Social robots as a tool to involve student in museum edutainment programs.

With a focus on the service potential of social robots for the cultural and tourism industry, the purpose of this document is to study how social robots are used as a new tool to involve students in the design of new edutainment applications in museums. We conducted an empirical analysis on multiple case studies. The results confirm that the use of the social robot in museum edutainment programs concern in the involvement of the young public and in the experimentation of new forms of entertainment. Moreover, concrete details are offered complementing the results already proposed by other scholars [18]. From a practical perspective, manager should encourage the implementation of social robot in edutainment museum programs to achieve higher efficiency and better results in terming of involving new age groups

How AI affects the motivations of tourists photographs.

Service literature suggests that identifying the motivations of tourists is fundamental (e.g., Woosnam et al., 2016; Pomfret & Bramwell, 2016) to be able to adapt marketing strategies according to the different users’ needs. However, today digital technologies and more generally service innovations have profoundly changed the decision-making of the tourists photographers. Some contributions (Lo et al., 2011; Ozansoy Çardici et al., 2019) agree that the motivation that drives users to take photos is no longer linked just to memory but to the communication of personal identity, especially for the new generations. These changes depend on the use of digital tools such as the introduction of mobile with camera, social networks, and AI. Indeed, Huyn et al (2009) conceptualized the tourism in the mobile context, recognizing the use of mobile to search travel information through photo of other visitors; then, Prideaux & Coghlan (2010) investigated the photographic habits, using mobile phones or cameras as a tool of memory. Several recent contributions (Munar & Jacobsen, 2014; Kozinets, 2017; Trinanda & Sari, 2019) focus on the evolution of tourist’s motivation photo due to the development of social networks. Indeed, Munar & Jacobsen (2014) examined the reasons that drive tourists to share their photos on social networks, showing that the findings provide insights into motivational factors such as personal and community-related benefits, as well as social capital that influences the sharing of user-generated content. Besides, according to Kozinets (2017) the visitor became part of art domain with the selfie, not only for narcissistic reasons, as exposed by Fox and Rooney (2015), Sorokowski et al. (2015), and Lee and Sung (2016), but to express aspects of themselves through the art. Findings show that AI is actually a tool able to influence and add new motivations for tourist photographer: in particular, AI improve the game and curiosity motivations, with the consequent rise of a different and new interaction with art. Future research could use a customer survey (Hulland et al., 2018) to better understand which features of AI are the most appreciated by tourist photographers

Digital communication and museum experience. A multichannel approach.

Today, tourists can no longer be considered passive recipients of proposals, but co-creators of travel experience (Campos et al., 2018; Prebensen et al., 2018). For this reason, companies and cultural organizations need to adopt a «multichannel» strategy that is able to attract the tourists towards the value proposition, combining physical and digital channels in order to offer a personalized consumption experience, without barriers between the different communication channels, to create engagement and building relationships of trust (Evans et al., 2011). These features are even more relevant for the twenty autonomous public museums in Italy, as the museums’ need to attract audience is an emerging issue, as the European Union has launched different funding programs on the audience development (Bamford and Wimmer, 2012), and the autonomy in the resource management has been the driving force for the development of new initiatives, especially concerning communication. Particularly, one of the main effects of the Ict impact on the cultural tourism offer system is the evolution from traditional communication tools to digital ones, the transition from top-down to bottom-up approaches, and from single-media messages to those multimedia ones (Rentschler, 2007). Object of the work is to understand the potential of this emergent marketing approach (Napolitano and De Nisco, 2017), with the aim of offering the museum experience as special tourist product. In this regard, we used a survey (dataset of 1,200 respondents) to analyze the visitors’ choice of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples who intercepted at least one digital marketing channel in 2019, divided into 4 clusters (Gen-Z, Millennials, Gen-X, Babyboomers). Evidence shows that digital technologies are confirmed to be able to facilitate interactions with/among cultural tourists and that the multi-channelling is an advantage to get in touch with all types of target audience (Wickham and Lehman, 2015). The use of a digital multichannel communication strategy would allow museum managers to respond more effectively to the needs of tourists and to oriented them towards omnichannel strategy

Museums and communication channels: insights from social media choices

Purpose of the paper: The purpose of the work is to analyze the role of social media choices in communication channels of the cultural museums district. The paper focuses on how use their social and analytics’ tools in order to meet the needs of different targets before Covid-19. Methodology: We used a qualitative methodology, and we conducted an empirical investigation of multiple case studies (Yin, 1992): in particular, we chose evidence from the museum district of via Duomo in Naples, analyzing the eight cultural sites that compose it. Main Findings: Main findings show that the museums analyzed did not have a planned communication strategy (e.g. uniform content on all social platforms; publication of posts at wrong times, etc.) showing the lack of a common strategy of the district. Furthermore, the potential of foreign tourists is still little exploited and their presence on these pages is too marginal. Practical implications: Each cultural institution should use an integrated and planned strategy of digital communication. In particular, they should diversify their posts tailored to the main type of audience used by the single social media. Originality/value: This work offers a better understanding of the impact that digitalization and social media tools may have on cultural institutions