Implications for Future Research

This work contributes to the classification of online discourses by ranking the most relevant topics that might influence the decision-making process of prospective travelers. It further confirms the familiarity of web users with the concept of reputation in online media and their ability to grasp dominant public opinion.

Three main directions for future research have been identified.

The first direction concerns the research model improvement of drivers influencing the perceived reputation in online media, and the improvement of the experiment design in order to ensure the enhancement of its predictive and explanatory power.

The second direction concerns the theoretical and practical introduction of the concept of monitoring of place branding activities. Thanks to the contributions of studies in reputation, it has been identified an upcoming shift from a general needs of online sentiment measures to measures for specific online activities (e.g. what to monitor; where to participate; how to interact). Thus, a definition of indicators and tools to enable management processes to improve the promotion of a place is foreseen for future research. Moreover, , a sociological analysis of the dynamics within virtual communities will help in the analysis of the type messages processes by third parties.

The third direction concerns the study of the reputation process formation in different communication channels such as the use of mobile devices. Another context is represented by the study of offline dynamics typical of tourism players compared to their

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online presence. In particular, a promising research would be an investigation of the offline reputation owned by different stakeholders within a destination and whose reflection in the online environment. Results of this kind of research might help better understand the critical issue of cooperation and shared responsibility in the promotion and management of the territory among tourism players.

Model improvement of drivers effecting the perceived reputation of tourism destination in online media.

Refinement of constructs and use of real web navigation. Results from the descriptive and reliability statistics of the respective constructs within the model about reputation perception in online media suggest that there is room for improvement in the creation of stimuli materials and in the quantity of stimuli used in a quasi-experiment research design. In particular, a further investigation of the items that define the perceived reputation construct in online media should be addressed. It has been noticed during this study that the average web navigation through the stimuli proposed was 20–30 minutes, and the average number of stimuli viewed by respondents was 5–10 minutes. Thus, in order to trigger change from the prior belief formed by reading online conversations, future researches should consider real navigation without a time limit by web users with explicit tourism related motivation in order to check for other potential moderation variables.

Sample size. In order to ensure a generalizable outcome, online content analysis and investigation of the perceived reputation in online media should be performed with other types destinations. This could lead to the discovery of other topic dimensions relevant to tourism destinations in online conversations.

Online tourism domain and definition of keywords. In this work, the data for the online content analysis were defined based on an interrogation of selected websites (e.g., social media platform such as Facebook, TripAdvisor, etc.) and/or search engine results from tourism-related keywords. Online tourism domain is defined by the keywords used, therefore, future research should consider increasing the number of keywords used to query search engines to ensure that the limited presence of some drivers are related to the search engine queries or to the actual online reputation market around a destination.

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From reputation measurement to reputation and brand monitoring.

To help a business manage its online reputation, the quintessential requirement is to monitor and track your brand. The new challenges require systems management that focuses on monitoring and managing the corpuses to both, better understand how consumers discuss your brand online and how it changes in time. Monitoring allows anticipating or responding to the latent needs.

The brand isn’t simply a descriptor for consumer goods: it includes products, services, places and experiences, and how they’re marketed to audience groups to create familiarity and favorability. Brands are also a collection of perceptions.

A brand that is well managed creates efficiencies in capital and resources. When aligned with a strategic vision, it can help maximize the impact of competitive communications.

Therefore, an investigation of the role of online conversations in managing destination reputation in online media is needed. Thus, future research should take the research further by incorporating technological capacities. As underlined by Pan et al. (2007), content analysis of texts requires human coding, which involves tedious and potentially biased operations. The use of automatic tools for semantic analysis and keywords frequency analysis might not reflect the semantic network of the contents; disambiguation is needed. In this sense, content analysis with human coding is superior. However, this research provides several indicators (topic dimensions about tourism destinations) that can be used for the development of ad-hoc semi-automatic tools for the analysis of reputation in online media.

Moreover, an investigation of the messages communicated by official websites vs. social media platforms should be considered in order to compare online dialogues and content provided by institutional websites or by websites of destination management organizations. This research could help access guidelines and measures for the management of online conversations (eWOM) within the promotion of destination place brands and will contribute to studies about signaling and co-creation. Moreover, future research should focus on the role of reputation in online media on decision making (i.e., the estimation of the influence of online conversations on intension/behavior changes, such as the willingness to visit a place).

A suggestion on how this monitoring issue should be approached foreseen a further investigation on the assessment of reputation indicators about tourism destination in online media. In particular, an evaluation assessment of each of the five reputation components should be followed as future research. As this research focused on the

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assessment of the opinions and relevant objects only (two out of five reputation components), future research should consider:

- the role of the stakeholder. In particular, the field of persuasive technologies can contribute by providing weight to stakeholder online features (e.g., authority of the commentator).

