Walk on the “rural” side: the social trekking tourism as opportunity to promote territorial sustainability and resilient rural development

Sonia Trampetti, Sara Di Lonardo, Valentina Grasso, Daniele Vergari, Francesca Camilli and Alfonso Crisci

Responsible tourism & ecotourism: social trekking create territorial development opportunities for rural areas?

Social trekking is a buzz word describing people walking on prefixed tracks planned by tour operators.Social trekking is a movement on rise today.Social trekking is responsible form of tourism because of its social commitment and environmental component linking it to sustainable tourism and ecotourism

The core of investigationSocial trekkers are territorial watchers and a voice-overs.Are they a real informative channel for rural area?

Aims of the research

1.To understand if osn analysis related to social trekkers can elicit information useful for promoting rural areas social trekkers pass through

2.To determine the main identity and communication features of social trekkers

“To begin... it is better not to wonder why one starts trekking. There may not be a reason. But just the answer to a natural need”. Giancarlo Cotta Ramusino, “Camminatori”

METHODOLOGY Explorative survey, based on an anonymous self-completion• questionnaire submitted by mean of Google Form Web Services. • Dissemination was done throughout a Google Gmail form and posting link on Twitter and Facebook (OSN Online Social Networks) to reach on line communities of Italian trekkers .

http://bit.ly/10DwSwk

Questionaire points1. IDENTITY: age, gender, job, educational qualification and geographical origin

2. MOTIVATION AND EXPERIENCE: main motivations, perceptions and participation across the rural world by walking

3. TRAVEL PLANNING: main trekkers informative channels 4. MOBILE SKILLS: technology for personal communication throughout ICT mobile devices 5. OSN ENGAGEMENT: the role of social media before, during or after the travel, WEB, 2.0 platforms used

Tourist's social stream analisys on FB page & contents analisys

Fan Page Facebook Name Category Talking about Page likes Activity

PasParTu Community 0 535 0.00%

Io viaggio Slow Community 6 560 1.07%

Cammina Francigena Company 42 3716 1.13%

Camminando Sulla Via Francigena Community 34 2343 1.45%

Diari Toscani Travel/leisure 55 3391 1.62%

Camminare lentamente Health/wellness website 33 1393 2.37%

il Movimento Lento Travel/leisure 283 8109 3.49%

Associazione Europea Vie Francigene

Community 111 2165 5.13%

Walden Viaggi a piedi Tours sightseeing 85 1536 5.53%

Social Trekking Society/culture website 45 703 6.40%

Social trekker is often a community user in online social networks.

Fan PageFacebook Name

Monthlypost

Monthly shares

Monthly like Monthly comments

Monthly link Monthly photo

Montlyvideo

Monthly havelink

PasParTu 21.1 6.1 144.3 26.6 3.3 0.5 - 2.8

Io viaggio Slow 21.8 3.3 54.2 3.7 9.8 10.9 0.5 1.8

Cammina Francigena

38.2 21.2 221.3 10.8 27.8 6.8 2.3 5.0

Camminando Sulla Via Francigena

40.9 24.1 237.6 35.7 32.2 0.9 1.0 14.7

Diari Toscani 170.9 68.6 337.2 19.4 72.8 8.3 1.9 93.7

Camminare lentamente

54.7 20.2 108.8 7.6 23.3 13.5 0.9 3.3

il Movimento Lento 127.7 281.4 896.4 45.0 95.3 20.2 5.2 13.8

Associazione Europea Vie

Francigene

53.7 123.6 408.5 44.3 20.3 29.3 1.6 30.8

Walden Viaggi a piedi

70.8 16.4 168.1 19.1 41.5 21.4 3.9 5.6

Social Trekking 42.4 4.8 40.0 4.5 37.1 3.1 1.3 11.6

Modeling social media touristic engagement...the web EFFICACY

For trekkers but not only!

• Engagement is a time dynamic parameter to evaluate if a OSN community is responsive to post actions by channel’s owner• It designs the style of users and their preferences in regard to style Page management. • It is defined in Facebook framework as a rate:

• Thanks to FB Graph Api, a webservice given by platform, it is possible to retrieve the full post stream of page inabling to produce a time summary of the users actions.• This work is carried out on 10 Fb page where trekking is the core.• On the comprehensive montly summaries 3 statistical hypothesis are tested. Briefly which are the tipologies of post linked to the actions (share,comments, like) numerosity?• Posts are categorized by content in status (text) ,video, link , photo and posts having a weblink.

Applied geo-semantics for a territorial fingerprint of tourist web communities

Thanks to Natural language processing it is possible to investigate the textual OSN contents.

R stat tm packages (text mining) is a good tool to process OSM corpora extracting :

The Main textual features of the text investigated.

1 The list of unique words and their occurence.

2 A semantic approach is possibile classifying the words previously extracted by specific ontology class appartenance,i.e: the geographical names in stream are identified by using webservice

GeoNames (www.geonames.org) Italian dbpedia (it.dbpedia.org.)

OpenstreetMap (www.openstreetmap.org)

Generally the outputs are rendered as infographics:1 WORDCLOUD

to point OSN COMMUNITY IDENTITY

1.2 THEMATIC MAPS

occurence of most cited places by OSN COMMUNITY are displayedIf patterns exist a geo-fingerprint is individuated.

results: middle age people practice social trekking driven for landscape feeling

Spatial distribution of interviewed people

Social trekkers: experience and informative channels

Social trekkers channels by gender

OSN platform used by social trekkers

Stream content analysis monthly engagements factors

LIKES are supported by SHARES are supported by COMMENTS are supported by

+ PHOTO

+ LINK

+ VIDEO

- STATUS

+ PHOTO

+LINK

- STATUS

No video

+ PHOTO

+ LINK

+ VIDEO

- STATUS

Analisys provided by GLM modeling on montly post summary on 10 FB Fan pages using R STAT

Engagement: photo for likes and video for sharing are winner

Semantic and Geo semantic on OSN textual corpora.

IDENTITY by words is clearly defined.

GeoWords follow most preferred user tracks: Via francigena.

Conclusions Social trekkers are communities developing internal cohesion during the travel experience and maintaining that cohesion through social networks after the event. Online Social Networks (OSN) are the main tools (Travel 2.0 specialized websites) for tourists who would share comments, evaluations, emotions throughout textual and multimedia contents regarding their personal experience and the visited territories.OSN engagements could be fruitfully modeled

Information extraction audit on territory is possible throughout semantic analysis

Ready for the glass!

Thanks!

Francesca Camilli: f.camilli@ibimet.cnr.it