Celebrating PhD research @ the School of Tourism

Today 18 of the School of Tourism's PhD students presented their PhD research to the BU community in the form of PhD Interactive Poster Presentations. Each PhD student had to prepare a poster, which was then displayed in the room. Each student presented their research in about 8 minutes, after which there was time for questions. Presentations were scheduled based on who the first supervisor is. The event started with Dimitrios Buhalis students, and surprise surprise, most of the research focuses around technology. I co-supervise three of the five students (Ivana, Nicolas and John):

• Zornitza  YOVCHEVA - Information system design of Smartphone augmented reality for tourism
• Ivana  RIHOVA - Consumers as producers: customer-to-customer co-creation in the context of festival experiences
• Nicolas  GREGORI Y RIBES - Technology and social media enabled service development and design
• Barbara  NEUHOFER - Technology enhanced tourist experience 
• John FOTIS - The impact of social media on consumer behaviour; focus on holiday travel

A great set of presentations, showing the cutting edge work undertaken by PhD students in the area of experience and technology in tourism. 

The next group involved Alan Fyall's and Lorraine Brown's students:

• Gayathri KANAGASAPATHY - The heritage experience, a visitor perspective: a comparative study of heritage destinations in Malaysia
• Gde Indra  BHASKARA - The local community as a stakeholder group and its participation in UNESCO’s World Heritage Nomination process: Jatiluwih Rice Fields, Bali, Indonesia
• Emma KAVANAGH - A narrative enquiry into the experience of maltreatment in high performance sport
• Sean BEER -  Human perceptions of the authenticity of food 

Another great set of presentations, raising interesting discussions about the notion of 'maltreatment' and 'authenticity', and the challenges that emerge from researching such subjective concepts.

The 4 students presenting their PhD research in the last session before lunch were supervised by Janet Dickinson and Adam Blake.

• Andrew HARES - Tourist understanding of and engagement with the climate change impacts of holiday
• Julia HIBBERT - Tourism travel and identity
• Jan HUTCHINGS - ‘In the Swim‘ – an ethnography on Masters swimming
• Stephen CALVER - The influence of mass media on countryside leisure visit behaviour compared

After lunch, there was a fourth and final session, where students supervised by Barry Richards, Heather Hartwell, Ian Jones and Roger Vaughan presented their PhD research. Amanda is also one of my PhD students. I could not stay due to having my Consumer Experience & Behaviour exam in the afternoon.

• Gregory KAPUSCINSKI - Tourism, terrorism, political instability and the media
• Joanna HAWKES - ‘My Bones Won’t Break Me’: an auto-ethnographical exploration of premenopausal osteoporosis in a physically active female‘
• Pamela WATSON - Grab Your Fork’: a netnography of a foodie blog and its community
• Stacy WALL - Synergies in public health and tourism; an organisational ethnography
• Amanda WILDING - The diffusion and adoption of sport psychology by track and field coaches

All in all a great opportunity to show to the BU community (and the world via this blog) the excellent PhD research undertaken at the School of Tourism.

[pictures courtesy of Soultana Symeonidou]

Social media training for School of Tourism Academics

I am participating in a training session aimed to helping academics make better use of social media as I write this post. The workshop has just started by exploring why social media are important and why action is needed.

16.30 - John Fotis, a PhD student, explained that social media are here to stay and all kinds of people (not only young) are using them. He continued by identifying the various types of social media> social networking sites (e.g. facebook, linked in), blogs (travelblog, travelpod), microblogs (e.g. twitter), Wikis (e.g. wikipedia, wikitravel), content comunity sites (e.g. picasa, flickr, slideshare), consumer review sites (e.g. tripadvisor), internet forums (e.g. lonely planet) and location-based social media (e.g. foursquare). John has also highlighted some key numbers: 1 in 3 upload content on the internet (UK), flickr contains 5bn photos. Academics are among the most active in social media: 1.5m academics, 45m abstracts, 10+ million pdf/free texts.

16.50 - Just finished my brief contribution to this workshop. I emphasised the 'war of visibility' that academics and institutions face given the number of users & content being generated. Social media is a good way to establish a presence in the web, and more specifically among specific social groups. It allows you to come earlier in search engines, and maintain 'non-invasive' communication with my 'publics'. I explained that I use blogs, academic, facebook and linked in because that's what suits me.

17.10 - One colleague asked whether using social media has a good return on investment... Dimitrios Buhalis answered that using social media need not to take too much time. I added that many times I simply post a link to a paper (2 minutes), or write a report for the university on the conference I attended, which I 'recycle' and post on my blog.

Dimitrios emphasised the six tips for social media success:

1. start with the right strategy

2. know your objectives

3. deliver relevant content

4. develop meaningful relationships

5. integrate into your marketing mix

6. measure what matters

17.30 - As the purpose was to instill action, the workshop is continuing by covering each of the steps academics should undertake:

1) establish profile: blog, academic, facebook, youtube, linkedin, twitter

2) create content: publications, courses, conferences, research interests, achievements, projects, community contributions.

3) publicise through different channels: create networks of academics (you advertise each others work), use media selectively (e.g. twitter is about 'now', blogs are picked up by search engines and are a good planform for ensuring its content is accessible for a long time)

4) engage in conversations.

The practical side of the workshop involved exploring how social media works. For this purpose, Dimitrios just posted about an IFITT event in a number of pages on facebook. In a few minutes, it was tweeted, facebook friends read about it and liked it. Some shared it with their friends. Social media played its role again.