JITT Tourism Destination Information Competition and Web Reputation more

Information Technology & Tourism, Vol. 11 pp. 221-234 Primed in the USA. All righls reserved. Copyright © 2009 Cognizant Comm. Corp. 1098 <O58/09 $60.00+ .00 DO!: 10.3727/ I0M W309X12596187863991 www i ci(tni/anti (iminunication.com DESTINATIONS' INFORMATION COMPETITION AND WEB REPUTATION ALESSANDRO INVERSINI,* LORENZO C ANTON I, t and DIMITRIOS BUHALISJ *Webatelier.net. University of Lugano. Lugano. Switzerland fNewMinE Lab & Webatelier.net, University of Lugano. Lugano. Switzerland tlCTHR, Bournemouth University, Poole, UK Destination managers are investing considerable effort (i.e., time, resources, and money) to market their destinations on the Internet. In addition to official destination websites, many unofficial web- sites are populating the results pages of search engines, diffusing almost the same contents as official destinations websites. The aim of this study is to investigate the information market avail- able to the traveler searching for destination-related information in the so-called online tourism space. Search engines are indexing not only official websites, but also any other websites such as blogs, review websites, wikis, reviews, etc., which are available online. Starting from a log file- analysis for a given destination, a set of nine keywords was used to perform search activities on two major search engines (Google and Yahoo!). Search results were first organized and described in order to describe the destinations' information competitors. Second, a content analysis study was performed in order to examine topics and arguments of the retrieved results that arc shaping the Web reputation of destinations. The article shows that unofficial sources of information ire equally important with respect to officially provided information. Hence, destinations need to man age their brand and online reputation holistically by attempting to coordinate the players offering information about themselves and also amalgamating the entire range of information and service providers on platforms of experience creation. Key words: Search engines; Internet; Destination marketing; Log file analysis; Reputation analysis Introduction ■ The World Wide Web continues to grow with thousands of players entering the information mar- ket everyday (eBusiness Watch, 2006; Internet World Stat, 2007). A wide range of information and resources is just a click away from the user's computer. This means that geographical and lin- guistic boundaries are becoming less important obstacles for global communications and for the global market, l ot example, users can compare prices of a given prodUCl that is sold on the Web by European, American, and Asian vendors be- cause theil Offtfl appeal on the same page of search results ol a given search engine. Moreover, Web 2.0 (O'lUllly, 2005), which enables individ- ual user) i" produce user-generated content (UGC), is contributing significantly to the growth of infor- Address correspondence to Alessandro Inversini, Webalelier.nel. I Inivnsily ul I tijNino. Via Buffi 13, 6900 Lugano, Switzerland. Tel. +41.58.666.4649; Fax: +41.58.666.4647; E-mail: altSSandlO iiiwimiiiIii'Iii UfliSi Oh 221 222 INVI-KSINI. CANT niation on the Web (be il relevant I'oi I he end- user or not). The Internet is becoming I hi' primary source of information for many people (Cole. Su- man, Schramm, Lunn. & Aquino. .'(KM; Fax, 2002); indeed, recent studies indicate lhal ovel 80% of Web searchers use Web search engines lo locate online information (Nielsen Media. 19971. Hence, the role of search engines as preferred gales to ac- cess and organize online information becomes cru- cial. The increasing amount ol ml.......nion on the Internet creates problems lo end intern in finding the right information (Sanlos.i, Wei. «V Chan, 2005). Recent studies (Cilibrusi X Viiany, 2(K)7) indicate that as of 2(K)7 the total numbci of Web pages indexed by Google appioiK linl ilic dramatic number of 10'". This huge umouni ol Web docu- ments comes both from offli lul noun CN and unof- ficial sources (Anderson, 2004) rhe need to lo- cate the right informittion become* fundamental, especially in the information Intensive louiism do- main (Buhalis. 20(H), Oret/,cl Vu I mi. X l-'escn- maicr. 20(H)) whan Information Hvuilwhility and gathering represenl u cuuial i-.mh* (I'oon. 1993). Differeni exparimantl both from academia and from the business menu me living i" tackle this issue. Travel search engines I I SI I. ilius. arise as one of the possible answer, lo the lounsls' infor- mation needs. I-or example, Kiivak i oni unci Kclkoo. com/YahooTravel have omerged i »pc< ialized metasearch engines. Beside', ihe -.in < ess of UGC is opening new opportunities and . halleiigcs as so- cial media websites such as blogs, virtual eomniu- nities, wikis, social netwoiks, review •He ,. Collab- orative tagging, and media shaiing websites (e.g., blogspot, facebook. tripadvisor, You Tube, and Flickr) have gained substanlial populiiniy These media are increasingly used by navelers that use the Internet to search information about destinations as well as to share inlonnaiion, im- ages, and images after their visit (Grct/.cl, 2006; Pan, MacLaurin, & CrotLs, 2(X)7). Increasingly UGC content is regard as more relevani to ihe real expe rience people have at the destination as well as a more honest approach to the real conditions, in comparison to the carefully selected images or ihe artificially boosted descriptions thai are often put forward by marketers. Finally, UGCs arc poMllal ing the Web, penetrating search engines results 41. AND BUHALIS and acquiring relevant positions in search results ranking, due to their "search engine friendliness" (Grctzel, 