A Bloggers View of the Old Centre of Macao World Heritage Site an Applied Approach
The increased complexity in managing heritage sites worldwide calls for new strategies to help better understand visitors and their behaviour.Social networks of all types provide a rich source of data.As an example of how this data may be used this paper looks the Historic Centre of Macao World Heritage Site (WHS) and how visitors relate to the site through their blog text.The data source is 345 blogs collected between January 2009 and August 2012.The blogs were analysed using simple techniques adapted from discourse and content analysis to determine what meaning the WHS designation has to a segment of Macao tourists.It also helps to better understand what visitors see as important relative to managers and tourism marketers.Methods are kept simple to make them more available and understandable to managers and politicians.Visitors creating blog sites are between 16 and 65 years old with the majority (65%) being male.Almost all are aware of some heritage attractions in Macao but the nature and true value is not clearly understood by most.Less than 8% of bloggers used the term “World Heritage and most that did directed it towards individual sites within the designated area rather than seeing the particular building as part of a larger whole.A clear appreciation of the history of the area was expressed by only 5% of those writing blogs.World Heritage site managers and tourism marketers need to rethink their present strategies to better provide a clear understanding of the meaning of the brand WHS and its cultural importance to Macao.
Keith Dewar Wenmei Li Hilary du Cross
University of New Brunswick-Saint John, Canada;Sun Yat-Sen University - Zhuhai, China Insitute For Tourism Studies Colina de Mong-Ha Macao
国际会议
The 3rd International Conference on Tourism between China-Spain(第三届中西旅游大会)
广州
英文
1-14
2012-12-01（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）