Festival Impact

Monitor

Exploring the Social

Impact of Events on

Social Media

Communities: An Iconic Case Study: Glastonbury Music

Festival 2013 (26th – 30th June)

Social Event Impacts

Social impacts are commonly

associated with the local

community

They are hard to measure /

quantify

Expensive to conduct research

Becoming more popular…

Building community resources

Social cohesiveness

Celebration

How events generate social capital (Stone 2011)

Online Social Revolution

Globalisation of social interactions through the web

Creation of ‘communities’ without clear demographic or

geographical commonalities

International social interactions

and flows directly linked to events

from all around the worldTwitter user #1

Twitter User #9 Twitter

user #2

Wider Community Impacts

Wider communities impact focuses on

benefits to tourism and destination image

But to what degree does social impact

extend across the online platform?Event consumers

Local Community

Wider community

Stakeholder Classification:

Power

Interest

High

High

Low

Low

Online Micro-blogging

Community

Online Communities

They have the potential to be impacted by, and/or have

impact on the event and it’s organisers

Social Change

Notting Hill Carnival

Glastonbury Music

Festival

The FIFA World Cup

However no specific research

exists on microbloggers as

peripheral events stakeholders

Need to address the propensity

for events to be a catalyst for

change

Twitter & Microblogging Sites

Limited academic knowledge around dynamics of

Twitter and other Microblogging sites

Focused on Twitter as a marketing platform

Overlooked potential as catalyst for social change

Aims and Objectives

AIM: To develop an understanding of the social impact of festivals on online social

media communities and networks

To understand the mechanisims of

how social messages are distributed

/propagated in event-based social media discussions

To establish topics and issues that are shared in event-

based social media discussions

To discover whether a disparity exists between the

actual and potential usage of social media for

social reform

To make recommendations

for events organisers

regarding their approach to realising the

potential of social media for social

reform

The Glastonbury Festival aims to encourage and stimulate youth culture from around the world in

all its forms, including pop music, dance music, jazz, folk music, fringe theatre, drama, mime, circus,

cinema, poetry and all the creative forms of art and design, including painting, sculpture and textile art.

A large area of the Festival (the "green" area) is set aside for complementary and alternative medicine,

demonstrations and displays of environmentally-friendly technologies and techniques,

various forms of religious expression, and a forum for debating environmental, social and

moral issues.

The Festival organises market places, selling an enormous range of wares, and which place particular

emphasis on offering high quality prepared food and hand-made goods, including clothes and jewellery.

The company makes films and recordings of the event, which are sold all over the world.

In addition to all of this, the company actively pursues the objective of making a profit. And in so doing is

able not only to make improvements to the site, but also to distribute large amounts of

money to Greenpeace, Oxfam, Water Aid and other humanitarian causes which

enhance the fabric of our society. In the running of the event the Festival deliberately employs the

services of these organisations, increasing the amounts they can raise towards their objectives.

Case Study: Glastonbury

Research Methods - Mixed

Extrapolate the non-local data into groups using NodeXL

Run content analysis on text to find keywords relating to

social issues – ‘What are they talking about?’

Identify important members based on ‘betweenness

centrality’ – ‘Who is doing the talking?’

Tweets Topic Groups

Findings…

Limited use of Glastonbury as a catalyst for raising of

social issue on twitter

Strongest ‘ripples’ made when issues are promoted by

artists

Recommendations…

Event organisers should consider the balance of risk /

reward…

Risk of damage to brand reputation

Propensity for significant reward

…Thank you…