2006). This is particularly the case when the platform is associated with a search engine, as for example BlogSpot is owned by Google. Desti- nation management organization (DMO) manag- ers should be aware of the dramatically increasing range of information providers that travelers may come across and the range of different types of websites, while browsing the Web (Inversini & Buhalis, 2009). It is now evident that these web- sites containing personal views and experiences have a great influence on the reputation of the des- tination. Therefore, it is important for online tour- ism managers to be aware of what sites are effec- tively competing with their website to provide travel information and who their destination is portrayed online. Background The World Wide Web is facing its first (Revo- lution: Web 2.0. This term has been introduced by O'Reilly (2005) and indicates a "second genera- tion of web-based communities and hosted ser- vices which aim. to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users." In this "read/write web" the end-user has become not only the information consumer, but indeed, the information player and provider (Nicholas, Huntington, Jamali, & Dobro- wolski, 2007). Because it is fairly easy for users to add multimedia information without either own- ing an Internet domain or knowing how to write and edit in html, Web publishing has effectively become accessible to everybody. Information not only go in one direction, from the website to the user, but also from the users, who are able to upload multimedia information to the Web and this is made available for all other users instantly. The Internet arena, therefore, is populated by a va- riety of information competitors (Cantoni, Fare, Bolchini, Inversini, & Giulieri, 2007) who present information with different forms and strategies and compete with official websites to attract end- user's attention. Users are empowered to post comments, reviews, pictures, and even videos on the Web regarding any subject they choose (O'Connor, Hopken, & Gretzel, 2008). One exam- ple of such Web 2.0 applications are web-logs INFORMATION COMPETITION AND WLB HI-IMITATION 223 (blogs), originally born as writing tools for users to keep track of their own records; they quickly turned into a key part of online culture (Hsu & Lin, 2008). According to Sirfy (2007), the blog- osphcre—the vast, dynamic complex network of blogs (Xiaolin, Belle, & Lada, 2007)—is now composed of more than 70 million blogs; and 120,000 new blogs are created and 1.5 million posts are published per day (Thevenot, 2007). Blogs have become a new and significant source of information distribution (Hsu & Lin, 2008), but they are only one of many information sources on the Internet. As increasingly people carry with them In- ternet-connected mobile phones empowered with photo and video cameras, instant publishing of multimedia is becoming easy and a regular prac- tice for a large number of consumers. This was demonstrated clearly on the recent coverage of the emergency landing of a plane in the Hudson River in New York on January 15, 2009. Janis Krums, who was riding on the ferry that approached first the US Airways Flight 1549 that had crash landed in the river, took a photo on his iPhone and shared the photo on Twitpic. 'There's a plane in the Hud- son. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy," Krums wrote when posting the photo on- line at TwitPic.com. Within the hour, Krums (or "jkrums" on Twitter) was talking to MSNBC about the rescue and photo, which attracted nearly 40,000 views in the first 4 hours after the crash. Krums' instant fame came less than a month after passenger Mike Wilson used Twitter—a free mi- cro-blogging service that allows users to send and read short text updates—to tell of his adventure aboard Continental Flight 1404, which skidded off the runway in Denver on December 20 and burst into flames. Wilson (or "2drinksbehind" on Twit- ter) became a national news phenomenon after telling—via "tweets" in Twitter parlance—of his escape, then of his annoyance at being refused a cocktail after the ordeal. Krums' and Wilson's tweets from the accidents and the instant celebrity they gained highlight a service that many road warriors increasingly are turning to as they travel (Heslin, 2009). It also demonstrates the power of the media, the hardware and software accessibil- ity, and the opportunities and challenges that this dynamic environment is bringing. Anderson (2004. 2006) recently introduced the concept of the Long Tail; institutional websites and official websites ol organizations represent only the 20% of the public websites on the In- ternet, while blogs, social networks, and small per- sonal websites represent the remaining 80%. Ander- son underlined some basic concepts thai contribute to the understanding and shaping of the actual World Wide Web in the future. He remarked that besides official websites, there is almost every- thing in the long tail: the information is present, but spread in a galaxy of small websites, blogs, communities, and personal websites. As travel and tourism are experience-based activities (e.g., Tus- syadiah & Fcsenmaier, 2008), such experiences need to be communicated. Communities, blogs, travel review websites, and social media in general help information sharing among users (Arsal et al., 2008). These websites increasingly gain substan- tial popularity in online travelers' use of the In- ternet (Gretzel, 2006; Pan et al., 2007). It is clear that relevant tourism information is spreading in a galaxy of different websites (e.g., Baggio, Anto- nioli Corigliano, & Tallinucci, 2007). Besides of- ficial websites, many unofficial websites appear every day competing to reach the traveler's atten- tion on the Internet. As noted by Henzingcr (2(X)7). the amount of information potentially available online is incredibly huge and diverse in nature. Hence, the appearance and the rise of these web- sites in the tourism domain an- dramatically changing the domain itself and inevitably alter dramatically both information search and online marketing strategies (Gretzel. 