Online social media — a vehicle for city branding in China, Summaries of Marketing

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Online social media — a vehicle for city branding in

China: The case of Sponge City Program (SCP)

Dimple Thadani, Lei Li, Faith Ka Shun Chan

University of Nottingham Ningbo China, 199 Taikang East Road, Ningbo,

315100, Zhejiang, China.

First published 2020

This work is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons

Attribution 4.0 International License:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.

The work is licenced to the University of Nottingham Ningbo China

under the Global University Publication Licence:

https://www.nottingham.edu.cn/en/library/documents/research/global

• university-publications-licence-2.0.pdf

spatial location” [3] (p. 148). Positive city branding is regarded as economic and social instruments to enhance city’s welfare [13].Although effective city branding is a pro- longed management process, conscious practices of nationwide urban program imple- mentation (e.g. utilizing appropriate communication channels) facilitates city brands promotion. In China, to cope with the frequent occurrence of urban floods and droughts, a na- tionwide initiative called Sponge City Program (SCP) has been launched since 2013. Community acceptance and financial challenges are considered to be the strongest bar- riers against the adoption and implementation of SCP [21]. Public-private partnership is one of the best way to make the program viable [14,37], which could be achieved via city marketing and branding. Given the tremendous impact of online social media on brand image, various levels of the Chinese Governments have begun to use online so- cial media for city program promotion. In particular, brand community formed by stakeholders on online social media could significantly influence the brand image by co-creating contents. The goal of this article is twofold: First, we analyze the current application of online social media for city marketing in China based on the case of SCP implementation. Then, we propose a framework/typology to inform how Chinese’ social media could be used for effective city branding. Implications on online social media use in China are discussed.

2 Current Application of Online Social Media: The Case of

SCP Implementation

2.1 City Marketing and City Branding Cutthroat competition among cities motivates city government to utilize marketing and branding strategies for city promotion. City marketing is a process of planning and promoting cities to satisfy the needs of city target markets [9,17-19]. The main entities in city marketing implementation are local government, organizations and residents [4,9,25].City brand is considered to be one of the essential city products [9,17,25,38] that provides a conscious and reliable commitment to stakeholders (i.e. local govern- ment, residents and organizations) in enhancing city images [31,36,38]. City branding can thus be considered as one of the city marketing strategies to strengthen long term relationships between a city and its stakeholders so as to establish good city image [17]. Specifically, city branding is process of identity building in which geographical, social, and cultural attributes are integrated [31,36,38], and thrives as a means for promoting competitive advantages [2]. Utilizing online social media for city marketing and city branding have been applied in various context [e.g. 23,32,34,35] including nationwide program implementation.

2.2 Online Social Media With rapid propagation of online social media, webs/apps users including the govern- ment, organizations and city residences can easily create and disseminate media con- tent. Hence, online social media plays an important role in shaping public perceptions and attitude [6] which impacts community acceptance and financial resources for na- tionwide program implementation. In particular, online social media is broadly defined as online technologies and platforms that allow users to connect, communicate, and interact with each other, often by posting, sharing, or co-producing information online [7]. Different typologies of online social media depending on their type and character- istics have been proposed by prior researchers [e.g.20,29]. The most widely used online social media typology was proposed by Kaplan and Haenlein [16] based on two dimen- sions : the degree of social presence/ media richness, and self-presentation/ self-disclo- sure. Table 1 summarizes the six types of online social media with global examples. Table 1. Six Types of Online Social Media [16] Type of Online Social Media Descriptions Examples

1. Collaborative Projects Platforms that allow users to add, remove, and change text-based content. Wikipedia
2. Blogs and Micro-blogs Platforms that come in a multitude of different variations, from per- sonal diaries describing the author’s life to summaries of all relevant information in one specific content area. Twitter; Weibo
3. Content Communities Platforms that aim at sharing content among users including news site. Youtube; Youku
4. Social Networking Services Platforms that aim at connecting users by creating personal profiles. Facebook; WeChat
5. Virtual Game Worlds Platforms that replicates three dimensional environment in which users can appear in the form of avatars or virtual characters with game rules restricting the range of in- teractions World of Warcraft
6. Virtual Social Worlds Platforms that replicates three dimensional environment in which users can appear in the form of avatars or virtual characters, but no rules restricting the range of possi- ble interactions Second Life

