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Branding Cities in the Age of Social Media: A Comparative Assessment of Local Government Performance

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Social Media and Local Governments

Part of the book series: Public Administration and Information Technology ((PAIT,volume 15))

Abstract

This chapter is a comparative study of how three local governments—Cape Town (South Africa), Philadelphia (Pennsylvania, USA), and Myrtle Beach (South Carolina, USA)—use social media platforms in their city branding attempts. Theoretical arguments in the fields of corporate and city branding point out the potential of these new communication platforms to change how brand-related content is created and shared with target audiences. However, the practice is understudied. The study first explains the potential of social media in branding through media ecology, city brand communication, and brand co-creation theories. Second, the performance of the aforementioned three cities on social media is evaluated by analyzing their Twitter and Facebook presence. The findings suggest that there is room for improvement for local governments in their employment of social media for city branding campaigns. The chapter concludes with recommendations for practitioners.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Information about Sun Valley’s Skippy the Stone Skipping Robot can be found here http://skiptown.visitsunvalley.com/

  2. 2.

    The first country to launch a country Twitter account controlled by its citizens was Sweden. Information about Sweden’s Curators of Sweden can be found here http://curatorsofsweden.com

  3. 3.

    “@” in front of a word denotes a Twitter username. The exact URL for the webpage is http://www.twitter.com/username (e.g. http://www.twitter.com/parisjecoute).

  4. 4.

    Given the fact that place branding is predominantly driven by practice (Lucarelli and Berg 2011), my case selection follows the innovation and best practice awards given in the field. All three cities’ use of social media has won numerous awards and have been recognized as the best uses of social media by Travel + Leisure Magazine in 2012 and 2013. This chapter sees the industry awards and praises as determinants of “best case” status and subsequently argues that these three cities represent the desired employment of social media tools in branding, in other words, are “typical cases” (Gerring 2009). This case selection is appropriate for an explanatory research that aims to identify and analyze expected social behavior (Seawright and Gerring 2008).

  5. 5.

    Place branding is used as an umbrella concept that covers branding activities of various administrative regions including but not limited to cities and nations.

  6. 6.

    More information about the sweepstakes can be found here http://www.icelandnaturally.com/boeing2013/

  7. 7.

    R is an open-source software and a programming language used for a variety of research methods. There are individual “packages,” or software add-ons that can be installed to carry out specific research methods. Further information about R can be accessed at http://www.r-project.org/

  8. 8.

    Twitter allows the researchers to scrap the most recent 3,200 at each request. After requesting the tweets at three different times, I ended up with different number of tweets per account based on their daily tweet volumes. In order to create comparable datasets, I decided to limit each dataset to 3,200 tweets.

  9. 9.

    The names given here are Facebook handles. The actual pages can be visited at the URL www.facebook.com/handle, e.g. http://www.facebook.com/CapeTown.Travel Please note that Facebook handles are case sensitive.

  10. 10.

    In the cases where two or more users are tied for the tenth place, they were all included in the list.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Public Relations and Information, Kadir Has University, Kadir Has Caddesi, Cibali, Istanbul, 34200, Turkey

    Efe Sevin

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  1. Efe Sevin
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  1. Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences Department of Public Administration, UludaÄź University, Nilufer, Turkey

    Mehmet Zahid Sobaci

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Sevin, E. (2016). Branding Cities in the Age of Social Media: A Comparative Assessment of Local Government Performance. In: Sobaci, M. (eds) Social Media and Local Governments. Public Administration and Information Technology, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17722-9_16

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