200n). One of the main issues related in information is overload (e.g., Rogers & Agarwala Hogcrs, 1975) and information entropy (e,f„ Jones et al., 2004). To manage this situation seurch engines are used as preferred gateways In BOOMS online information (Nielsen Media. 1997) Hence, a large amount of websites, official CM unofficial, social or not, com- pete to reach thfl and user. Studies (mainly in the information retrieval field) have focused on the importance 01 the Web search activity as the pri- mary way loi the end-users to achieve their infor- mative noiils (Hose & Levinson, 2004). They de- SCribe how users look for information online (Jinsen, Spimk. & Saracevic, 2006) and propose new ways in optimize the Web search (Ma, Pant, 224 INVI-kSINI. CAN & Sheng, 2007). As the Web is ihc primary source of information for many people (Cole el al.. 2003; Fox, 2002), search engines such as djooglc and Yahoo! have become very popului among pro- spective travelers in order to obtain suitable infor- mation before, during, and after Ihcii visit (Gret- zel, Fesenmaier, & O'Leary, 2006). Focusing on the travel and tourism domain, information search is a critical activity as the Internet is becoming one of the most important sources foi information acquisition (Pan & Fesenemaier, 2006) A recent study by HitWise (Hopkins, 2008) confirms the importance of this research field, underlining the growing importance of search engine referrals in the travel and tourism market. Search engines arc the largest source of traffic for travel websites as in April 2008, for example, search engines coun- ted for one third of upstream visits to the industry as a whole. This trend is growing al a rale of 8% every year. Schmoll (1977) presented a mode I foi describ- ing tourism behaviors based on Howard and Sheth (1969) and Nicosia (1966). According to Schmoll, the decision to travel is the result ol a distinct pro- cess involving: (i) travel stimuli, (it) personal de- terminants, (iii) external variables, and (iy) desti- nation characteristics. In the model there are some activities underpinning tourist behavior: (i) travel desires, (ii) information search, (iii) assessment/ comparison of travel alternatives, and (iv) decision (Cooper, Fletcher, Gilbert. Shepherd, <V Wanhill, 2005). The Internet revolution has nol changed that but it provided a much widei langc of provid- ers who are supporting this process. In recent years studies extended and refined this model, adding interesting concepts such as the mental models (Fig. 1). A mental model is the travelers' perception and representation of the informal ion she/he is looking for (i.e., destination). Pan and Fesenmaier (2006) argued that the tourist planning process and information search on the Internet can be viewed as an interaction among (I) the tourist, (2) the interface, and (3) the online space (Fig. I). More recently Kim and Fesenmaier (2007) inte- grated the mental model (as the first step of search activity) in a global four-stage model to describe tourists' use of the Internet for trip planning. This article investigates the nature of online tourism space. According to the long tail theory •il, AND BUHALIS by Anderson (2006), the online space is a collec- tion of official and unofficial websites that concur to gain the users' attention for a given search term. Information is present but spread in a galaxy of websites (Anderson, 2006). This is especially true for the tourism domain where relevant information that may help the traveler in each stage of the tour- ism goods consumption is spread in a galaxy of different websites (e.g., Baggio ct al., 2007; Gret- zel et al.. 2006). A recent study from Xiang, Wober, and Fesenmaier (2008) defined the "online tourism domain" accessible via search engines. Based on previous work from Pan and Fesenmaier (2006), Wober (2006). and Xiang, Kim, Hu, and Fesenmaier (2007), this study conceptualized and defined the so-called "online tourism domain" as it could be accessed from the users' preferred gate to the Internet: search engines. The online tourism domain conceptualization is based upon four differ- ent perspectives, namely (i) the tourism industry perspective; (ii) the tourism symbolic representa- tion perspective; (iii) the travel behavior perspec- tive; and (iv) the travel information search per- spective. Xiang et al. (2008) found that only a tiny part of pages indexed by the popular search engine Google are accessible for users, among these pages a lot of websites (domain duplicates) are dominating the results. A study by Xiang and Gretzel (in press) describes the presence of UGC within the online tourism domain. The study de- scribes the results of ten different searches per- formed with the popular search engine Google in nine US cities. The relevant results for each query were the ones contained in the first 10 pages (10,383 results). The findings demonstrated that there is a great amount of UGC populating the or- ganic results of the popular search engine Google: 11% of search results are social media, distributed in the following categories: virtual communities 40%, review sites 27%, blogs 15%, networking site 9%, media sharing 7%, others 2%. One other interesting finding regards the fact that different keywords generate different social media (Xiang & Gretzel, in press). This study also confirmed what