Identity and Social Media in an Art Festival

In recent years, festivals have become prominent events in many cities throughout Europe, playing a crucial role in improving the image of the host city and enhancing its attractiveness to tourists. Festivals are temporary organizations with a short-lived and intermittent nature. Such features could raise several challenges in terms of maintaining a festival’s identity and its attendees’ identification during the periods of inactivity. Drawing on the literature on temporary organizations, organizational identity, and social identification, this chapter investigates how festivals can communicate their central and stable characteristics to audiences by adopting Web 2.0-based communication strategies. To explore this issue, the chapter illustrates the case of an Italian festival, Fotografia Europea, which has changed its communication strategy from a more traditional approach to a Web 2.0-based one.