绵城市” using Baidu and google search engines. In addition, the top 5 most popularly international and Chinese online social media were manually searched. The initial searches returned 1651 articles in total. Following the guidelines of the systematic review methodology, we applied inclusion and exclusion criteria to the ini- tial set of articles. The inclusion criteria were (1) SCP was the main focus of investiga- tion and comments; (2) The article was written in Chinese or English; (3) article pub- lished between 2013 and 2019. The exclusion criteria were applied to (1) articles in which SCP was referenced merely as the main topic; ( 2 ) duplicate or linguistically un- usable articles; (3) photos or videos without SCP related hashtags. 890 articles were excluded from analysis because they failed to meet the criteria stipulated in the current research design. At the end of the review and screening process, 418 articles published between 2013 and 2019 were identified. Preliminary Findings 418 SCP articles published on online social media between 2013 and 2 019 were iden- tified at the end of the review and screening process. Table 2 provides an overview of the number of SCP articles by year and online social media outlet categorized using Kaplan and Haenlein [16] typology. Table 2. Online Social Media Outlets for SCP Articles Online Social Media Outlets Total 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 Content Communities

• News website (e.g. Sina News; Business insiders; Wechat News)
• Dynamic video/audio community (e.g. Tiktok, Youku, Voice tube 影音 號) 377 30 68 13 65 10 90 6 99 1 54 0 1 0 0 0 Blogs and Micro-blogs (e.g. Weibo) 9 3 4 2 0 0 0 0 Social Networking Services (e.g. WeChat) 2 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 Total 418 86 79 98 100 54 1 0 Referring to table 2, SCP articles first appeared in news website (i.e., WeChat News) in 2014, and majority of these articles (90%) were found to publish in news websites. Surprisingly, among the 407 published articles in the content communities, only 63 of them specified City information; and only 27 of these articles were involved in the in- teractivity activities (e.g. forwarded/ liked /commented). SCP articles first published on video/audio community in 2015, and has been steadily increasing ever since.

3 Framework of Chinese Social Media for City Branding

Although it is believed that online social media could be an effective vehicle for city marketing and city branding [39], our preliminary findings suggest that the current SCP implementation have not fully utilized the interactive and participative nature of online social media. Majority of SCP articles were published in static news websites with em- phasizes on technical content which made them difficult to be commented. Among all these news websites, 95% of interactive actions such as forwarding, commenting and liking were done on Chinese SCP articles. More importantly, there is a lack of two-way communications between the city government, organizations and city resident, which are considered to be essential components of city branding. Recognizing that interac- tivity, source of information, and media richness are important dimensions that could facilitate city branding, we propose the following framework by integrating typologies suggested by Kaplan and Haenlein [16] and Stockmann and Luo [30]. The first dimension relates to the degree to which individual users/ organization/ gov- ernment users disseminate information on the social media platform. The second di- mension relates to the degree to which the functions of the platform support two-way interactions between users. The third dimensions relates to the degree of media richness provided by the platform. The top 5 most popular Chinese social media platforms in 2019 [1] are mapped onto a three-dimensional construct of online social media as shown in Fig. 1. Fig. 1. The three-dimensional mapping of various Chinese online social media Although city government has been using online media that enhances the openness and transparency of city marketing and branding, it remains a government-lead market-

technical for city stakeholders to engage. Future studies should further explore the in- tegration framework of both traditional and online social media in the aspects of city marketing and branding. It is also necessary to conduct a more robust empirical anal- ysis on the mapping of the characteristics content to types of online social media plat- forms in China.

Acknowledgement

The research presented in this paper was funded by Institute of Asia Pacific Studies (IAPS) research grant 2019/20– University of Nottingham Ningbo China

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