The power of co-creative story-telling in narratives of place: An account of VisitDenmark's social media practices to build alliances with storytellers.

Abstract

DMOs have for some years now developed strategies to create storytelling alliances with consumers in order to strengthen their destinations’ narrative position on social media. The emergence of social media has facilitated a democratisation of media production and a power shift towards consumers who can now produce and publish content (Berthon, Pitt, Plangger and Shapiro, 2012). This means that the construction of brands within social media can be interpreted as a collective, dynamic co-creational process involving multiple brand authors who all contribute their personal stories (Gensler, Völckner, Liu-Thompkins, & Wiertz, 2013). DMOs have to some degree adapted to the new social media spaces of storytelling (Roque and Raposso, 2016; Usakli, Koç and Sönmez, 2017). They try to actively engage with their tourists online to utilise their stories, repackage them and spread the positive narratives experienced at the destination. They need the users’ help to do marketing and branding as the users’ stories generate conversations about the destination and subsequently increase awareness. This paper offers an insight into VisitDenmark’s social media strategy to build alliances with users through a co-creative approach. VisitDenmark’s (2014) social media branding strategy is based on the so-called ‘Unceasing Eco-system’, where users’ stories, knowledge and recommendations are utilised before, during and after they have been at the destination.