Gretzel (2006) and Pan et al. (2007) found in previous studies that social media gained sub- stantial popularity within the online tourism do- main. INFORMATION COMPETITION AND WHH KIll'UTATION 225 Mental Model Search Results Figure I. Adapted from Pan and Fesenmaier (2006) and Xiang ct al. (2008). Since social media was created and used for Ihc purpose of sharing personal experiences, images, videos, thoughts, and feelings, they represent "a mixture of fact and opinion, impression and senti- ment, founded and unfounded tidbits, experiences, and even rumor" (Blackshaw & Nazzaro, 2006). Marketing managers and researchers arc exploit- ing new ways to adopt social media in Ihc market- ing and promotion arena to take advantage of "electronic word of mouth" (Litvin, Goldsmith. & Pan, 2008). Schmallegger and Carson (2008) sug- gested that (he strategy of using blogs as an in- formation channel encompasses communication, promotion, product distribution, management, and research. In tourism, some hotel chains and desti- nation management organization websites arc in- corporating UGC as a part of their site content (e.g., Sheraton.com and visitlondon.com). These UGC websites can be viewed as an aggregation of online feedback mechanisms that use Internet bidirectional communication to share opinions about a wide range of topics, such as: products, services, and events (Dellarocas, 2003), creating a network of digitized word of mouth (Hcnning- Thurau, Gwinncr, Walsh, & Gremler, 2004). The aggregation of the entire range of online represen- tations creates the web reputation of organizations (Bolton, Katok. & Ockenfels, 2004; Dellarocas, 2003, 2005). Managing the increasingly diverse range of sites and content that build (he Web repu- tation requires using a cross-disciplinary approach that incorporates ideas from marketing, social psy- chology, economics, and decision science (Ma- laga, 2001). Inevitably these developments are influencing travel and tourism as increasingly organizations and destinations need to manage their online repu- tation and branding by dealing with the entire range of online providers rather than simply their own website. These issues must be taken into ac- count by the destinations' or hotels' managers while planning and delivering online activities. "The impact on the seller's reputation is crucial, and from defection greater than the impact to the buyer's reputation"; due to the buyer's ability to choose whom to play the game with (Malaga. 2001). Online reputation can be considered as an asset that requires investment to create and main- tain and it reflects the branding and marketing proposition in general. As an asset, online reputa- tion need to be developed, managed, and protected in an in increasingly volatile environment (Mailath & Samuclson, 2001). Objectives and Research Hypothesis The main objective of this exploratory research is to investigate the online tourism domain acces- sible from search engines in the long tail era. The online tourism domain (Xiang el al., 2008) seems to be perceived as a whole, a kind of black box where diffcrcnl players are competing to both reach a higher ranking within Ihc search engine and to satisfy users' needs. The extreme vitality of social software as well as the diffusion of personal websites should help destination managers target their online communicational efforts. Social media can support a variety of activities on the Internet tourism domain (e.g., marketing intelligence, travel decision making. Iravcl experiences), and destina- 226 1NVHRSINI, CANTONI, AND BUHALIS lion managers as well as marketing researchers in the academic field and tourism industry need to explore different strategics to exploit social media for online promotion. This study proposes a differ- ent approach to the social media presence and ex- ploitation within search results foi a given desti- nation. It takes into consideration social media presence and relevance within the online tourism domain, the importance of recent online market- ing, and promotion strategies and their peculiar characteristics of informal communication. Hence, the study investigates how these online rflSOUrcei can shape the reputation of a given destination The main research objectives are: (i) to assess how the long tail shapes the Web reputation for a given destination; (ii) to develop a measurement for Web reputation; and (iii) to givt recommendations to destination managers to improve destination Web reputation. DMOs arc in this work considered as the head of the long tail, because they arc generally en- trusted (usually by public authority) with the pro- motion of the destination and DMO websites. They arc committed to destination marketing, try- ing to attract more prospective travelers to the website and convert them to travelers to the desti- nation (Buhalis, 2003). Their role is very impor- tant in the tourism value chain: they spread insti- tutional destination information on the Internet, highlight attractions, events, accommodation, and services (Choi, Lehot, & O'Leary, 2007). DMO managers gradually appreciate that if managed properly, ICTs can generate a tremendous added value for organizations (Lee, 2001). DMO web- sites are official communication sources and there- fore can be considered as a point of reference in the tourism online domain, mainly as regards the authority, accuracy, objectivity, conciseness, and coverage of the content (lnversini & Buhalis, 2009) However, new players are entering the on- line info-market (Cantoni et al., 2007) and the long tail players generate content that is growing at an astronomical rate (lnversini & Buhalis, 2009). The DMO online communication strategy should reflect the institutional nature of the