pm and 8.00pm, 44% of us are watching TV. We spend 16 hours each week on the Internet, 9 hours listening to the radio, 5 hours watching DVDs, 3 hours reading the newspaper and 2 hours reading magazines. There is now so much media in our lives that we often use them at the same time, with almost two-thirds of Australians watching TV while they use the Internet.

Much of what we know – or think we know – about our health comes from watching television, reading newspapers and magazines, and surfing the Internet. However, decades of research into health information in entertainment programs, news coverage, and advertising shows that most of this information is confusing, misleading or just plain wrong.

If you talk to many people about autism they will tell you that it is caused by vaccination. This is not correct. There have been lots of well-designed and carefully controlled studies that have proven for certain that the MMR vaccine does not cause autism. So, why do so many people believe that vaccination ‘makes children autistic’? Most of them saw it on TV or read it in a book.

Those scientific studies were published in leading academic journals, so they were probably read by a few thousand academics. When television stations around the world broadcast an episode of Eli Stone in which the fictional lawyer represented a mother suing a pharmaceutical company for ‘causing’ her child’s autism more than 5 million Americans and more than 1 million Australians were watching. When Jodi Picoult wrote in ‘House Rules’ that vaccination caused the young Jacob to develop autism almost overnight, millions of people around the world were reading (and even more will watch if they make it into a movie). In America, an actress named Jenny McCarthy is attracting a huge amount of media coverage, even appearing on the Oprah show. Ms McCarthy is not a doctor or a scientist – she is Jim Carrey’s girlfriend – but when she claims that vaccination causes autism, millions of women around the world will be convinced not to vaccinate their children.

So why does this matter? It matters because high rates of vaccination had virtually eliminated diseases like mumps, measles and whooping cough in countries like Australia. Each time stories like this appear in the media, parents stop getting their children vaccinated. Some of these children will develop preventable diseases and become extremely ill. Others will spread the infection to babies who are too young to be immunized and some of these babies will die.

Cancer is another popular topic for news and entertainment media. Women’s magazines frequently provide in-depth coverage of celebrities’ battles with cancer. Soap operas kill off characters by having them develop fatal cancers, or show their strength by having them survive cancer (often so they can be struck down with another fatal disease in the next season). Newspapers and magazines tell us every month of another ‘cause’ of cancer, and at the same time report another ‘scientific breakthrough’ that will eliminate cancer.

Unfortunately, much of what the media tells us about cancer is misleading or just plain wrong. The biggest risk factor for breast cancer is increasing age – the older you are the greater the risk – but readers of women’s magazines are regularly presented with stories of very young women with breast cancer and, as a result, many women believe that risk is highest when they are young.

Why does the media get it wrong? Sometimes its because journalists, editors or authors sensationalise stories to get our attention. Sometimes its because scientists and researchers provide the media with confusing or misleading information. Sometimes its because there is conflicting evidence, with ‘experts’ arguing for different points of view.

 So what can we do to sort the good information from the misinformation? Professor Jones will be speaking at the Uni in Brewery on 25^th August from 5:30 at the Five Islands Brewery. In her presentation she will discuss some of the misinformation in the media, reasons why the media gets it wrong, and how we can more critically interpret the information we receive. For more information visit http://www.uow.edu.au/research/unibrewery/UOW075583.html

Jason Wilson: Social Media, Political Tragics and the Future of the Journalism

[Jason gave the 26th May Uni in the Brewery presentation at Five Islands Brewery (Wollongong)]

Currently there are extensive public discussions about the “future of journalism”, with many concerns about the impact of new technologies on the bottom line of media businesses. With classified advertising going online, and a range of platforms allowing anyone to share news or be a commentator, many fear that the days of professional journalism are numbered. I will be presenting on this topic as part of the Uni in the Brewery Series on Wednesday 26 May, 5.30pm at the Five Islands Brewery, Wollongong. In this talk I will suggest that the relationship between new media and traditional media; journalists and the “political tragics” who are the keenest producers of user-generated content can actually be complementary. Indeed, the uses of platforms like Twitter suggest that they bring people together around broadcasting and mainstream media products, creating a whole new kind of audience for journalistic output.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me by commenting on this blog post.