- a clear definition of the group of stakeholders within which the reputation is shaped, and their influence in the perception of a dominant opinion expressed online, and

- the long-term analyzed. In particular, the long-term reputation element (longitudinal analysis) has not yet been investigated in detail. It is, however, a key element in the current professional tools used for reputation analysis. The reputation performances (trend of contents and sentiments expressed online) are tracked and monitored over time and among competitors. Thus, the integration of these approaches into tourism research should be considered in the future. On the web, this long-term analysis is reflected in the monitoring of the topics and related feelings expressed over time (longitudinal studies). The identification of those indicators should validated considering the perspective about how people process online information for decision making regarding tourism destinations.

An eye-tracking approach can help to investigate the use of different strategies for decision making across individuals, such as individuals who have visited the destination vs. individuals who have not. With the advent of detailed technologies such as eye- tracking, it is possible to track contingent responses and pupil dilation. This approach represents a valid alternative to studies on decision making. Indeed, the ability to evaluate what prospective customers are looking at in online context represents a new way to enhance the promotion of a destination.

Application of the reputation in online media analysis in different contexts

This research focused on the role of online conversation from a web navigation perspective. Although, the Internet can be accessed via mobile, web navigation represents a huge trend in the information seeking experience. Thus, future research on reputation in online media should consider online message reception via smartphones in order to investigate the effect of the use of new technologies on dominant opinion perception.

Finally, an investigation of the reputation as a power asset within organizations is proposed. Another stream of research that sees reputation as an object of analysis in the tourism domain is related to the issue of power and is found in management literature. Within this stream of literature, it is possible to identify two approaches.

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The first one argues that destination-marketing organizations are able to shape tourist behavior through the destination brand with the objective of generating revenue for the destination (Marzano & Scott, 2009). Marzano and Scott (2009) found that persuasion, reputation, and authority are forms of power most used by tourism managers for brand strategy. Indeed, persuasion in the form of propaganda, advertising, and rhetoric represents an instrument by which one subject aims to achieve an intended effect on a person’s behavior. The situation that Marzano and Scott (2009) found recurrent in the tourism domain was that asymmetry in the distribution and availability of information allows actor A (tourism managers) to use persuasion as an intervening variable in the decision making of actor B (tourists).

The second approach to analysis of power in tourism is related to power asymmetries (Ford, Wang, & Vestal, 2011; Beritelli & Laesser, 2011). In this approach, tourism is considered to be an organization comprising several actors at different levels of power. Strategic contingencies theory perspective (Hickson et al., 1971) is used as a theoretical background in tourism organization studies (Ford et al., 2011) to analyze power asymmetries in tourism distribution networks exchanging critical resources. The assumption is that when an organizational actor is dependent on another actor, the latter gains the ability to exercise power over the former in the organization. This situation is likely to realize less value from the partnership for less powerful members. According to Hickson et al. (1971), this situation creates a sort of dilemma, where dependent organizations obtain great benefit from partnerships with other organizations, as they provide access to capital, resources, markets, and information. On the other hand, partnerships with more powerful organizations leave the less powerful organizations unable to negotiate preferred allocations of the total value from the relationship. In this context Ford et al., (2011) found reputation to be a strategy that can balance power asymmetries in the tourism domain. The authors used findings from Pfeffer (1992) and noted that since reputations are formed early in relationships, actions taken early must be successful. Thus, organizations should seek to establish a reputation for being powerful and successful and for being able to achieve outcomes perceived as difficult; this must be done early in the organization’s existence. Ford et al. (2011) used the example of the convention and meetings industry to confirm this tendency in the tourism domain. They found that a strategy for influencing power asymmetries in the network was to offer value that the for-profit intermediaries did not or could not offer because they did not have decision-making control over hotel inventory or have direct contact with the attractions at a destination. According to the authors, a reputation strategy could include hotels either by themselves or in concert with their local destination management organizations. These offer an unconditional guarantee for performance of key features for the organization. Beritelli and Laesser (2011) analyzed the issue of reputation as an indicator of power in tourism communities. They considered reputation as a collective judgment that acts in a social context in which actors are defined by individual or group

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attributions in addition to their overall network position. Their studies focused on authority, one of the forms of power discussed by Wrong (1979) who defined authority as “the institutional code within which the use of power as [a] medium is organized and legitimized.” Results show that the reputation is a construct related to an attribution by others rather than the perception of others. In this approach, influence is used as an identifier for an actor or stakeholder group type of power, and the influence reputation serves as an indicator of power in network research studies, particularly for community power analysis.

Considering this recent promising research area, which sees the reputation connected with the issue of power, several research propositions related to the role of the web can be formulated. From this perspective, the main assumption is that reputations are formed early in relationships and actions taken must be successful from the beginning of the relationship. Several research questions for future research include:

• What is the influence of online contents in community power dynamics?

• What is the role of the web in studies of power asymmetries among tourism organizations?

• Does online reputation reshape the power asymmetries within tourism organization networks?