Social Communication in Event Management: Concept and Implementation

Abstract

Special events provide organizations with an opportunity to communicate with their prospective customers: private businesses increase brand awareness and loyalty while state socio-cultural institutions pursue various social goals. However, event management as a research subject is shared by many sciences, from sociology to marketing. As a result, no separate science can offer a comprehensive understanding of processes and tools that allow organizations to impact their event visitors. The research objective was to conceptualize the social and communicative tools of event management from digital perspectives. The unified system reflects the multi-channel and time-consuming nature of event management as a total of interrelated impact tools and processes. The author used a systematic and structural-functional approach to conceptualize the social and communicative mechanism in event management. The result was verified against practical approaches specified by the local expert community of event managers. The paper describes the structure of the event-communicative mechanism, including influencing, input-conditioning, and output-correction. The research revealed an additional socio-communicative component, which is based on the properties of reference influence. The goal-setting tools proved to depend on the process in particular or their sets. Instrumental material / information technologies were classified in accordance with the social or communicative components and stages. The concept verification revealed a lack of actual managerial control and coordination of social and self-management processes.