Article Analysis #3

1. Xiang, Z., & Gretzel, U. (2010). Role of social media in online travel information search. Tourism Management, 31(2), 179-188.

2. The goal of this research paper was to investigate the extent social media appearing in search results when inputting travel-related searches. They are examining the impact of electronic word-of-mouth in the online tourism when planning a trip.

3. The methodology the authors employed consisted if mimicking travelers’ use of search engines when looking for information of a destination. They input queries in the search engine and examined the results for the following: (1) the proportion of social media amount the results; (2) how the search engine represented social media; (3) the types social media websites retrieved; (4) the relationship between the social media website and keywords. The authors conducted a search on Google with 10 specific keywords and 10 different travel locations. The authors had 10,383 results.

4. The authors found that social media represents the majority of the search results. It also found that there is “long tail” of websites that were returned by the Google search, with just 10 websites making up 50% of the results. They also found that the percentage of social media results did vary significantly between the 10 cities.

5. I think that the article, although published, did not contribute much to the body of literature. I think that conducting Google searches and finding that social media is returned is not a remarkable finding. Nore was the methodology a great contribution to literature, conducting searches by keyword and destination is, in my opinion, nothing remarkable. Also, the “long tail” is a well-known phenomena for e-commerce, it is not surprising that just 10 websites accounted for 50% of the results. This may have been a weak article, I think it was important that I review it because it reinforces the idea that one should look at the potential results and examine its potential relevance/rigor before conducting a study.

~ by Anish Parikh on April 10, 2011.