organization, being more informative than emotional, as well as expressing a positive sense with all destination as- pects. Hence, the first and second research hypoth- eses concentrate on these aspects: HI. DMO communicates the destination experi- ence mainly with factual arguments. H2. When DMO websites uses emotional argu- ments, it uses positive value judgments to mar- ket the destination online. In contrast, long tail players do not have to sub- mit to strict editorial or institutional rules and they can be more sensational about a given topic. They essentially provide personal opinions, attitudes and perspectives. With the rise of Web 2.0, end- tisers are both information generators and consum- ers at the same time, as they review products, ex- picss opinions, contribute photos and videos, and comment about services. This is primarily happen- ing in the tourism field where travelers arc review- ing hotels, attractions (O'Connor et al., 2008) and commenting about their holidays as well as other experiences. Hence the following two hypotheses: H3. Unofficial players' communications are based more on emotional arguments. H4. Unofficial players' communications express different value judgments about the destination. Finally, a destination's Web reputation can be investigated at different levels. Each level can give important feedback to the destination managers, creating general and detailed recommendations, useful to improve the reputation shortcomings. H5. Different levels of analysis give general or de- tailed recommendation to destination managers. Research Design In order to explore this topic and to verify the proposed hypotheses, an exploratory research meth- odology was designed, to take advantage of both qualitative and quantitative research. The Roman city of Bath (UK) was selected to serve as a case study. The log files for I year of the official DMO website of the city of Bath, UK (visitbath.co.uk) were analyzed in order to extract nine relevant keywords. This allowed researchers to create a hy- pothetical environment that Web searchers are confronted with while looking for relevant infor- mation about the city of Bath. Then researchers studied the results that search engine would re- trieve for real users. The nine most popular key- words used to reach the visitbath.co.uk website INFORMATION COMPETITION AND WEB REPUTATION 227 were used to perform nine search activities on two of the most popular search engines, namely google, com and yahoo.com (Comescore, 2008). The first three results pages were considered useful for the study. Studies in this field sometimes concentrate on more than three pages of results (e.g.. Xiang & Grctzel, in press; Xiang et al., 2008), but research- ers decided to focus only on the first 30 results for each Web search (normal search engine setting is 10 results per page) as they are considered rele- vant for end-users both from academia and indus- try (iProspect, 2006). Once the 540 search results were selected and the unique results (i.e.. single occurrences) iso- lated, the problem of distinguishing between "offi- cial" and "unofficial" websites was evident (Ander- son, 2006; Inversini & Buhalis, 2009). Although the DMO websites could be clearly identified, the other players were indistinguishable, making clas- sifying them in the two categories quite subjective. The results were distinguished into two categories consistent with Anderson's (2006) typology: 1) BMOW ("Brick and mortar" organizations' web- sites, including all players that are doing business also in the offline world; most of these organiza- tions were doing business long before the Internet was developed; and 2) MOOWAI (Mere online or- ganizations' websites and individual websites), in- cluding all individual websites—mainly blogs— and those organizations doing business (almost) exclusively online; these providers wouldn't be even conceivable without the infostructure that the Internet provided. BMOW were considered us "of- ficial" websites and examples include official and institutional websites (e.g., official destination websites), traditional tourism-related business (e.g., car rental, hotels), traditional travel BgenM (e.g., Thomas Cook). In contrast, MOOWAI were considered as "unofficial" websites when tIk-y host UGCs (such as Wikipedia.org, Wikitravflli org, Facebook, IgoUgo.com, Tripadvisor.com) or personal websites (e.g., blogs). The last treated category was NR/NW (not rclcvant/noi working) websites: they are the websites with content that is irrelevant to the city of Bath in England. Exam- ples of these websites are the Bath (Maine, USA). Cosmetics websites, bath components websiies. and SO on. Figure 2 shows the classification How of the websites. Given the high complcxilv of (he domain, and (he unique characteristics of the tour- ism information, in this study it is postulated that BMOW refer to whal Anderson (2006) called offi- cial websites (i.e., 20% of (he tail), while MOOWAI refer to unofficial ones (i.e.. 80% of the tail, namely the long tail). Finally, a tentative codebook for reputation analysis was created. The codebook was used as an instrument for content analysis (Rifle, Lacy, & Fico, 1998), in order to describe (he reputation of Bath as a destination, based on the MOOWAI (or unofficial) websites. Websites were chosen as tar- gets for the analysis mainly for two reasons: (i) they arc part of the so-called long tail (Anderson, 2006) and they host a variety of information about different aspects of the destination, and (ii) they have no strict political or editorial rules to follow. The Web reputation, writing style, and arguments of the content found in the MOOWAI category were compared to the retrieved results from visit bath.co.uk. The