Social media and city branding: a challenge for local authorities and urban communities

Julian Stubbs, brand communication strategist and co-founder of UP THERE EVERYWHERE, suggests in this interview to start from what makes a city unique as potential source of contents for a participative social media strategy of city promotion. Some useful lessons for the partners of Interactive Cities, as well as for all the cities which are actively involving residents in collaborative strategies of urban growth.

How can the debate on urban branding be linked to the use of social media? How social media can help cities in being more effective in their activities of promotion?
I think that every city is using social media, such as Facebook and Instagram, in many different ways but we are still at the early phases in the way we are using them and the way we look at them. We need to talk about content. Social media are quite often just a platform to reach the audiences you want to reach but the most important thing is delivering great and interesting contents. So we can take a step back from social media but we need to think also about the content of the communication. Content has to relate to the target audience that you want to reach. Probably you don’t want to reach everybody but maybe just some specific audiences. So I think it is very important, first of all, to define what kind of audience you want to reach with social media. Obviously having data on who are your visitors or where they come from can tell you a lot about your social media strategy. For instance take the example of Amsterdam, where at the moment one of the key strategic considerations is to have less backpackers and since the city has been always the backpackers capital of the world, Amsterdam moved to the market to have higher value visitors and decide to adapt its strategy on it
A good social media strategy can help cities to have a higher target of visitors?
Yes. One of the strategic problems for Amsterdam is its image of a mix of canals, sex and drugs, that is a very odd mix to put together. The sex and the drugs actually put off a certain target of tourists, it is something negative. What Amsterdam needs to do is to create contents that are not related to this, in order to let people know that if they come there they can realize it is not everything on sex and drugs. You need content to do that job, qualified journalistic-level writing as blogs and contents to be pushed on social media to promote this message: that has to be done on a high level, in terms of quantity and quality, in order to change the perception of a place.
Can social media directly involve users in creating this kind of contents?
This effort clearly involve people of the city. A city can’t just decide how is going to change according to what the city administration says because the fact is that people live in a place and they have a voice and they need to be involved in the process. Social media is fundamental to involve them in the process.
Social media platforms can really be useful on this?
Absolutely. I come from Sweden and we have been very innovative in the way we use social media and actually using social media platforms to give voices to individuals in the country and it is a quite brave things to do. One of the current campaigns running is “Call a random Swede”: basically you can call any Swede and you don’t know who you are going to get in order to get advice before coming to Sweden and that is a very brave thing to do, since the national tourism authority cannot control it totally.
What you said can be linked to the fact that the urban communication on social media cannot be controlled anymore just by the local authorities but residents are fundamental actors on this: what are the risks and the opportunities of this and how cities can manage this process?
That is correct. In general when you want  to create a brand it is obvious that you want to make it attractive but the truth is that all brands have positives and negatives and consumers are not stupid: they understand very soon what the negatives are. So if you are confident in your urban brand, you should be confident in involving your citizens in it. For me that is the truth. If you are trying to make claims which are not true or draw a picture which is unreal, it is not going to work anyway and it is just going to fail. In the case of the claim “Stockholm capital of Scandinavia”, it reflected a very natural position: people in Stockholm would agree on majority on the values and the identity recalled by this and would be at their ease with it. Thinking outside places and focusing on users groups, a company like Apple have so many users groups talking about their products: they know perfectly that some comments will be negative but they don’t edit those groups, they let people say what they want to say because the company is confident in its products. In a certain way that is a good aspect of democracy for branding.
Social media can be useful also as multipliers of contents, such as happened in Stockholm with this video on the magic take of the city
I think that this is the way place brands should be developed: telling the truth on what you are, how you are unique and special for some reasons. In Alba Iulia we discussed on it and the question on the city was: what is special, what is unique here? How many places on Earth can claim to be the modern birth place of Romania? There is only one and it makes the city pretty unique. That is a good starting point for a local promotion strategy.
 
Simone d’Antonio