Extracting destination Representation and Competitiveness from Online Content

There is an abundance of blogs and reviews available which marketers can use to extract relevant knowledge. These insights can be used for marketing intelligence. However, it is uncertain if the topics and the language used in blogs reflect what researchers traditionally investigate in conventional studies. This article provides an overview of a method to automatically analyze thousands of blog entries. Within this context it compares the findings of a conventional image study with the content mining approach to provide insights into destination image representation in the online and offline world. The results indicate that automated content analysis reproduces the findings from image studies to a great extent, and therefore, the findings lend themselves for city benchmarking. Thus, it is concluded that blogs are a valuable additional source of information for destination marketing organizations.