codebook created for analysis was basically composed of two sections: (i) the first section concerned item descriptions such as the medium, the type of website (Xiang & Gretzel, in press), the item type, its size, and topic; and (ii) the second section concerned the arguments used as well as the value judgments and feelings ex- pressed. Three cixlers were used for the study. Inter- coder reliability (Rifle et al.. 1998) was checked after an extensive training with die coders (4 hours of couching) using the Hciss Kappa method (FleiM, 1971; Sim & Wright, 2005) and the reli- ability rcsull was 0.92. The training was important lor (wo reasons: (i) the different background of the coder! and (ii) the emotions-based codebook that gave u lol of interpretation freedom to the coders. I he information unit used for analysis is the item. I lence, the content analysis study did not consider all statements that appear in the websites but the overall content of the item (see Fig.3). A second information level was defined for each unit and, therefore, the information unit (item) could also be split into subitems. Subitcms are usually just a click away from the result page. For example, considering the example of a blog. the blog post about the City of Bath would be the item for content analysis, while the comments to the post would be the subitems. 228 INVIiKSINI. CANTONI. AND BUHALIS bmow^) UGC (mooway) mooway Figure 2. Websites' classification pro ell Results There were nine extracted keywordl fljtblf I) that generated 39.7% of the traffic lo the website (log files analysis). A positioning analysis was performed in order to understand the ran|dn| Ol visitBath.co.uk within the result pages ol boogie and Yahoo search engines (Table I) foi the nine keywords. The positioning analysis was perfformsd with the help of the popular software WebCoo (http://www.wcbceo.com, free version). Despite the fact that the keywords used an- the most popular ones used by real users to reach the official DMO website and they correspond to the general users' image of the destination (the so- called mental model), visitbath.co.uk has problems with the two keywords "bath spa" and "hotels in bath" (14th and 7th, respectively, in Google.com and not present in Yahoo.com). The keywords "bath england" and "things to do in bath" were also problematic in Yahoo.com (10th and 19th, re- spectively). However, in most of the cases, the of- IH i;il DMO website is present in the first page of search engine results (13 times out of 18). This means that when the DMO website is not ranked in |he very first positions, its information compcti- lOfl outperform it on the Search Engine Optimiza- lion I lence, there is space for its information com- Figure 3. Wikipcdia.org—Information unit: item. INFORMATION COMPETITION AND WliB REPUTATION 229 Table 1 Visitbath.co.uk Googlc.com and Yahoo.com Ranking (September 17. 2008) Keywords Google Ranking Yahoo Ranking bath 1 3 bath hotels 4 4 visit bath 1 1 hotels in vath 7 bath tourist information 1 ; things to do in bath 1 19 bath tourism 1 1 bath spa 14 7 bath england 2 10 petilors to "sell" the destination and to reach the end-user first. In order to understand the range of competitors of the Bath DMO website in the online tourism space, 18 search activities (nine key words for each of the two search engines) were performed. The first three results per page were considered as of key relevance. The 540 search results (270 for each search engine) were qualitatively organized and classified in order to have a clear understanding of the websites galaxy around the destination. Unique results were isolated and divided in three (2+1) cat- egories, namely: (i) BMOW, (ii) MOOWAI, and (iii) NR/NW. Among the first group (BMOW), the visitbath. co.uk websites were highlighted and among the second website group (MOOWAI) the ones with UGC were isolated. Table 2 shows the classification of unique re- sults retrieved from the two search engines for the given set of keywords. The table shows the num- bers of retrieved websites on the basis of unique results (column 1): similar results have been con- sidered only once, for all of the search activities in each search engine. Google.com retrieved 205 unique results over 270 results in total. Among these results 69 websites belong to the BMOW category (official: nine websites belong to the Bath DMO), 83 belong lo Ihe MOOWAI category (unofficial: 20 hosl UGC), and 53 NR/NW. Yahoo, com retrieved 222 unique results over 270; among these results 28 websites belong to the BMOW category (official; four websites belong to the Bath DMO), while 93 belong to the MOOWAI category (unofficial; 38 host UGC). and 101 NR/ NW. These results demonstrate how the long tail is already becoming mainstream in the informa- tion search process and the fact that prospective tourists need to go through a wide range of unoffi- cial websites to reach the official information. !