Non-Gatekeeping on Social Media: A Reputation Monitoring Approach and its Application in Tourism Services

Social media users can send messages, create stories, are co-creators of these stories and contribute to a message sharing for a group of people. This is a process that takes place in real-time. The privilege companies had with the traditional media to send messages in their one-way communication with the public is no longer the case. Users with a high number of message exchanges are in a position to exert strong, selective influence on the information passed within the network. Segmenting social media web pages and associating users' opinions to structural tokens is an issue that needs to be taken into consideration by companies and organizations. Sections with the interesting information in a web page need to be identified and an intelligent wrapper system to do so is proposed in this paper based on clustering and statistics which can take place automatically without human intervention while a new software tool is presented. The aim is to illustrate the potential of collecting information related to a company's or an organization's services or products based on the comments made by the users in real time. An online community of like-minded users may be thus, identified illustrating the way users on social media interact in real time and the influence they may have. At a practical level, experiments are presented over Facebook content and in particular, metadata (comments) made on the hotel booking brand Booking. com. Implications are discussed in relation to the creation of an online community of users sharing similar interests which are associated with a product or service. They may reinforce trust and act as part of the marketing communication strategy of a company. This in turn may increase loyalty and reliability based on comments' replies provided on social media and applied in tourism and other services.