Florian Gasser

EN: In keeping with the trend of the attention economy, social media influencer marketing is a growth market that runs across the lifestyle themes of beauty, luxury, fashion, travel, and food. This article explores the status quo of this phenomenon and highlights current trends and the resulting challenges for marketers and influencers.

What is the current status quo of the decision-making impact of Social Media Influencers (SMI) in Tourism Research? A mixed research approach is chosen to partially explain the appetitive or aversive influence of SMI and their messages on recipients in the tourism context. This approach applies a comprehensive literature analysis and a positivistic SO(MOA)R model, which is adapted by context factors regarding the effects of digitalization and eWord-of-mouth. Preliminary results reveal that there are no comprehensive answers regarding context-related influences of SMI in tourism so far. Finally, influencers, their characteristics, and research operationalizations are categorized, and a first Processual-Model of Influencing in tourism research was established. These findings still reveal numerous research gaps and serve as a reference point for future research efforts.

During the 2020 South Tyrolean municipal election that was postponed due to Covid-19-crisis, 113 municipal councils were up for election – parallel to the Italian confirming constitutional referendum. One of the peculiarities of this local council election was its election campaign: It was atypically short without any major capital investments in most municipalities. Possible reasons for this might be the election date (it was set close to the holiday season), the lack of political competition and the Covid-19-situation. The result itself was not groundbreaking, even if some surprise winners occurred. The SVP was still able to live up to its claim of being the mayoral party with 101 mandates in the 116 municipalities in 2020. It was particularly surprising that 10 incumbent mayors were voted out of office and 4 new mayors were younger than 35. For the first time in the last 25 years, there was a slowdown in the voter turnout reduction trend. This was underpinned by higher turnouts from large municipalities. However, it turned out that more than 80 municipalities experienced a renewed reduction. Especially in municipalities with low or even no political competition, the number of white/invalid votes and nonvoters increased. A rise in political competition could counteract this ongoing trend and avoid the accompanying threat of provisional administrations.