< is clearly obvious that out of the 427 unique re- sults only 13 belong to Visit Bath, demonstrating that the online information, promotion, and brand- ing of the destination online is undertaken by a plethora of websites, all with different objectives, orientations, and policies. Two additional conclu- sions can be drawn from these results: Google, com considers more relevant official (brick and mortar) websites than Yahoo.com (69 and 28, re- spectively); while Yahoo.com considers more important unofficial (MOOWAI) websites than Google.com (93 and 83, respectively). Among mere online results, the cumulative percentage of Web 2.0 websites among those retrieved by the studied search engines and presented in the first three results accounts for 32.9%, while most of the DMO official website information competitors are Web 1.0 sites (66.1%). The websites belonging to the MOOWAI cate- gory (as well as VisitBath official websites) were used as input for the next phase of the study: the reputation analysis. Among the 540 retrieved re- sults (427 unique results), only Ihe websites be- longing to the MOOWAI category were consid- ered for reputation analysis (together with the official Bath wcbsiie results to investigate HI and H2). Hence, the content analysis corpus was com- posed of 176 websites, plus 13 VisitBath.co.uk Table 2 Unique Results Classification Unique Results BMOW Visit Bath MOOWAI UGC NR/NW Google.com 205 69 9 83 20 53 Yahoo.com 222 28 4 <)t 38 101 230 invi:rsini. cantoni. and buhalis websites that emerged as unique search engine re- sults. Coding Results The items analyzed in the VisilBath official website present mostly factual arguments (86.4%), which express a positive value judgment about the destination (63.6%). In contrast, the MOOWAI category presents both factual arguments (33.1%) and also emotional arguments (55.6%). Iimotional arguments arc dominant (i.e.. "the item presents only emotional arguments") only in a small part of the analyzed items (16,7%). In most cases (38.8%), emotional arguments are present but not dominant (i.e., "the item presents factual argu- ments as well as emotional arguments" and "the item presents more factual arguments than emo- tional arguments"). Moreover, in the case of web- sites belonging to the M(K)WAI category, the general evaluation of the destination is good: 54.2% of arguments express an overall positive judgment. Table 3 confirms the first four hypotheses. Of- ficial DMO websites (i.e., visitbalh.co.uk) tend to perform the marketing function for the destination with factual arguments, even though some emo- tional arguments are present in several items (HI). The value judgments expressed by DMO websites are mostly positive or at least neutral (H2). In con- trast, MOOWAI players' communication is based more on emotional arguments, but also factual ar- guments are relevant (H3). Value judgments of MOOWAI sources are different from official sources (H4): in most cases they are positive or at least neutral. Only a small percentage of items express negative value judgments. This first group of results helps to understand that the city of Bath is in general well considered on the Web and its reputation is in general supported by many state- ments online. The next results were compiled re- garding the coding activity for MOOWAI items and subitcms. The analysis was intended to re- spond to H5, because items present more descrip- tive and factual information from an empirical ob- servation while subitems often highlight emotional comments. Due to the research keywords used, the following topic category of items and subitems (Table 4) were incorporated into the codebook. The item column (Table 5) represents percentages of items found for each topic, and the subitems column represents percentages of subitems found for each topic. With regards to the first-level items, accommo- dation is the most relevant topic (34.7%), then the destination (25.9%) and attractions (20.6%); the subitcms refer mostly to accommodation (48.6%), attractions (17.7%), and amenities (restaurants, pubs, and social life places) (10.9%). The items as a whole present a comparable amount of factual arguments (41.3%) and argu- ments with an emotional connotation (46.9%). The value judgments are distributed as shown in Fig- ure 4. Accommodation, travel experiences, and attrac- tions are the most critical topics. The destination as a whole presents a small number of (almost) negative judgments. Although the "item level" gives important information to the destination managers, this level of analysis is not sufficient to identify the real reputation shortcomings because emotional arguments have the same percentage as factual arguments. Therefore, a more detailed analysis has to be carried out. The last and final Table 3 Argument Results Classification Official DMO and MOOWAI (Unofficial) Websites Table 4 Arguments Official DMO M( K )WAI No arguments 0.0% II 1% Factual 3B.S* Emotional 9. 1'/, M.Sft Postive 63.0% 14.2% Neutral 37.0% Vf.9% Negative 0.0% 7.9% Item and Subitem Topic Distribution Topic Item Subitems Deulnation 25.9% 8.2% Travel experience 4.2% 1.8% Ai 11>iiiiiiixlnlit>■■ 34.7* 48.6% ReiUurant/pub/tocial life 3.4% 10.9% Alliuelion 20.6% 17.7% 1 Villi 2.H9, 3.6% News O.V9( 0.0% Oilier 7„v;; 9.3% INFORMATION COMPETITION AND WEB REPUTATION 231 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% -10% 30% 20% 10% 0% ?#A <f J J S ■ neg.tive value ijdgmcnts m more negative value judgments rather thai positive ■ positive value judgments as well as negative » more posi:ive value judgments rather thai negative ones ■ positive value ludgments ■ No value judgment Figure 4. Items: value judgments distributions among topics. level is the subitem level. Subitems are just a click away from the result page and its items. To con- sider the example of a blog: the blog post about the city of Bath would be the item for the content analysis, while the comments of the post would be its subitems. Subitems have a strong emotional connotation: 63.2% of them have emotional con- notations while 28.6% are factual. Subitems may help destination managers to focus more on the problems of the destination as a whole. As de- scribed in Figure 5, the real reputation shortcom- ings from the travelers' perspective lie in the ac- commodation and in the general perception of the destination. From these last two analyses it is now possible to present recommendations for destina- tion managers to raise the destination's Web repu- tation: shortcomings for Bath's Web reputation are primarily