Engaging Destination Stakeholders in the Social Media Era: Implications for Place Branding and Challenges for Cultural Entrepreneurship

This chapter theorizes how the ‘conceptual spaces’ created by the emerging Web 2.0-based tourism scenarios might be leveraged for harnessing cultural entrepreneurship within an e-governance framework for the systematic construction of smart, inclusive, sustainable place branding (Go and Covers, 2012). The genealogy of place harbours diverse ideas, the most salient ones being that place represents a particular perspective, that is, a path to the sacred place, often recreating the pilgrim’s journey and its three components of preparation, separation and return on the one hand, and its built form symbolizing the rite of passage and spiritual transformation on the other.