concerned with (i) accommodation, (ii) the overall perception of the destination, and (iii) attractions. Discussion and Conclusion Search engines are increasingly used as pre- ferred gateways for online information. By re-creat- ing end-users' real environment and performing online searches using keywords used by real users to access the website as found in the log files anal- ysis many conclusions can be drawn. Furthermore, search engines can play a strong role in shaping online reputation of a destination given the huge number of people who use them as preferred gate- way to access the online information (Nielsen Me- dia, 1997). As most users look mainly at the first three pages of the search results (e.g., Xiang & Gretzel, in press; Xiang et al., 2008), search en- gines can be considered as the primary layer that filters the online reputation of a destination (by given a defined set of results to the end-user). This study examines the tremendous prolifera- tion of online content and information contributed by both official and unofficial sources. The re- trieved results were categorized into "brick and mortar" organization websites (BMOW) and "mere online organization websites and individual web- sites" (MOOWAI). in order io classify the differ- ent websites found in the tourism domain. Results show that VisitBath.co.uk (the official website of the destination) is only one of the information pro- viders in the marketplace, competing with many players in the long tail for providing the right in- formation to consumers. They market the destina- tion with factual arguments (even though some emotional arguments are present). Most of the value judgments expressed by DMO websites are mostly positive or at least neutral. In contrast. 232 INVI'RSINI. CANTONI. AND BUHALIS uxk 9ch4 80"* 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% J jf <f * IILTtdtiVOVdlUl judgment: • more negative value jodg rents rathpr than po* t ve ■ positive value (uegments as well as ieg:t ve k more positrvcvaluc judgments rather than regative one: ■ positive value jucgmenls ■ No value fudgmeit Figure 5. Subilems: value jiidgittcnla distributions among topics. MOOWAI players' communication is baaed Ttore on emotional arguments (but also factual lirgu ments are relevant). The emotional arguments art very important when Web 2.0 comes in: sub|iemi (comments and reviews, or in general tern* the information units that are a click away front the main result of the search activity item) are mostl) emotional (63.2%) and express different Value judgments for different aspects of Ihe destination (e.g., travel experience, accommodation, rtfstau rant pub and social life, attractions, and events I li is becoming more evident that it is the emojional connection that prospective travelers make with this content that can motivate or prevent prospec live travelers in their purchase behavioi and alio in the way they consume the tlesiiuaiion It is important for DMO managers lo bjndfl stand the reputation of their destination on the Web and how this is emerging through both olli cial and unofficial content. Tourism manaiH'is can find interesting issues from this analysis, including the need for better search engine optimization, the need to provide the relevant content to meet the information needs of consumers, as well as the need to improve the communication flows within some specific sectors, such as the attractions and accom modation. The findings of this study are critical for a destination that needs constructive recom- mendations to act at the physical (hotel, event, at- traction) and virtual (Internet, and in general on- line communication) levels. Once an understanding of what really concerns both information seekers and information providers should be a starting point for elaborating on the critical issues to be addressed in both the real and virtual worlds and to tackle the shortcomings that may affect its repu- tation and competitiveness. Reverse engineering work can help destination managers to find web- sites thai are influencing the destination Web repu- tation and to try to create marketing (but also "physical") initiatives to support, enhance, and perhaps correct them. Therefore, this study repre- sents ■ first step for the destinations Web reputa- iii hi analysis and provides a methodology for des- linations to assess their reputation online. The online tourism domain must not be perceived as a black box. and the interactions that are constantly taking place should be followed and interpreted by destination managers in order to address criticisms and instigate improvements. Reputation recom- mendations are needed and should be given in de- tail to managers in order to let them operate both at offline and online levels. Hence, the Internet and Web 2.0 enable one to find reputation short- comings at various levels, giving destination man- agers real data about tourists' perceptions of a des- tination and an opportunity to address them in order to strengthen their competitiveness. INFORMATION COMPETITION AND WEB REPUTATION 233 Biographical Nolcs Alessandro Inversini received a Master in Communication Sciences and Communication Technologies in 2004 (US1, Lugano); his research activity primarily deals with usabil- ity, quality, Weh 2.0. and new technologies of communica- tion in cultural tourism. Alessandro visited Bournemouth University (UK) and Temple University (USA) for a 6- month period each, thanks to a grant of the Swiss National Research Foundation. Lorenzo Cantoni graduated in Philosophy and holds a Ph.D. in Education and Linguistics. L. Cantoni is a full professor at the University of Lugano (Switzerland), School of Communication Sciences. 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